Dell Latitude D430 Laptop Performance

Inside the Dell Latitude D430 there is a processor made by Intel. For a change the Intel Core 2 Duo U7600 is not very powerful, but, its energy demand and dissipation loss are low. Both of the cores of this ULV-chip (Ultra-Low-Voltage) run at a maximum clock rate of 1.2 GHz and are equipped with 2 MByte L2-Cache and there thermal dissipation power (TDP) is only 10 Watt. For Comparison: A standard mobile processor, one of the Core 2 Duos, can have a TDP of up to 35 Watt. It's for sure that the Dell Latitude D430 runs quietly and quite a long time in battery mode.

The reviewed notebook was equipped with one Gigabyte soldered DDR2 RAM. Nevertheless, the RAM capacity can still be easily enhanced to up to 3 GB, because there is a free memory slot hidden beneath a maintenance opening. Considering the current RAM costs, this is surely a good idea. But, Windows XP ran also smoothly with only one GB RAM.

The provided mass storage devices contribute to this too. Dell equipped the reviewed notebook with a very fast and very expensive SSD by Samsung, a PZA064. From the very beginning it convinced by high performance, whereas it is absolutely silent. It has a capacity of 64 GB, the transfer rate is nearly constantly as high as 47 MB/s and it accesses any location within a very short delay of 0.3 ms. According to SiSoft Sandra, the transfer rate is still 24 MB/s when writing data. For Comparison: The transfer rate of a standard 1.8 inch hard disk is about 30 MB/s, its access time is mostly clearly above 20ms.

Your daily work will profit from this. Windows XP is already ready for use 28 seconds after switching the notebook on. Applications start stunningly fast, smaller installations are done very quickly. Even though its processor is clearly slower than the one of other notebooks, we felt that the Dell Latitude D430 resonsives clearly faster than most other mobile computers – impressive. However, if you decide to do it without SSD, which costs nearly 800 Euro, you need to be aware that the total performance will drop. Standard 1.8 inch hard disks - which are usually used in this notebook - do not ensure high performance.

Dell Latitude D430 Laptop Benchmarks

Performance wise, the Latitude D430 didn’t fare so well in our PCMark05 benchmark. The overall score was 2,465 points with the CPU doing 2,993 points. This is expected considering the lower speed and Ultra Low Voltage nature of the U7600 CPU. Practically speaking, however, the CPU did reasonably well under Windows Vista with no extraordinary slow-down during normal use like browsing and word processing. The graphics score was rather disappointing, however, with only 682 points from the GMA950 chip. The SDD storage got 3,127 points from the benchmark. This is on par with any other system we’ve tested, but we were expecting better performance from the SSD drive. The PCMark05 test performs an average of various scenarios. In our daily use however, the low random-access time of the SSD resulted in rather responsive performance during bootup and navigating around Windows. Accessing many fragments of system files across the disk will not slow down the SSD.