The Notebook “makeover” – Kingston SSD/RAM upgrade and clean OS install

Real World Testing

CustomPC Benchmark

CustomPC benchmark use widely available open-source applications to carry out the tasks that most of us perform on a regular basis. There are three tests, each of which measure different aspects of a PC’s performance. These tests themselves are not synthetic benchmarks but instead they use real world image, video and multi-tasking tasks to test the performance of your computer. We are looking to see if tasks are faster on the SSD than the HDD.

The tests are:

• GIMP Image Editing
• H.264 Video Encoding
• Multi-tasking

As usual we test with the 250GB Toshiba 5400 rpm notebook HDD first.

Now the same test is repeated on the SSD.

The SSD has about 1% more CPU usage than the mechanical HDD for each of the three tests.  Image editing is 2 seconds faster on the mechanical HDD and ten seconds faster on multi-tasking where most of the time is spent waiting on the CPU.  However we see a 41 second improvement using the SSD for video encoding. Now we will go to a very practical test of something we all do, file copying.

File Copy: H.A.W.X.

In this test we are using MrK’s method of installing the game to the drive being benchmarked. After that, the game folder is copied to another folder on the same drive using Microsoft’s Robocopy GUI and the time taken is noted. This real world benchmark tests both the read and the write speeds of the drive at the same time. This time, we used H.A.W.X. for this purpose as this game has a lot of files of various sizes. This should test the hard disk transfer speeds across vast sizes of files and is indeed a real world scenario.

The 250GB Toshiba 5400 rpm notebook HDD took 6 minutes and 47 seconds on average to copy 5.61GB.

The SDD took 2 minutes and 54 seconds on average to copy that same 5.61GB.

Need we say more? We are saving nearly four (4) minutes!  It takes nearly seven minutes for the HDD to copy the same files that the SSD does in less than three!!

We have already seen very slight improvements in video editing when the drives are accessed and huge gains in copying big files, but will it also translate to improved performance in gaming? We will look at gaming and application load times now that we are finished with the synthetic and real world benchmarks.