Well, I've successfully swapped the Vaio UX390N that was quite pricey for a 280P off eBay that was a great deal.  Overall, it was about $1500 less.  So, what did I lose for that change?

Specification-wise, it's got a 40GB 4200rpm disk and a 1.2GHz processor.  Aside from being silver, that's about the end of the differences.  I've already upgraded the Windows XP Pro to Windows Vista Business.  Although I plan on upgrading the hard drive later, I though I'd do the same benchmarks as before to compare the two models.

• PCMark05: 1273
• 3DMark06: 95
• Windows Experience Index:
  • Processor: 2.7
  • Memory (RAM): 4.3
  • Graphics: 3.5
  • Gaming Graphics: 2.6
  • Primary Hard Disk: 3.7
• SiSoft Sandra:
  • Processor Arithmetic:
    • Dhrystone ALU: 4068 MIPS
    • Whetstone iSSE3: 2999 MFLOPS
  • Processor Multi-Media:
    • Integer x8 iSSE2: 9317 it/s
    • Floating-Point x4 iSSE2: 12557 it/s
  • Physical Disks: 24MBps-11MBps
• SuperPi
  • 1M: 1m 13s
  • 2M: 2m 9s
  • 4M: TBD (the version I grabbed crashes)

Well, that's it for this time.  As you'll probably have noticed, it's missing a few minor numbers and at least one number is actually faster than the result I got for the Sony UX390N.

The overall feel of the system isn't that much slower, but things do take a bit longer to launch and startup is definitely slower.  However, the speed improvements certainly weren't worth the $1500 difference between the good price I got from eBay on this and the full, retail price of the Sony UX390N. 

I'll be running more tests if I can figure out where to order one of the new Toshiba 100GB 1.8" drives from.  They've got a large buffer and with the greater data density, they should be a bit faster, overall.

Posted by Shane on April 21, 2007 9:30 AM | Permalink