Tag: benchmark

Benchmarking GPD Win Mini 2024

CPU, memory and GPU

Elaborating the subject of the most powerful clamshell handheld of 2024 it is interesting to compare the performance of the GPD Win Mini with other UMPCs of the second epoch.

Here is provided a comparison of CPU, GPU and memory performance: Benchmarking UMPCs of the second epoch. The results of GPD Win Mini are very impressive.

In addition to testing the Win Mini at the maximum TDP value of 28W, it is also interesting to measure the performance depending on the TDP. The corresponding test results are provided below.


What conclusions can be drawn from the charts? The performance of memory and one processor core has practically not increased since 10 watts. TDP value of 20W is almost a performance limit for multithreaded CPU mode and the GPU. In the case of portable use, it makes no sense to increase the TDP above 20W.

Default SSD

The comparison of SSD performance with other UMPCs has already been provided at the link above. In this comparison, the GPD Win Mini was used with the Patriot VP4000 Mini 1TB, instead of the standard SSD from the manufacturer (KIOXIA KBG50ZNS512G 512 GB). It is interesting to compare the speeds of these two drives in the Win Mini.

Test results of the default SSD (KIOXIA KBG50ZNS512G):
Default SSD test results

Test results of Patriot VP4000 Mini 1Tb:
VP4000 Mini test results

As you can see, in terms of operating speeds, the default SSD shows quite good results. It will be difficult to achieve significantly higher values on the Win Mini.

Benchmarking NoName P8 – a convertible UMPC

Introduction

Not so long ago, a UMPC device called the P8 appeared on the market. The device is actively sold on Aliexpress. The manufacturer of the device is unknown, so we will call the device NoName P8. The NoName P8 is notable for the fact that, with rich functionality, it costs about $250, which is several times cheaper than competing devices such as the One-Netbook A1.

Let’s test the performance and see how the NoName P8, with its surprisingly low price, is able to compete with analogous UMPC devices in terms of CPU, SSD and GPU performance.

Testing methodology

The following programs were used to test CPU, Memory, Disk performance:

  • Geekbench version 5.3.1;
  • PassMark Performance Test 10.0 build 1010;
  • CrystalDiskMark version 8.0.1;
  • CPU-Z version 1.95;

The following programs were used to test 3D performance:

3DMark with default settings. Version details:

  • Time Spy version 1.2
  • Fire Strike version 1.1
  • Wild Life version 1.0
  • SystemInfo version 5.37.888.0

Unigine Heaven Benchmark at the resolution of 1280×720; version 4.0.

Test setup descriptions

NoName P8

Processor: Intel Processor N100
SSD: Netac 1Tb N930ES NT01N930ES-001T-E2X
BIOS version: MH-ADL81 1.08 x64
OS: Windows 10 Professional Version 22H2 Build 19045.4291
Intel UHD Graphics driver version: 31.0.101.5186

All the other test setups are described here: https://handheld.computer/?page_id=1009

CPU & Memory performance

PassMark Performance Test results
Geekbench test results
CPU-Z test results

SSD performance

CrystalDiskMark test results

It is worth noting the SSD performance of P8 is even faster than the premium OneGx1 Pro.

3D performance

3DMark test results
Unigine Heaven test results

Conclusion

In all major aspects, the No Name P8 is significantly faster than the One-Netbook A 1 and other UMPC devices based on the m3-8100Y. Considering the price of the No Name P8 at $ 250, the device stands out from the modern UMPC line in terms of price/quality ratio.

CPU replacement in Sony VAIO UX

Sony VAIO UX is one of the most outstanding, elegant, and powerful UMPC of the first epoch. Despite the quite wide range of models in the UX series and quite high prices, there were no dual-core versions of the device. However, the device itself is 100% ready to work with a dual-core processor. Therefore it’s relatively easy to make a custom upgrade.

The gallery below represents the process of CPU replacement: the original Intel® Core™ Solo U1500 is replaced by Intel® Core™2 Duo U7700 (dual-core, 64-bit). The modding was made by a professional master Sergey (aka Freeqwer). Here is a video from Sergey of a similar modding made for another item: https://youtu.be/OcuwCzd7C0I.

According to my benchmarks, Core™2 Duo U7700 is actually two times faster than Core™ Solo U1500 when the application utilizes both cores. The new CPU has increased the power consumption of the device by 25% and the cooling system is able to handle the extra power without the device overheating.

Sabrent Rocket NVME SSD inside One-Netbook A1

Sabrent Rocket is one of the fastest NVME SSD series in the formfactor of M.2 2242. According to the manufacturer, "its speed performance can reach up to 2500MB/s read and 2100MB/s write" (ref).
Here is what you can expect from this SSD inserted into the One-Netbook A1 handheld computer:

It’s worth mentioning that the default One-Netbook SSD shows very similar performance.

So there is no reason to replace SSD in order to get higher speed. The default SSD is pretty much the best you can achieve.

