Does MobileMark Need to Change Its Focus?

At Techgage, we take our benchmarking methodologies seriously, as evidenced by my post from earlier today. In order us to feel completely confident in our results, we need to make sure that we exhaust our methods from all angles, making sure that the room for error is as small as possible. Though earlier I was talking about CPU, GPUs and motherboard testing... there's another product that we often test that can be just as tedious: notebooks.

Where those are concerned, we again try to handle our testing a little differently than others, but one area where that's not the case is with the inclusion of MobileMark 2007 testing. The primary goal of this test is to exhaust the battery while running a realistic scenario, such as while getting work done or while reading an e-Book. The problem, is that it's not entirely realistic of a typical consumer.

The ever-outspoken Pat Moorhead, VP of Advanced Marketing at AMD, has made a new blog post talking about this exact issue, and I have to say, he raises some interesting points. I won't repeat all of what's said there, but the idea is simple... how useful is MM07 when it uses applications and scenarios completely atypical to the regular consumer?

The new question I raise is this... what's the alternative? It's difficult to compare one notebook to another where battery-life is concerned with real-world testing, because there IS going to be some variance. MobileMark tests things the exact same way with each run, so the results can at least be compared. It's a tough one. Either MobileMark is going to have to re-think how they do things, or sites like ours will be forced to write our own scripts (the former sounds great to me right about now!).

Inside MM07, The "measured application task times" for Adobe Flash Creation is 33.6%, Adobe Photoshop CS2 is 21.8%, Adobe Illustrator CS2 is 16.7%, Microsoft Excel is 16.6%, WinZip 10.0 is 7.1%, Microsoft Word is 1.1%, Microsoft PowerPoint is 1.0%, Microsoft Project is 1.2% and Microsoft Outlook is 1.0%. I ask, when you use your notebook, do you spend 72% of your time recoding Flash videos, manipulating and compressing pictures in Photoshop and Illustrator? I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that that is not an accurate reflection of most of our usage profiles!

VirtualBox 3.0 Introduces Direct3D and OpenGL Support

I've made my love for virtualization well-known in our news section a few times in the past few months, and the reason is obvious, but simple: it's useful. I've been running Windows XP inside of my desktop Linux for months now, and haven't had much of an issue. It sure makes Photoshop, iTunes and other Windows-only applications a lot more accessible, I can say that much.

When the time came for me to choose a virtualization app, it came down to just a few, but I ended up choosing VMware Workstation in the end primarily due to its light support of 3D graphics. For the most part, that functionality works well, and I'm even able to play my favorite MMO for a while without issue (real Windows does offer better performance, however). It looks like those who want or need 3D support are soon in for a treat though, with VirtualBox 3.

This absolutely free piece of virtualization software is widely-used and widely-enjoyed. Not only because it's free, but because it's robust, looks nice and works well. There are a few caveats to the program though, but it appears like version 3.0 is kicking all of the important ones to the curb, such as the addition of Direct3D 8 and 9 to Windows' guests, and also OpenGL support for Windows, Linux and Solaris. It's also noted that a Guest SMP is supported with up to 32 virtual CPUs, but I'm not quite sure whether that means you can have 32 different guests running at a time, or if you can dedicate more than one core to a particular guest. I'll find out soon, I hope.

Additions like these certainly warrant a major version revision, but that's not all that's been changed. You can check out the full changelist in at the URL below, and probably could expect to see more bug fixes and the like prior to the official release. And if you've never used VirtualBox before and have any interest at all of running an OS inside of your OS, give it a try.

VirtualBox is a free virtualization application for WIndows, OS X, or Linux. Like VirtualPC, or VMWare, VirtualBox lets you run an operating system within an operating system. Say, for example, you want to test out Ubuntu Linux without installing it or even logging out of Windows. Just download the Ubuntu installation disc image, fire up VirtualBox, and load the disc image.

The Joys of Updating Our Test Suites...

In our news section a few weeks ago, I hinted at the fact that we'd soon be revising our various methodologies and application/game choices for our performance-based articles, and we're now knee-deep in it, and hoping to wrap things up soon (it's a time-consuming process, trust me!). As I consider our testing practices and methodologies to be the best out there to begin with, we won't be making stark changes there, but rather some tweaks and refinements.

What is important to update is our chosen selection of applications and games we use for our processor, graphics card and even motherboard content. Over time, our selection can either begin to stale, or favor one side too heavily, and we have two such cases of that now. Making such changes isn't a simple process though, and last time I did it, it took me two full weeks (even I think this is ridiculous), but it's not a process of simply picking and choosing new benchmarks... we're actually benchmarking each and every one on various architectures to make sure that we have a fair selection.

