In the first two parts in this series, I assessed the condition of my refurbished HP ProBook 440 G8 Laptop and looked at its specifications.
In this third part in the series I’ll put the refurbished HP ProBook 440 G8 Laptop through some benchmarks. Most of the tests use the Phoronix Test Suite. Together with the ProBook, I’ve run the same benchmarks on two desktop machines with Intel 10th and 12th generation processors, as well as an Intel N100 mini PC. The N100 machine is much cheaper than all the machines. It’s included simply to put in perspective the performance improvement offered by the higher specification machines.
Each machine is tested with the same software and configured to ensure consistency between results. All power management functionality is disabled when running the benchmarks. Where available, I enabled Performance Mode in the Power Limit mode section in the BIOS. Every performance enhancing technique is used e.g. the performance governor is used for all tests, each machine was running with as few processes running as possible (e.g. no X11/Wayland is running except for the graphic benchmarks).
Let’s kick off with a variety of processor benchmarks.
The results from CPU Mark show that the laptop should perform significantly better than an N100 mini PC.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark smallpt
Smallpt is a C++ global illumination renderer written in less than 100 lines of code. Global illumination is done via unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing and there is multi-threading support via the OpenMP library. A lower time indicates better performance. As this benchmark uses all cores, a CPU with many cores complete the test considerably quicker.
The result for the HP ProBook is roughly what I expected given that this test uses all cores and the two desktop machines have 6 cores (12 threads) whereas the HP ProBook only has 4 cores (8 threads). The ProBook comfortably beats the N100 roughly by the margin expected given the CPU Mark of each processor.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark openssl
OpenSSL is an open-source toolkit that implements SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocols. This test profile makes use of the built-in “openssl speed” benchmarking capabilities.
There are many different algorithms available for this benchmark. I’ve tested with the RSA4096 algorithm, as it’s representative for the others. There are two charts for this benchmark, one for the sign/s and one for the verify/s.
The HP ProBook performs compartively better on the sign/s benchmarks compared to verify/s.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark crafty
Crafty is a chess program directly derived from Cray Blitz, winner of the 1983 and 1986 World Computer Chess Championships.
This is a benchmark looking at the CPU’s performance through a chess benchmark. This benchmark only uses a single core.
When using desktop apps, one should never underestimate the importance of single thread performance. Many desktop tasks don’t use lots of cores, so having lots of cores may not actually improve performance. The ProBook does very well on this test actually beating the 10th generation desktop processor.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Processor
Page 2 – Graphics
Page 3 – Memory
Page 4 – Disk and WiFi
Complete list of articles in this series:
| HP ProBook 440 G8 Laptop | |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Condition of the refurbished laptop |
| Specifications | Let's interrogate the laptop specifications |