General Benchmarks
I used Crystal Mark to benchmark several aspects of the VAIO P:
I’m glad to report that the VAIO P scores better than my four year old Sony VAIO UX180, unlike most of the netbooks I have tested lately. Though the VAIO P is more of an ultra mobile PC than a netbook, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. It should be noted that Vista is known to score poorly in the D2D and OGL categories. I would imagine that the VAIO P should score around 2000 and 1000 respectively, if running Windows XP. That would bump to overall score up to 30590. The GDI score is surprisingly low, though as far as I’m aware, it doesn’t have a poor tract record on Vista, so I don’t think we can blame Vista on that one.
Looking at the Windows Vista Index score, I was quite surprised at some of the numbers that I saw. I expected the Primary hard disk test to score high, as well as the RAM test, however the Graphics score seems way too high. Vista recommends a Graphics score of at least 3 for acceptable Aero performance. The VAIO P scored 5.9 (the highest possible) in this category, and yet when I turn Aero on, it slows the system way down. I did a re-test just to make sure that this wasn’t some sort of mistake, and I got the same result. I suppose that the test isn’t all that accurate if it is supposed to represent the performance that you will see while Aero is enabled.
Correction on the image below: After some additional updates, a re-test has scored the Processor at 3.4 instead of 2.0, and the RAM score increased from 4.0 to 4.2. The 5.9 score in Graphics remains unchanged.
Solid State Disk
Obviously the biggest scorer here is the HDD test. This is the highest score I’ve ever seen from a 1.8 inch SSD. The 32GB SSDs sold in the UX390 [Portal page] usually score around 8k, and top out around 9k. The VAIO P’s 128GB SSD pushes that bar all the way up to nearly an 11.5k score in Crystal Mark which is very impressive. For reference, the 1.8 inch HDD in the UX series usually scores around 2800 (under XP, less in Vista). The VAIO P’s SSD score represents an increase in performance of 4 times over a similarly sized HDD. For those of you who like to see write times, I used Crystal Disk Mark to specifically test the SSD.
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Performance – Sony VAIO P http://www.umpcportal.com/?p=6399
Let’s hope Windows Seven will perform better with the boot and hibernate times…
By the way, the out of hibernation time is *really* long. Basically the hibernation process of Windows dumps the content of the RAM in a file.
I guess we could compute the time it takes from the SSD performance ; for instance to go into hibernation: 2GB RAM into one big file on the SSD (sequential write) –> 2048MB / 50.96MB/s = 40.2s
Which fits perfectly with the 42 seconds stated ; a bit more than a second to launch the hibernating process, 40 seconds to dump the ram, and the rest of the time to shutdown the computer.
But now what’s going on with going out of hibernation??? If we do the same calculus: read one big 2GB file (sequential read) on the SSD into RAM –> 2048MB / 69.41MB/s = 29.5s
So it should take less than 30 seconds to read the file. Let’s add 5 seconds for the BIOS process, and 5 more for Windows to find the file and get ready to work after loading it in RAM, we end up with 40 seconds. Not 1 minute and 10 seconds, not 70 seconds. That’s basically twice the time it should take!!!
I guess that’s something you should dig into. There’s a problem here…
Plus, as you rightfully said: “In my opinion, a hibernate that takes more time than shutdown, isn’t worth using.” I totally agree.
I note from Pocketables that although you can tune the system to get rid of most video playback issues, no one has got the machine to play anything usably with iTunes, which is a real shame. It looks like a pretty low level driver issue. http://forum.pocketables.net/forumdisplay.php?f=85
for unrecognised graphics vista automatically awards 5.9. Don’t ask why because I don’t know, nor do I know why the gfx still isn’t recognised, but that is why the score is so high.
Thanks I didn’t know that, I’ll update the post when I have a chance.