PaceBook PaceBlade: The Tablet PC Arrives

Performance - SYSMark 2002

As mentioned in the test section, we were not able to get our PaceBook to complete the Content Creation Winstone 2002 tests. Let's move on to SYSMark 2002.

Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002 PaceBlade PaceBook 600MHz Sony PictureBook 600MHz Desktop Celeron 533MHz Desktop Celeron 433MHz 43 42 37 31 | 0 | 9 | 17 | 26 | 34 | 43 | 52

The first of SYSMark 2002's tests, the Internet Content Creation benchmark, puts the Crusoe based laptops above the desktop Celerons of a slower speed, but not by much. The PaceBook is able to slightly outdo the Sony PictureBook and was able to outperform the desktop Celeron system at 533MHz by 16%.

As you can probably tell by the desktop speeds that the Crusoe based PictureBook compares to, the 600MHz TM5600 Crusoe is not a CPU powerhouse. Remember how we hinted that the CPU's low power consumption may cause sacrifices elsewhere? Well, it seems that it causes speed sacrifices. The PaceBook, for example, performed over four times slower than the fastest notebook we have seen in this benchmark, the Compaq Presario 2800T. The slow performance is not something that this particular benchmark exaggerates: as our own personal use suggested and the rest of the benchmarks proved, the TM5600 Crusoe at 600MHz is not a fast machine.

Office Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 Desktop Celeron 533MHz Desktop Celeron 433MHz PaceBlade PaceBook 600MHz Sony PictureBook 600MHz 48 41 35 32 | 0 | 10 | 19 | 29 | 38 | 48 | 58

The Crusoe based laptops fared even poorer in the Office Productivity portion of SYSMark 2002. In this case, the PaceBook was left performing 17% slower than the desktop Celeron computer running at 433MHz. Again, the system's slow performance was certainly noticed during product use: even surfing the web seemed to take longer on the PaceBook. For comparisons sake, the fastest laptop in this test, again the Compaq Presario 2800T 1.7GHz, was about 2.5 times faster than the PaceBook.

Overall Performance SYSMark 2002 Desktop Celeron 533MHz PaceBlade PaceBook 600MHz Sony PictureBook 600MHz Desktop Celeron 433MHz 42 39 37 36 | 0 | 8 | 17 | 25 | 34 | 42 | 50

Finally we come to the overall SYSMark 2002 score. With a comparatively high Internet Content Creation score and a comparatively low Office Productivity score, the PaceBlade PaceBook finds itself in the middle of the overall SYSMark 2002 scores. The system scored 7% slower than the desktop Celeron 533MHz system and 8% faster than the desktop Celeron 433MHz system. The difference between the two Crusoe 600MHz laptops was essentially nonexistent, scoring within 5% of each other Again, the 39 that the PaceBook got in SYSMark 2002 is a few orders of magnitude slower than our current highest performing mobile product, the Compaq Presario 2800T.