Benchmarking UMPCs of the second epoch

Introduction

"An ultra-mobile PC (ultra-mobile personal computer or UMPC) is a miniature version of a pen computer, a class of laptop whose specifications were launched by Microsoft and Intel in spring 2006." (c) Wikipedia. That was the dawn of the first UMPC epoch. This epoch did not last too long, because in the early 2010s major UMPC manufacturers ended its product lines. Few years later new manufacturers emerged and recreated UMPC market. The major one was the Chinese company GPD. GPD started the second UMPC epoch by releasing gaming handheld GPD Win in 2016 and the general purpose device GPD Pocket in 2017. Since then a whole bunch of UMPC devices were released. In this article we will compare performance of various UMPC devices from the second epoch: including the very first GPD Win and the most powerful UMPC up do the date – One-Netbook OneGx1 Pro.

Disclaimer. This article is not a comprehensive performance analysis of the 2-nd era UMPCs. All the test items are taken from my collection. Therefore the number of test items is quite limited. In case I add any new corresponding items to my collection, this benchmark survey might be extended as well.

Testing methodology

The following programs were used to test CPU, Memory, Disk performance:

  • Geekbench version 5.3.1;
  • PassMark Performance Test 10.0 build 1010;
  • CrystalDiskMark version 8.0.1;
  • CPU-Z version 1.95;

The following programs were used to test 3D performance:

3DMark with default settings. Version details:

  • Time Spy version 1.2
  • Fire Strike version 1.1
  • Wild Life version 1.0
  • SystemInfo version 5.37.888.0

Unigine Heaven Benchmark at the resolution of 1280×720; version 4.0.

Test setup descriptions

GPD Pocket

Processor: Intel Atom x7-Z8750
BIOS version: AMI 5.11 8/7/2017
OS: Windows 10 Professional Version 10.0.18363 Build 18363
Intel HD Graphics 405 driver version: 20.19.15.4444

GPD Win

Processor: Intel Atom x7-Z8750
BIOS version: AMI 5.11, 25.05.2017
OS: Windows 10 Professional Version 10.0.18363 Build 18363
Intel HD Graphics 405 driver version: 20.19.15.4549

GPD MicroPC

CPU: Intel Celeron N4100
BIOS version: AMI 02.07.2019
OS: Windows 10 Professional Version 10.0.17763 Build 17763
Intel UHD Graphics 600 driver version: 26.20.100.7584
TDP: 10W

One-Netbook A1

Processor: Intel Core m3-8100Y
BIOS version: AMI 5.12 12.09.2020
OS: Windows 10 Professional Version 10.0.19042 Build 19042
Intel UHD Graphics 615 driver version: 27.20.100.8681

One-Netbook OneMix 2s

Processor: Intel Core m3-8100Y
BIOS version: AMI 5.12 04.03.2019
OS: Windows 10 Professional Version 10.0.19042 Build 19042
Intel UHD Graphics 600 driver version: 26.20.100.7584

Noname P8

Processor: Intel N100
BIOS version: 5.25 MH-ADL81 1.08 x64
OS: Windows 10 Pro Version 22H2 Build 19045.5131
Intel UHD Graphics driver version: 32.0.101.6129

One-Netbook OneGx1 Pro

Processor: Intel Core i7-1160G7
BIOS version: AMI 5.19 17.12.2020
OS: Windows 10 Professional Version 10.0.19042 Build 19042
Intel Iris Xe Graphics driver version: 27.20.100.8680

GPD Win Mini 2024

Processor: AMD Ryzen™ 7 8840U @28W
RAM: 32Gb 7500Mhz
BIOS version: MiniEDP 1.66 x64
OS: Windows 11 Home 23H2 Build 22631.4602
AMD GPU driver version: 24.12.1

CPU & Memory performance

PassMark Performance Test results
Geekbench test results
CPU-Z test results

Processor performance in multithreaded mode has at least doubled from 2021 to 2024. At the same time, the performance of a single core is barely noticeable and is growing at a much less significant rate.

SSD performance

CrystalDiskMark test results

The read and write speeds of solid-state drives have also almost doubled and reached incredible values of about 3 GB/sec.

3D performance

3DMark test results
Unigine Heaven test results

Few notes:

  1. Performance of Iris Xe (One-Netbook OneGx1 Pro) was just outstanding as of 2021.
  2. The performance of the Radeon 780M (GPD Win Mini) has almost doubled compared to the Iris Xe.
  3. Tiger Lake supports Thunderbolt 4, which allows to connect eGPU to the UMPC. eGPU can improve 3D performance of OneGx1 Pro by at least 4 times. See details here: Benchmarking OneGx1 Pro with eGPU.
  4. Performance of A1 is significantly lower than performance of OneMix 2s, which is based on the same Intel Core m3-8100Y.

Conclusion

Since the GPD Win (released in 2017) performance of UMPCs for 2024 has changed as follows:

  • CPU performance in single-threaded mode has increased by about 8 times and has not grown significantly in the last 3 years.
  • CPU performance in multithreaded mode has increased by about 15 times and has roughly doubled over the past 3 years.
  • SSD read performance increased by 20 times, and write performance increased by 37 times.
  • GPU performance increased by about 20-35 times, depending on the task.

