Acer Aspire 1551 11.6-inch Notebook Review – AMD Turion II

x264 HD Encoding, Sandra 2011, & wPrime

Simply put, it is a reproducible measure of how fast your machine can encode a short HD-quality video clip into a high quality x264 video file. It’s nice because everyone running it will use the same video clip and software. The video encoder (x264.exe) reports a fairly accurate internal benchmark (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All these factors make this an ideal benchmark to compare different processors and systems to each other.

We have some other notebooks here for comparison. The Acer AS1551-5448 is right in the middle and putting up some double the numbers of the Atom netbooks, which are comparable in size. One thing we found interesting was that the AMD Turion II X2 K625 was ahead of the upcoming Zacate E-350 CPU.

SiSoft Sandra 2011a

A year ago, SiSoftware released Sandra 2010 with full support for Windows 7; in the 18 months since the launch of Windows 7, more than ever before we have seen the line blur between PC and entertainment hubs. Two months ago we released a Blu-Ray benchmark, now we have added a brand-new Media Transcoding benchmark using the new Media Foundation of Windows 7. We have also added yet another benchmark (GPGPU Cryptography) which allows direct comparison of CPU performance (using crypto instruction sets) and GPGPU performance.

This is a “new” benchmark since Sandra 2011a was recently released, so we have no other data to compare it to. At a bit less than 6GB/s we should see this turning out to be on the low end of the results but in line with other products in this space.

wPrime

wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton’s method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we’re sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum.

Again we see great results from the AMD Turion II X2 K625 processor. At 55.69 seconds it’s the fourth fastest processor in our test and ahead of Zacate E-350 again.