Acer Aspire S7-393 Review (2015): Refreshed With Intel's Broadwell

Name: Acer Aspire S7-393 Review (2015)
Brand: Acer

by David Murphy — Tuesday, July 28, 2015, 11:53 AM EDT

Benchmarks: SANDRA and Sunspider

We began testing Acer's S7-393 with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2015 the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2014 suite (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Physical Disks and Memory Bandwidth).

SiSoft SANDRA 2015

System Level Synthetic Benchmark Testing

SANDRA CPU, Multimedia

Memory and Physical Disk Tests

The laptop's Intel i7-5500U processor (a dual-core Broadwell chip, of course) performed well on the Arithmetic and Multi-Media tests. It was only really bested by quad-core Core i7 chips on SANDRA's graphs. We'd expect that it would also be topped by the slightly speedier dual-core processors in the mobile Broadwell line as well. The laptop's memory performance was among the best on SANDRA's charts. Its storage performance—thanks to the laptop's RAID array of two 120GB SSDs—clocked in at an eye-opening 905MB/s for reads.

SunSpider

Javascript Processing Test (CPU)

The Webkit Open Source Project suggest the following about the SunSpider Javascript benchmark...

Unlike many widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is:

Real World - This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples.

Balanced - This test is balanced between different areas of the language and different types of code. It's not all math, all string processing, or all timing simple loops. In addition to having tests in many categories, the individual tests were balanced to take similar amounts of time on currently shipping versions of popular browsers.

Statistically Sound - One of the challenges of benchmarking is knowing how much noise you have in your measurements. This benchmark runs each test multiple times and determines an error range (technically, a 95% confidence interval).

In SunSpider, Acer's S7-393 wasn't the best of the ultralight machines we've tested, but it was certainly up there. As we somewhat expected, systems with higher clock speeds tended to beat Acer's laptop (and it's "mere" 2.4GHz chip).