Dell Latitude 12 Rugged Extreme Notebook Review: Rough And Tumble Mobile Computing
It's obvious the Latitude 12 Rugged is a physically strong machine, but what about performance? We'll start our benchmarking with SiSoftware SANDRA, or the System Analyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Our testing consists of four of SANDRA's built in subsystem benchmarks: Processor Arithmetic, Processor Multimedia, Physical Disks, and Memory Bandwidth. Then we'll run ATTO, a low level disk throughput benchmark, followed by SunSpider to evaluate JavaScript performance on the web.
Sandra CPU Arithmetic and Multimedia
Sandra Memory and Storage Bandwidth
Dell's Latitude 12 Rugged hasn't made the leap to Kaby Lake just yet, but that doesn't really have an adverse effect on performance. The Core i7-6600U put up numbers in line with other systems that use the same processor while the 16GB of DDR4-2133 RAM offers nearly 27GB/s of memory bandwidth. SANDRA rates the read speed of the SanDisk X400 SSD at a little above 508MB/s.
ATTO Disk Benchmark Read/Write Results
We like to supplement SANDRA with ATTO to zero in on the storage drive, which in the past has been a bottleneck on some systems. Things have improved drastically since SSDs swept in and starting replacing HDDs. In this case, the SanDisx X400 M.2 is one of the newer SSDs that is similar in shape and size to a gum stick, though it still taps into the SATA bus rather than hitching a ride through PCI Express. The good news is that this drive is about as fast as it gets in SATA 6Gbps territory—ATTO recorded top read and write speeds of nearly 548MB/s and 506MB/s, respectively.
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The Latitude 12 Rugged climbed its way to the top section by scoring in the low 80s (ms). It trails behind a few Kaby Lake systems, though not by much—less than 14ms separates the this laptop from the top spot, versus more than 45ms between it and the last place finisher.
