Next up, we ran our test systems through Futuremark’s previous generation total-system performance evaluation tool, PCMark Vantage. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. Since we have a large database of scores for this test, we felt it would be good to give you additional reference points to compare to.
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| PCMark Vantage |
| General Application Performance |
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We really didn't expect to see this sort of variance but it appears the Dell XPS 13 is getting off the starting block with a bang. Though technically the Asus Zenbook's processor is faster, since PCMark Vantage is especially storage subsystem sensitive, it appears Dell's edge here could have come from the slightly better
random IO throughput we've seen from Samsung SSDs previously. This is roughly a 15% advantage for the XPS 13 here, versus our fastest ultrabook score we've recorded thus far in this test.
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| PCMark 7 |
| General Application and Multimedia Performance |
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Futuremark's PCMark 7 is the latest version of the PCMark suite, recently released this spring. It has updated application performance measurements targeted for a Windows 7 environment. It combines 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, Web browsing, and gaming.
Here the XPS 13 once again takes the top rung in the more up-to-date version of the PCMark test suite. This tends to employ a bit more CPU and graphics/multimedia intensive workloads on the machines and as such, the delta is smaller. Regardless, it's clear to see thus far, that the Dell XPS 13 is the fastest ultrabook we've tested to date.
