Lenovo Thinkpad W500 with switchable graphics. 2D and 3D marks seem low...

[ecucksey]

I have a new Lenovo Thinkpad W500 with Intel Core2 Duo P8700 @ 2.53GHz and 4 gigs RAM.

This laptop has two display adapters: one basic (Mobile Intel 4 Series) and one discrete (ATI Mobility FireGL V5700).

The following results are from a test of the system with the ATI card running. The rest of the computer seemed to perform well enough, but in the 2D and 3D tests, both scores are very low, particularly compared to other similar builds.

The 3D results aren't so much of a problem, except the DirectX 10 mark. Not sure if I need to be worried about that.



But the 2D results for solid and transparent vectors are a bit worrisome. Also, what's up with that "Windows Interface" result?:



Anyway, thanks for any feedback you can provide about these results, and options I might look into for addressing the graphics issues, if possible.

[Michael (Passmark)]

You need to take into account what version of Windows these systems are running as well as the hardware. Although most the benchmarks produce roughly the same results across different versions of Windows the 2D tests are known to vary wildly as Microsoft keeps tweaking the underlying framework behind the Windows user interface.

For instance we've seen some pretty poor results from tests run on Windows 7, see this page (http://www.passmark.com/support/performancetest/2d_windows7_performance.htm) for more details.

We've also noticed that Vista seems to run the transparent vector test a lot faster than XP.

[ecucksey]

Thanks for the response and the link

I've tested my system using both the Intel graphics (Energy Savings) and the ATI graphics (High Performance), and compared those results to three other systems running 64 bit Win 7: a Sony Vaio VGN-FW (with the same 2.53 GHz Core2 Duo P8700 as mine but with a bigger hard drive and what may be a slightly better ATI graphics card), and two similar ThinkPad T500's (with the 2.53GHz Core2 Duo T9400).

Here are the graphics results:


Wow, maybe I should have bought a Vaio...





Somehow one of the T500s avoids the 2D issue that you mentioned.

Anyway, thanks again for the info.