Dell Inspiron 13 7000 Special Edition 2-in-1 Review

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2014 -- 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 2014 System Level Synthetic Benchmark Testing

SANDRA CPU, Multimedia and Arithmetic

Memory and Physical Disk Tests

Intel’s Core i7-5500U performed well in the Processor Arithmetic test, outpacing a Core i5 though (unsurprisingly) behind an AMD A10 and Intel Core i7-2630QM. In the Multi-Media benchmark, it outpaced a Core i7-4510U as well as an i7-4600U. Memory bandwidth of the 8GB DDR3L-1600 RAM peaked at just over 9.9GB/s, while the Samsung PM851 256GB SSD put up good numbers in the range of 429MB/s range.

SunSpider JavaScript Processing Test (CPU)

The Webkit Open Source Project suggests 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).

The Inspiron 13 7000 SE ran neck-and-neck with Asus' latest 2-in-1 as well as Microsoft's Surface Pro 3 for the top spot in our SunSpider test. (Of note, this score was notched in Internet Explorer. We ran the same test in Google's Chrome browser and received a score of 277.7ms, nearly 3x as slow as IE. From desktop to mobile, Chrome continues to fair poorly in the SunSpider test, though real-world snappiness when browsing is good.)