System76 Serval Professional Notebook

Moving to more comparable tests, the timed PHP compilation was very close between the System76 Serval Professional and ThinkPad T61. While the Serval Professional packs twice the amount of memory and a blazing-fast Intel SSD, the ThinkPad T61 has the Penryn-based Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 that moves it forward in the computational tests. The Lenovo notebook was six seconds faster at compiling PHP 5.2.5.

There was only a one second difference in the compilation time for Apache, but the lead was in favor of the ThinkPad T61.

The time to compress a 2GB file using Gzip was roughly the same across the two tested notebooks (albeit it was in favor of the ThinkPad T61), even though the Lenovo ThinkPad was using a 5400RPM SATA 2.0 HDD instead of a SATA 2.0 SSD.