Hardware and Performance

I've been looking at numerous laptops, all of different brands. What I would like to know is:

Is the performance of a laptop only related to its hardware? By performance, I am referring to speed, during bootup, multi-tasking, Converting videos and loading windows.

Say there are two laptops of different brands; Dell and Sager. Each have the exact same configurations: T7500, 2Gb Ram, 5400rpm hdd, etc. Will the performance of these two laptops during the tasks mentioned above be the same? Or is there something else which also affects performance?

And if performance is related to hardware only, then why are there differences in benchmarks of laptops which are identically configured?

 

Performance also depends on the number of other programs/apps running in the background.

 

The performance will be largely the same but it is interesting to see laptops with similar config posting different benchmarks consistently. I think the motherboard is an issue that people often don't consider.

 

Benchmarks split hairs and give the impression they are breaking boulders. The same make and model can test different. They sometimes measure stuff that is so small or precise what does 100 or 1000 mean?
The MoBo does likely make a difference and other parts that are never disscussed that unless you want to get a degree you just pick the main components and go from there.

 

Alot of things can affect performance. If two systems have the exact same specifications, then they should perform very close to each other. Circuitry can affect performance, so the motherboard will also affect performance, as will using different chipsets.

As jetstar said, the number of background tasks can affect speed and the revisions of different pieces of hardware. A newer revision motherboard may perform faster than the previos model.

 

thanks for the help guys. I have just had bad experiences with performance. Every laptop/desktop I have had in the past has been sluggish while multi-tasking and/or can never play any games since my machines never had a dedicated graphics card. However, everytime I buy a new computer I expect to see a great performance boost, but I am always disappointed by the difference.

For example:
My first Desktop
Pentium III, 800Mhz, 384mb Ram, 16mb GPU - used until two years ago

My Next Laptop
Pentium M, 1.6 Mhz, 512mb Ram, 128mb 915GM

My Current Desktop
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+, 2.4Ghz, 1Gb Ram, Nvidia Geforce 6150 LE (vista)


I was expecting a great performance boost from my first dektop and laptop to my new laptop. However, this desktop was sluggish, always lags during multi-tasking and always goes unbearably slow when using media center. Its so bad that I have to wait 30sec-1 min sometimes for the menu to load.

Can anybody tell me if the laptop in my sig will also be sluggish like my desktop or should I expect a performance boost?

 

Your notebook has excellent specifications, and I don't see any reason for it to be sluggish. However, Dell will probably have installed a boat load of extra utilities and bloatware, that may slow the system a fair bit. When you recieve the notebook, remove the software that you don't plan on using.

 

Ram has been part of your problem (with IGP you need more) when you upgrade the new to 2GB you should be very happy, maybe even with 1GB, you have a dedicated GPU!

 

On your laptop, you will have less than probably 128MB of ram left after your video card takes 128MB and the OS 256MB, and now you have to load a game onto 128MB, which is nearly impossible.

I would suggest to get a least one stick 1GB of ram to add to your 512MB. Your laptop is still quite fast. You just need some ram.

My OS takes up 650MB when you first boot it up. lol a lot of programs