Think Fast, Fly Faster: M4 Page 8

Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Pictures

Timings
I ran some quick timing tests with the M4 shutting down, starting up, hibernating in/out, and standby in/out. I used a stopwatch, ending when the Power light went out for shutdowns, or when the “press Ctrl-Alt-Del to login” message was displayed on startup. Timings were the same regardless of if the system were plugged in or on battery.
Shutdown:
55 seconds
Startup:
45 seconds
Hibernate:
44 seconds
Resume from Hibernation:
19 seconds
Standby:
17 seconds
Resume from Standby:
7 seconds.

Video Driver and 3DMark03 Performance
Using some instructions found in the forums on TabletPCBuzz, I was able to upgrade my NVidia video driver to version 77.72 and have had a significant increase in performance. The video card performs significantly better and I’m no longer running into GPU overheat messages while running 3DMark03. I haven’t installed any graphics heavy games on the M4 yet, so I can’t post framerates, but I do have the 3DMark scores. With the original drivers and before underclocking, I got a score of 3502. After the new drivers I was able to bring it up to 3926. For the sake of comparison, my Althon64 3000+ (2.0 Ghz overclocked to 2.5 Ghz), 1 gig Ram, ATI All-In-Wonder 9600XT desktop got a score of 4326.

Sound
The speakers in the M4 have typical volume and quality for notebook speakers. If you want high quality sound, you’ll need to plug in a pair or good headphones or external speakers, but the quality is good enough for most casual use. They are partially obscured by the screen when in Tablet mode, but still perfectly useable. As mentioned earlier, I can’t find the third microphone in the mic array, but the quality is decent. I’ve been using the array in OneNote to record discussion with my Flight Instructor during our ground training sessions and even when he’s 10–15 feet away his voice is still distinct and understandable.