Benchmark Matchup: Acer TM8204 vs. Dell E1705

Hello everyone. If you have been following the Acer forum at Notebookreview.com, then you may have read how I ordered an 8204 as a replacement for a Dell E1705 that was supposedly delayed until the end of May (ordered March 8th!). Long story short, the Dell somehow shipped the same day as my Acer, so now I have both. Dream situation, right? Wrong...I'm not wealthy enough to keep them both. So my misfortune is your best chance to get a head-to-head benchmark comparison of these two killer systems.

Before I go any further, I just want to note that my Acer laptop does not seem to have any of the reported problems talked about on this forum. I played FarCry for about an hour today and I never heard any buzzing noises, and the fan noise was the same as the Dell's. The display is not as bright as I would have liked it, but I made it about 30% brighter using ATI's Control Center. I have the lcd display that other's have complained about, but I can't tell any difference between it and the Dell's. If I had found any of the problems that others have had, I would never have run these benchmarks. No level of performance makes having a troublesome laptop worthwhile. For those of you who have had troubles, I hope you get them sorted out with Acer. For those of you thinking of getting the 8204, you won't be disappointed.

Computer Specs:
Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi with standard specs (no upgrades...yet)
Round 1: Stock Round 2: Updated Bios (v3312) and GPU (8.231)
Dell E1705, T2500, Go7800, 2 GB 667 RAM, 80 GB 7200rpm HDD, XP Pro SP2
Round 1: Stock Round 2: Upgraded Bios (A01) --no GPU u.d. avail.
All non-essential apps were closed down and both machines had been running for about 1 hour previous. Benchmarks were run on each machine simultaneously.

Benchmarks:
Everest Ultimate Ed. 2006 Eval 2.80.534
HDTach 3.0.1.0
3DMark05 1.2.0
SiSoft Sandra Lite Unicode 2005.10.10.69
Far Cry (subjective)

Results:

http://home.comcast.net/~peddlar/Benchmarks.rtf

Review:
Out of the box, in Round 1, the Dell's faster hard drive and memory show their muscles on all of the Everest and HDTach benchmarks. The biggest difference was shown in Memory Read speed and HDD Average Read speed. However, on the 3DMark05 and Sandra tests, the Acer shows how it can outperform the Dell even with "lesser" components.

After the updates for Round 2, the Acer became even more efficient, winning almost all of the Everst and HDTach benchmarks. The new Acer bios really improves overall component performance. On the other hand, the Dell's new bios seemed to cause it's hard drive to slow it's Average Read and Long Random Access speeds.

Best of all, the Acer's 3DMark05 score took a HUGE leap of 353 points! This can easily be attributed to the raising of the x1600's core and clock speeds to 473/468. Thank you Christopher H. The Acer's new video driver also helped extend it's advantage over the Dell in the Sandra tests.

As for the subjective FarCry tests, I felt that the Acer ran more smoothly. The Dell had horizontal striping patterns at multiple resolutions and performance settings. Also, the game runs smoother on both computers at lower resolutions, but the Acer looks better at native resolution simply because it's easier (1680x1050 vs. 1920x1200). Running FarCry on the Dell at native resolution looks noticeably slower.

You may notice that I have not made any comments on the CPU performances in 3DMark05. Honestly, it's because I don't understand what the numbers mean. Please feel free to enlighten me if you know the answer.

Comments:
I've had a really tough time trying to decide between these two excellent laptops. On one side, the Dell has top notch specs including one of the best displays I have ever seen. The speakers are VERY good for a laptop and the Dell Media Direct really shines (especially if you have to run XP Pro for work instead of Media Center). On the other side, the Acer offers better performance, security, and connectivity (including a REAL port replicator) for about $500 less than the Dell.

Before today's tests, I was set to keep the Dell because I thought it had the whole performance package (minus PC Card and port replicator). Now I know that the Dell somehow wastes it's component advantage with unnecessary bloatware and poorly optimized bios and drivers. I would not have believed it if I hadn't run the tests myself.

I think it's fairly safe to say that I'm keeping the Acer. It's faster, sleeker, lighter, and fits MY work and play needs better than the Dell. For play, I dabble with HD video editing (go AVIVO!). So how do I plan to live without the Dell's bright display, great speakers, and multimedia enhancements? Well, I have a 20" widescreen lcd at work which I can use as my primary in a mirrored arrangement or an extended desktop. I can get portable speakers to use with my ipod and the Acer for when I travel. A great set of headphones is always a better option for me anyway.

**Update**
After reading others' reviews about their 8204s with the same build date, I tested mine with cpu-z and it shows that I do indeed have pc5300 ram installed. So the ram specs between these two laptops are the same. The only real difference between these two (spec-wise) is the hard drive speed and video cards. This information might help to explain some of the results above.

Not really. I have an 0306 build and it came preloaded with almost all of the latest drivers from the Acer website. I don't have the ATI noise and my NIC works great. I don't know about the grey lines on the monitor because I can't see them. I do have the LTN display, but again, I think it looks fine (with some ATI control panel tweeks). It is very easy to cause ripples on the lcd by putting pressure on the case lid, but as my doctor says, don't do that.

I guess I could try to get another lcd if the ripple thing is really a quality-control issue. But I dont' want to give up my productivity to order one.

Thanks.

Well, like I state in the review, there were no update Dell video drivers. The matchup was against out-of-the-box stock laptops, then bios and video driver updates only. I've read that people have already overclocked the Go 7800, and there are probably hacked drivers being used as well. I'm not willing to do that on a machine I use for work, so my test didn't include it. If I failed to change an important setting in the nvidia software, let me know really soon and I'll retest it. Otherwise it goes back on Friday.

Sir Maximum, I thought about your comment, then went back to the Dell and played with the Go 7800's settings. I changed the performance profile to the 3Dmark05 performance setting, and then made sure that the performance and power settings were cranked to full. The highest 3DMark05 score I got was 3921 and 6631 for Cpu. A litte better, but not as good as the Acer. I also made the same adjustments to the x1600 settings, and it received 4573 3DMarks and 5480 for Cpu. I also read tonight that people using Omega drivers are passing 5000 3DMarks with no problems.

What drivers and settings are you using? Did they change anything else about your laptop (like loss of S-video or DVI output)? Where did you get them and how did you uninstall the old and install the new? Thanks.

Thanks. BTW, I meant that people using the x1600 with Omega drivers were hitting over 5k in 3DMark. Check out Kohaar's sig above. I don't know what people are getting out of their overclocked 7800's. But I have read that they are severely underclocked by Dell compared to the 7800 GTX.

Thanks Nitehood. The only replicator you can use is the Acer ezDock because there is a proprietary connector. It's expensive, big, and is horribly designed. But it offers every connection currently available and it comes with it's own power supply.

I say that it's horribly designed because the connector is only about 3 inches long, it sticks out of the side of the replicator (which is as wide as the notebook), and the port on the laptop is not in the middle of the back. So when the replicator is connected, it takes up an additional 8 inches directly behind the laptop and extends about 2 inches to the right. So make sure your desk is deep enough to comfortably hold it all because you don't have a choice on the placement. Cheers.