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7 Days with the HP 2133 Ultra Portable Netbook
Synthetic Benchmarks
Continuing on my evaluation and following our philosophy of real world testing I used several synthetic benchmarks on the HP 2133 but in a real world manner. What this means is that we did not spare the machine any workload during testing. The average computer user has between 20 and 45 programs loaded on their PC. True to this we loaded the following software onto our test machine to reflect a "normal" environment.
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These programs are in addition to the basic Windows XP Pro SP3 installation and all of the drivers needed for full functionality of the HP 2133.
CPUz
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As you can see the HP 2133 has a rated FSB of 800mhz, an integrated 8X AGP video card, and surprisingly single channel memory. As you will see below this could account in part for the lower memory scores of the system.
Sisoft Sandra XII SP2c
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Well as you can see the C7-M significantly holds back this platform in many tests and on several levels. The HP 2133 is outfit with 2GB of DDR2 667 memory and yet the VIA chipset restricts the memory bandwidth severely. What we do see which is surprising is the Seagate 120GB 7200rpm hard drive shine. The Seagate 7200 rpm hard drive is really a saving grace for this little machine and allows what could be an unbearable experience to actually be quite usable.
You should keep in mind the original intention for these machines is as a mobile data access platform primarily for internet and e-mail. What we are subjecting the C7-M and HP 2133 to is not in the scope of what this machine is meant for. It is however what many consumers will indeed use it for.
Super Pi v1.5
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SuperPi is simply a test of how fast a CPU can solve a math problem. In this case it is computing PI to a set number of digits and reporting how long it takes the CPU to do so. As we mentioned in our editorial on Real World Benchmarks VS Synthetic Benchmarks this test while a real world benchmarks is still only usefull if you have another system or CPU to compare it to. As such we have added results to the right for a standard Dell Laptop equipped with a T7400 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of Ram. As you can see math is not the strong point of the VIA C7-M. To be fair these laptops are meant for completely different purposes and it essentially amounts to us comparing a dog with a lion.
CrystalMark R4 2003
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While the score of the system is not bad considering the platform you can see several weak points which are the graphics, and CPU. Interestingly the hard drive returns the highest score in the system. CrystalMark returns a bit more information about the CPU than CPUz does and allows us to see more about whats going on under the hood. Here we see shared system memory and supported types of instruction sets. We suspect that upcoming ultra portables will support hyperthreading followed by actual dual core processors when they are able to lower the working wattage of such processors.
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