Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch: Affordable, Touch-Enabled

Name: Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch: Affordable, Touch-Enabled Windows 8 Notebook
Brand: Lenovo

by Joshua Gulick — Monday, April 15, 2013, 12:00 PM EDT

Next, we fired up some benchmarks by Futuremark. The company, which is based just outside of Helsinki, Finland, started publishing benchmarks in 1998. Since then, Futuremark has developed benchmarks for testing standard PCs and mobile devices and continues to update its flagship 3DMark gaming benchmark suite.

Futuremark PCMark 7

Simulated Application Performance

Futuremark’s PCMark 7 benchmark includes a suite of tests designed to measure the way your computer would perform during typical tasks. It includes an Entertainment Suite, which offers gaming scenarios and tests its media playback capabilities. The benchmark also has a Creativity Suite, in which the system processes images and video. Other tools include the Computation Suite and the Storage Suite. The latter is capable of measure SSDs and hard drives, either individually, or as a whole.

PCMark 7 produces an overall score and scores for the individual test suites. We use the overall PCMark score for comparison purposes, and that score puts the Z400 Touch around the lower middle of our pack of recently tested systems. Not bad, considering it outscored a system with a Core i7 processor.

Futuremark 3DMark 11

Simulated Gaming Performance

As a gaming benchmark, 3DMark 11 puts extra emphasis on your system’s handling of DirectX 11. But it measures more than the graphics card’s performance (the processor can make a big difference to a score, for example) and is a good way to get a feel for a system both as a gaming PC and as a general-use computer. Futuremark recently updated 3DMark 11 to support Windows 8, so if you plan to run this test on your own Windows 8 system, be sure to get the latest update.

The Z400 Touch really didn’t hold its own, here. The Intel HD 4000 graphics appeared in several systems that provided better benchmark scores. The Z400 Touch's processor, memory, and software / driver configuration all contribute to its somewhat lower score here.

Tags: Lenovo, IdeaPad, laptop, Core i5, touch, Ivy Bridge, Intel HD 4000, z400

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.