Benchmarking OneGx1 Pro with eGPU

I connected EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FOUNDERS EDITION to One-Netbook OneGx1 Pro via the following eGPU box: Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box 550.

Here are the main results:

  1. eGPU can improve 3D performance of OneGx1 Pro by at least 4 times.
  2. Performance of the video card inserted in the desktop is significantly higher than performance of the same card connected via eGPU box.
  3. Performance of eGPU is significantly higher when the image is displayed on an external monitor.

More benchmarks of OneGx1 Pro are availavle here.

GPD MicroPC arrived

Overall impression

MicroPC looks very robust. The build quality is quite impressive. Chinese companies definitely improve their skills. The keyboard is one of the most comfortable handheld keyboards I’ve ever used. The size of the device is significantly smaller than size of similar devices from UMPC era (see comparison photos below).

In general I really like the device. I can’t mention any disadvantages so far.

I did’t like the original GPD case, because it’s designed to fit much larger devices (GPD Pocket, probably). So I ended up using the FlipStart bag instead, because I have an extra one and the MicroPC fits perfectly.

Benchmarks

The performance of MicroPC is significantly higher than the performance of Microsoft Surface 3.

DOOM 3 benchmark (1280×720, graphic quality set to high, timedemo demo1)

Device FPS (1st run) FPS (2nd run) FPS (3rd run) Average FSB
GPD MicroPC 10W 39.5 44.6 47.0 43,7
Microsoft Surface 3 30.5 31.7 34.1 32,1

It’s also worth mentioning that Surface 3 is unable to sustain this perofrmance during long period of time. Without active cooling Surface 3 starts throttling and the performance decreases to 23-24 FPS.

Benchmarking Toshiba Libretto 70CT

Introduction

Toshiba Libretto 70CT is based on Intel Mobile Pentium MMX 120 Mhz (sSpec number SL2JS). Lets compare this this processor with a desktop Pentium MMX of the same time:

Model number Lithography Frequency L1 Cache FSB TDP sSpec number
Mobile Pentium MMX 120 0.35 µm 120 Mhz 16+16 KiB 60 MT/s 4.2 W SL2JS
Pentium MMX 166 0.35 µm 166 Mhz 16+16 KiB 66 MT/s 13.1 W SL239, SL27H

Despite being built using the same lithography technology as the desktop Pentium MMX processors (0.35 µm) and having comparatively close frequency (the desktop processor has 38% higher frequency), SL2JS has significantly smaller TDP (the TDP of the desktop processors is 3.12 times higher, than the TDP of SL2JS).

Because of this fact I became curious whether the performance SL2JS will be identical to the performance of a desktop MMX processor with the same frequency of 120 Mhz. In order to find this out I prepared a test setup and executed few CPU benchmarks. The benchmark results are presented below.

Testing methodology

The following programs were used to test CPU performance:

  • SiSoft Sandra version 2001.0.7.10;
  • PassMark Performance Test 5.0 build 1038;
  • CPUBENCH version 4.0.0.6;
  • Speedsys version 4.78;
  • Landmark System Speed Test version 6.00;
  • Norton System Information 8.0;
  • Quake version 1.0.6. Settings: resolution is 320×200, disabled sound, disabled cdaudio, demo1 used as demo map. Full config is available here.

All tests performed after suitable warm-up period.

Setup #1 description

Toshiba Libretto 70CT

Device: Toshiba Libretto 70CT
BIOS version: 6.40
CPU: Mobile Pentium MMX 120 (SL2JS)
RAM: 32Mb (including genuine 16Mb extension module)
Video: Chips & Technology F65550 1Mb
OS: Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 A

Setup #2 description

Intel Pentium MMX 166

Motherboard: Lucky Star 5I-VX1F
BIOS version: 4.51PG
CPU: There is no desktop Pentium MMX clocked at 120 Mhz. Therefore a downclocked Pentium MMX 166 was used (clocked at 120 Mhz with 60 MHz FSB). There were used two samples with different spec numbers: SL239 and SL27H.
RAM: Hitachi 32Mb SDRAM 81117822a-100fn
Video: S3 Trio64V2/DX 2 Mb
PSU: Linkworld LP12SWITCH 200W
OS: Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 A

Test results

Landmark System Speed test results

Speedsys test results

Norton System Information test results

As we can see, DOS benchmarks didn’t detect any difference. However, Windows benchmarks show a different picture.

PassMark Performance Test results

SiSoft Sandra test results

CPUBENCH test results

In most tests the SL2JS is behind its desktop competitors. In some test the gap is as big as 49%, but the average difference is only 10%.

I also decided to execute one additional test with Quake. However, the results of this benchmark can not be linked directly to CPU. This benchmark is highly dependent on video output and there are different video chip used in the test
setups. Anyway, here is the result.

PassMark Performance Test results

Conclusion

The presumption was confirmed. The performance of SL2JS is not identical to the performance of a desktop MMX processor with the same frequency. However, the average difference in performance is not very significant: it’s just 10%.