PC Club Enpower ENP660: Back to School

Synthetic Graphics and Gaming Performance

We don't place a lot of stock in the performance results generated by Futuremark's 3DMark applications, and the PC Club ENP660 isn't designed with gaming performance in mind. The Intel GMA X3100 GPU does run Aero Glass without any noticeable problems and it scores a 3.5 on the Windows Experience Index. SM3.0 is technically supported, but the performance of most games or graphics benchmarks leaves a lot to be desired. Intel is still working on getting fully functional drivers out, but they do have a public beta available that now allows a few DirectX 9 games to actually run on the GMA X3100. As a rough estimate of gaming performance, we'll start with 3DMark results follow with a brief discussion of our actual gaming experiences.









It's pretty interesting that the ENP660 with the latest Intel drivers loses in every 3DMark graphics benchmark to the older drivers on the HP dv6500t. Perhaps more telling is that the beta drivers actually make 3DMark performance drop even further! Last we checked, however, people don't "play" 3DMark; they play actual games. Did the latest beta driver from Intel help out with gaming performance?

Considering its beta status, we weren't too surprised that the results were hit and miss. Most games didn't run any faster, a few had performance drop, but there is a bright side to all this. There were a couple games that we couldn't load previously that would now actually load using the beta driver. (Note that the latest official driver (15.4.4) was released a couple weeks after the beta (15.6b) but does not include all of the beta features at present.) The beta specifically lists the following titles as being supported: Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, Call of Duty 2, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Vanguard: The Saga of Heroes, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Age of Empires 3, Final Fantasy XI Bench 3, and Unreal Tournament 2004. We did not test all of the titles, but we did confirm that Battlefield 2, Oblivion, and Age of Empires 3 could all run with the new driver. We still had to use more or less minimum quality settings in those three games along with lower resolutions, and there were still graphical artifacts. Frame rates generally hovered around 20 FPS. However, at least there is progress being made.

Before you get your hopes up too far, though, consider the theoretical level of performance on tap with the GMA X3100. The graphics core runs at somewhere around 400 MHz, with a maximum of two pixels processed per clock cycle. That means fill rate is at best ~800 megapixels. Memory bandwidth is shared with the system, and at maximum it gets 10.6GB/s (but more likely about half of that). The net result is that you have something which at best might perform as fast as a GeForce 3 - albeit with DirectX 9 features. Or if you prefer other terms, performance is relatively close to what you might get from the GeForce 6100. It's fast enough for office work, watching movies, and older/less demanding games. Sounds perfect for parents looking to get their college-bound student a new laptop! (We certainly wouldn't want them to play a part in helping their child fail classes because they're at home playing Team Fortress Classic....)