Kobalt Comanche SLI

General Performance

To gauge general performance we use a range of different programs that run an automated set of processes and output several results in seconds.

We perform each test three times in order to get a good groundwork, then we average these times to try and get a figure which is the most fair and representative.

That said, we did have a few problems with Kobalt’s Comanche SLI laptop in that, since it uses a 64-Bit OS, our VirtualDub-based Xvid encoding test would not run at all. We did contemplate finding an alternative video encoding test, but without a reliable reference the results would be pointlessly limited.

Instead, the absence of a video encoding benchmark will have to remain as evidence that 64-Bit OS’ aren’t always the easiest systems to work with and can occasionally prove to be a little limiting. Regardless, on with the usual tests…

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 three megapixel photographs taken in a variety of surroundings using the batch file processing function in the Elements Editor.


We performed all of the auto fixes, including Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour and Sharpen before resizing the image to 640x480 and saving as a high quality JPEG.

The Kobalt Comanche laptop managed to complete this test in an average of 328 seconds, which is notably faster than recent competitors like the Rock Xtreme X770 and the Alienware Area 51 m15x, both of which took 355 seconds.

File Compression & Encryption

Our file compression and decompression tests were split into two halves to cover a broad spectrum of performance. The first test we ran was to compress and encrypt a MPEG-2 source file with the highest quality compression ratio. Secondly, we compressed and encrypted the folder of 400 photographs used in our Photoshop Elements test with the same compression settings.

In this test the Kobalt Comanche SLI appeared to do well, tackling the large video compression in just 120 seconds, which is notably faster than other laptops we’ve looked at recently – beating the Alienware laptop by margin of roughly 50 seconds.


In the small compression and encryption test the results are favourable again – no doubt a result of the well-endowed cache of the quad core CPU – and the Kobalt Comanche compressed and encrypted all the files in just 104 seconds, more than ten seconds faster than the nearest competitor.

File Decompression & Decryption

The two RAR archives created during the compression and encryption tests were then decompressed and decrypted. If you’re an online gamer or are often installing new games then this result will be especially important if you don’t want to spend too long unzipping all those patches.

The decompression and decryption of the files is the quickest test we do usually and once more the Comanche SLI stayed true to form and burned through the test at light-shattering speeds. The large decompression took only 14 seconds to completely process, again faster than the competition though this time only by around two seconds or so.

Decompressing the smaller file takes longer than the larger file, because there is a lot more work to do and in this instance the test took an average of 23 seconds. Again, faster than all the previous laptops we’ve looked at, though by increments so small it isn’t really noticeable.