Does Intel's Mobile Pentium III-M processor meet its claims? It's tough to tell, since each component of a notebook plays such an important part. Unlike with desktops, it's not as easy as dropping in a new processor. Still, we gave it a try and looked at three notebooks featuring processors running at or above 1 GHz. The performance numbers were skewed much more than we expected, but for the most part the new processors played a part in generating the highest performance numbers we've ever seen.

• Dell Inspiron 8100
• IBM ThinkPad T23
• HP OmniBook 6100

How we tested

We tested all the notebooks using standard industry benchmarks from Ziff-Davis. We tested systems using Business Winstone 2001, Content Creation Winstone 2001, and BatteryMark 4.01.

Business Winstone 2001 tests the performance of the notebook when running the following 32-bit business applications using the native resolution with 32-bit color:

• Microsoft Office 2000 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word)
• Microsoft Project 98
• Lotus Notes R5
• NicoMak WinZip
• Norton AntiVirus
• Netscape Communicator

Content Creation Winstone 2001 tests system performance using the following intensive 32-bit applications using native resolution with 32-bit color:

• Adobe Photoshop 5.5
• Adobe Premiere 5.1
• Macromedia Director 8.0
• Macromedia Dreamweaver 3.0
• Netscape Navigator 4.73
• Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 4.5

See comparative charts showing the performance of these notebooks running Business Winstone 2001 and Content Creation Winstone 2001.

For systems with capable video cards, we also ran MadOnion's 3DMark2001 to test the 3D capabilities of the notebook. The benchmark runs through a series of simulations designed to stress various aspects of 3D performance. In the past, notebooks couldn't run this benchmark, but newer systems are coming equipped with better video cards with 3D support. For this reason, we've started using this benchmark when appropriate. For this benchmark, we used a resolution of 1024x768 and the maximum settings available for the video card. See a comparative chart.

BatteryMark 4.01 performs graphics, disk, and processor tests to simulate typical system usage and determine battery life. The test is a compilation of components from WinBench 97. See a comparative chart of battery test results.

We tested notebooks from Dell, HP, and IBM. Each notebook was tested with 128MB of RAM and running Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional.