X200 PCMark05 score

Well, on notebook review they ran a test on the X200 and got 4,298.

Lenovo ThinkPad X200 (Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 @ 2.40GHz, Intel X4500) 4,298 PCMarks

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4497

I received a much higher score of 6,673 and the only difference was the inclusion of the SSD. I posted a picture. I also ran this off of the battery which may have affected the performance. I'll plug it in an retest just to make sure later on. Overall I am impressed by this system so far in what it can do.

 

Very nice result. It will be interesting to know if it runs even faster, when on AC.

 

I'll test out the battery later today.

 

I'll test mine as well. My specification is somewhat closer to the Notebook review unit (P8600, X4500, 2GB DDR3 [they used DDR2], 160GB 5400 RPM [Hitachi 5K160]). What version of PC mark did you use? That could make a difference in the score reported.

 

is PCMark05 free? if so i guess i can do one.. when i receive my x200.

(P8600, 4gb DDR3, 100GB 7200RPM HD, 32-bit Vista)

 

Yeah, PCMARK05 is free if all you want is the score.

I used the latest version.
http://www.futuremark.com/download/pcmark05/

When you install it, you have to install the extra direct x files, don't worry as it only adds functionality that wasn't there so the menu can run. You have to run the program with the vista "adjust for best appearance" so all the tests run correctly. It runs pretty quickly through the tests and gives you a score.

I didn't notice the review notebook did have ddr2 which probably lowered the score as well. I set the notebook to high performance obviously but ran the test on battery. In a minute I will run the test again on AC and report back.

 

I just ran the tests, and it looks like PCMark 05 is VERY dependent on hard drive speed. My x200 has a 160GB 5400 RPM Hitachi drive (admittedly a two year old drive that is probably much slower than the 64GB SLC SSD in your x200). My scores were quite low compared to yours, and even a little lower than the scores in the notebook review article.

My average of 3 scores on AC was only 3260. Dropping down to battery and a slow (800Mhz) processor stepping reduced my score to 1953. Digging deeper, it looked like my XP boot score was very low (≈6 MB/s), and some of the other disk tests were also bad (it looped the video/audio encode about 7 times before it finished the virus scan when it ran them in parallel).

It looks like your SSD is very good for this test, but I am not convinced that it is necessarily worth the price you paid for it (unless you were one of those lucky guys that took advantage of Lenovo's screwup and got a free one). In actual usage, my machine is very fast. Vista pre-caches most programs into RAM and they load very quickly. When you are actually running a task that writes a substantial amount of data to the disk (encoding, compiling, etc.), it is still the processor that tends to be the bottleneck and not the disk. That being said if the price on SSDs becomes reasonable, I will probably swap to one, if only for the reduced noise and increased durability.

Here are some screenshots of my results (print screen and paste are your friends).

 

What about PCMark06 and 3DMarkVantage.. they have free versions too.. what's the difference between those two and PCMark05?

wow.. that's a big difference between Supermans and jonlumpkin....
I'm surprize the HD made such a big difference.... i can't see it being the bottleneck for performance in that magnitude = =. I can't wait to test it with my 7200rpm...

 

A lot of the tests in PCMark05 are really disk bound. It basically runs a few tasks in parallel (one of which is almost always a virus scan) and waits for all of them to finish. If your drive is slowing down one of those tests (virus scan in my test, took several times longer than the processor intensive tasks), it considers your entire system to have crap performance. I personally feel this is an inadequate benchmark, because I don't even run Anti-virus software, and if I did I would only run scans when I am NOT using my machine. The 5400 RPM drive really is just fine performance wise (although hibernation takes forever with 2GB RAM).

I think PCMarkVantage is less disk bound, I will run a test in it as well and post my results. I am curious if my numbers on Vantage are more in line with what others are getting.

I also think that the original review used the 7200 RPM drive, although it may not have been your exact model.

 

You're right in that PCMark05 does show off the advantages of having an SSD drive in a laptop. I did get the SSD for free because of the screwup on the website however I would not have paid $700 for it as an upgrade back then. The prices will drop and it definately is worth it to upgrade to one as you will see amazing performance increases with everything. I am very surprised at the graphics performance of the X200. I am able to play many games and even newer ones without any problems. High Def playback is better on this laptop than on my desktop PC. I will run a few more benchmarks on this and post them as the days go on. All this is just for fun and it may help some to choose upgrades over others perhaps.

 

Somewhat off topic, but do you notice serious issues with blocking, grain, or generally poor picture quality when playing back videos on your x200s LCD. The problem isn't too bad with 720P content, but it gets very bad very fast as the resolution and/or bitrate goes down. I am not sure if this is a common driver problem, or if I have a defective panel. Office/Web stuff looks just fine, the problem only happens on video, and it goes away when I hook it up to an external monitor, more details in this thread.

 

I installed coreAVC codec and bs player pro for video along with AC3 for sound and ffdshow. I have zero playback issues for any file and can play up to 1080p resolution without any stutter or playback issues, even while running a virus scan and downloading a file at the same time. I've noticed no grain that you are mentioning.

 

I guess I better call Lenovo then, because I have serious issues with the picture. Playback speed is fine, and I can play a 1080P file even on the lowest processor setting, but I do have picture problems that don't appear on any of my other computers, or my old T40, especially with non-HD material.

Also, BSPlayer was my old standby, but I can't get it to work properly in Vista 64, I get sound but no picture. VLC and media player classic work fine in Vista except for the aforementioned block/grain issues. Bsplayer, VLC, mplayerc, et al work in XP, but the picture problems remain.

Thanks for your help. You are confirming my fear that this is a hardware issue and that my x200 needs to be serviced. At least I now know that the x200 is capable of producing quality output and that a replacement should fix the problem.

 

Change your refresh rate to 60HZ from the default 50HZ and that will solve your problem of playback of video...