Gateway MP8708 laptop vs. Dual Intel QuadCore

I have been struggling with getting my new workstation working correctly for some time now. Unfortunately, I haven’t spent nor had the time required to just figure it out all in one block of time, so it has taken a couple months now.

For details about my machine see My dual Intel QuadCore workstation.

My laptop is an (amazingly fast) Gateway MP8708 that has a Core2 Duo 7200 CPU in it.

The reason for this post is because I’ve gotten the second CPU installed. Heh-heh!

So, I performed the same test as before with excellent results. Here they are:

Woohoo!

The laptop is still faster, so why do I say woohoo? The laptop is slightly faster, but that’s okay and here’s why…

The laptop is pretty much unusable while it is compiling. That’s not a problem while using the laptop, because I seldom do a full compile like this. However, my workstation averaged about 9% of the CPU while performing this test.

Yes, I said only 9% of the CPU. That’s cool! That’s So Cool! That means I have a lot of extra bandwidth to spare right!? Oh yeah!

Bandwidth left over

So, to check out how well my processors were doing I loaded up pretty much every program I have installed and then did the same compilation process.

Here’s what I was running, all at the same time:

• Lots of Office 2007 applications were loaded and fully responsive including Outlook, Word, and Excel.
• Winamp was playing a 320 kb song.
• Had the task manager opened, polling High speed.
• Had a VMware image running Windows XP with 1GB RAM (performing a massive Windows Update download/install).
• Windows Media Player was playing a HD Smallville episode double size.
• Visual Studio 2005 compiling another solution.
• Visual Studio 2005 compiling standard test solution.

Yeah, it was way cool. I even took a screen shot of it.

With all of that running it only averaged 19% of the CPU and the RAID just danced along happily. And, of course everything was totally responsive and each application felt as if there wasn’t anything else running.

Yeah, I’m excited now.