Toshiba Satellite 1905-S277 Notebook

Performance - Unreal Performance Test 2002

So the Satellite 1905-S277 uses a full 3D graphics chip with dedicated 64-bit DDR memory, making it beg to have games played on it. Let's see how the notebook did in 3 sets of games. To begin we will use Unreal Performance Test 2002 build 856. The game should give us an idea as to how the notebook compares to a similarly equipped desktop system using a Radeon 7000 graphics card (which is almost the equivalent to the Mobility Radeon, but more on that in a second). Although the benchmark is stressful, it gives a good idea of how a system will perform in future games.

Unreal Performance Test 2002 (Build 856) 640x480x32 Desktop 1.6GHz Desktop 1.5GHz Desktop 1.4GHz Desktop 1.3GHz Toshiba 1905-S277 24.2 23.1 22.4 21.6 20.7 | 0 | 5 | 10 | 15 | 19 | 24 | 29

At 640x480x32 it seems that the benchmark scales on CPU speed. The FPS in the game went down every time the desktop CPU was underclocked 100MHz. The Toshiba Satellite 1905-S277 performed slower than even the 1.3GHz Pentium 4 desktop, falling behind the 1.6GHz system by 16.9%. The performance of the system, at 20.7FPS, leaves quite a bit to be desired. Then again, the performance of the desktop system at 1.6GHz also leaves a lot to be desired.

Unreal Performance Test 2002 (Build 856) 800x600x32 Desktop 1.6GHz Desktop 1.5GHz Desktop 1.4GHz Desktop 1.3GHz Toshiba 1905-S277 20.1 20.1 19.9 19.6 17.7 | 0 | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 | 2

Now we see where the video card has become a bottleneck. At 800x600x32, all of the desktop systems perform essentially the same thanks to the Unreal Performance Test stressing the video card to the max. You may notice, however, that the Toshiba Satellite 1905-S277 falls behind. Why?

Well, it is a result of the differences between the desktop Radeon 7000 (also known as the Radeon VE) and the mobile Mobility Radeon. Although both are based on the RV100 core, meaning they are 0.18 micron based and leave out both T&L support as well as HyperZ support, the two chips are different in two ways: in the amount of memory they have and the speed of the memory and the graphic core. The Mobility Radeon can accept up to 64MB of external 64-bit DDR memory, our Toshiba notebook only came with 16MB of video buffer. This really hurt the system as resolution was increased, as more complex scenes could not fit in the system's frame buffer. The Radeon 7000's 64MB of buffer was plenty to run the games we tested on.

The other difference is in clock speed. The Mobility Radeon is only clocked at a 166MHz core and a 166MHz memory bus speed. In comparison, the Radeon 7000 we used in the desktop system was clocked at a 183MHz core and a 183MHz memory clock. Both the increased speed as well as the increased frame buffer added together to produce the slow 3D scores we find throughout the remainder of the review.

Unreal Performance Test 2002 (Build 856) 1024x768x32 Desktop 1.6GHz Desktop 1.5GHz Desktop 1.4GHz Desktop 1.3GHz Toshiba 1905-S277 13.7 13.7 13.6 13.5 11.3 | 0 | 3 | 5 | 8 | 11 | 14 | 16

Again, the Mobility Radeon is held back by its slower clock speeds and its smaller video buffer. The laptop system performed 21% slower than the desktop ones.