We of course don't rule out a particular application benchmark or game if it favors one side, but it would depend on the popularity of the said application. For example, we wouldn't give Call of Duty: World at War the boot if it happened to favor one GPU team, because it's an ultra-popular game that people actually play. Essentially, it doesn't make much sense to benchmark applications or games that no one plays.

That all said, I'm in the middle of revising the game selection for our graphics card content, and I'm not opposed to receiving suggestions on our selection. At this point in time, I've dropped all games from our previous selection except for CoD: World at War and Crysis Warhead (I think for obvious reasons). The additions would be FEAR 2, GRID, Grand Theft Auto IV and possibly Tom Clancy's HAWX. I say possibly only because the FPS rate in that game happens to be sky-high (no pun) as it is, so it could prove to be a pointless title to include.

Check out the thread and toss in your two cents... it'd be appreciated!

Due to the sheer amount of testing involved, I usually try to put off our testing suite for as long as possible, but we clearly are due for a change. Once we have a new game suite, I don't expect to be able to re-benchmark every card we have that quickly, but I will get as many done as quickly as possible. I'll mainly focus on current cards though, not last-gen, if I can help it. We manually benchmark each and every card / game configuration, and that's obviously extremely time-consuming.

Simplifying Intel's Processor Naming Scheme

If there's one thing manufacturers are starting to clue into, it's the fact that product naming schemes are far too confusing for the regular consumer. Take, for example, the ATI Radeon 9800 PRO and the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+. One is vastly superior to the other, but a regular consumer wouldn't know it right off. NVIDIA is one company in particular that has vowed for better naming schemes, but now Intel has come clean about their own structure as well.

Bill Calder, Intel's Corporate Communications Manager, has made a blog post outlining the company's goals, and in doing so has revealed some information about their upcoming product lines. Up to this point, it's been common belief that Lynnfield was going to be placed under the Core i5 moniker, but that's not entirely the case. According to the posting, chances are Lynnfield will be both Core i5 and Core i7, depending of course on the feature-set.

The question to ask is... what's going to lack on the processor to have it become a Core i5? It's very unlikely that Core i5 is going to be reserved for Dual-Cores, because at this point in time, Quad-Cores are quickly becoming the norm. I could be wrong, however. The post further talks about Core i3, which would be dedicated to the lower-end of the spectrum, which would likely be Dual-Cores. Brands like Atom, Celeron and Pentium would not become Core i3, but rather their branding would remain in tact.

Let the speculation begin!

So the key here is there will be a range of features and capabilities within the Intel Core family - our flagship brand representing the highest performance and the latest technology - but simplified into entry-level (Intel Core i3), mid-level (Intel Core i5), and high-level (Intel Core i7). We will still have Celeron for entry-level computing at affordable price points, Pentium for basic computing, and of course the Intel Atom processor for all these new devices ranging from netbooks to smartphones.

Tech Roundup - June 18, 2009

Motherboards & Processors
• Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P - Neoseeker
• High-End Socket AM3 Chipsets Under the Microscope - Tech Report

Memory & Storage
• Indilinx based OCZ Vertex and Super Talent UltraDrive ME SSDs - PC Perspective
• OCZ Blade 3×2GB PC3-16000 CL7 - Hardware Canucks
• OCZ Vertex EX SSD Update Guide To Firmware v1.20 - Legit Reviews
• Patriot Duplicator 16GB SDHC Card - Bigbruin
• Western Digital Caviar 2TB Green Drive - Motherboards.org

Peripherals & Gadgets
• Garmin Zumo 660 GPS - GPS Trends

Cooling
• Cooler Master Hyper TX3 CPU Cooler - Bjorn3D
• Scythe Mugen 2 CPU Cooler - Tech-Reviews

Chassis & Power Supplies
• Antec P183 Mid-Tower Chassis - Hardware Canucks
• Cooler Master Storm Scout Chassis - SweMOD
• In Win X-Fighter AL-13 Series Chassis - Hi Tech Legion
• NZXT Beta Chassis - techPowerUp
• Thermaltake Litepower 450W Power Supply - Think Computers

Competitions, Complete Systems & Et cetera
• ASRock ION 330-BD Nettop - TweakTown
• OCZ Neutrino 10" Do-It-Yourself Netbook - TechSpot
• Top Summer Gadgets - Digital Trends