Dell XPS 15 (9550) Review: Pushing The Infinity Edge (Updated)
Dell XPS 15 PCMark 8 And Cinebench Benchmarks
PCMark 8 v2 is the latest version in Futuremark’s series of popular PC benchmarking tools. It is designed to test the performance of all types of systems, from tablets to desktops. PCMark 8 offers five separate benchmark tests--plus battery life testing for mobile platforms—to help consumers find the devices that offer the right combination of efficiency and performance for their particular use case.
This latest version of the suite improves the Home and Work benchmarks with new tests using popular open source applications for image processing, video editing and spreadsheets. These are trace-based tests and a wide variety of workloads have also been added to the Work benchmark to better reflect the way PCs are used in enterprise environments.
We tested three of the benchmark modules: Home, Work and Storage...
Here we see that storage anomaly again for the XPS 15, but it's very little variance in performance at less than 5% overall. Other than that, the XPS 15 posts strong scores besting most of the light notebooks we've tested here. This suite of tests is rather disk sensitive though, so there's likely more headroom available in performance as Dell continues to optimize their NVMe solution.
Cinebench R11.5 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of processor resources and is an excellent gauge of computational throughput.
This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral "No Keyframes" animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.
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This latest version of the suite improves the Home and Work benchmarks with new tests using popular open source applications for image processing, video editing and spreadsheets. These are trace-based tests and a wide variety of workloads have also been added to the Work benchmark to better reflect the way PCs are used in enterprise environments.
We tested three of the benchmark modules: Home, Work and Storage...
Here we see that storage anomaly again for the XPS 15, but it's very little variance in performance at less than 5% overall. Other than that, the XPS 15 posts strong scores besting most of the light notebooks we've tested here. This suite of tests is rather disk sensitive though, so there's likely more headroom available in performance as Dell continues to optimize their NVMe solution.
Cinebench R11.5 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of processor resources and is an excellent gauge of computational throughput.
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Now we see Dell's new XPS 15 really stretch its legs. The multi-threaded CPU test here shows that the new Core i7-6700HQ quad-core mobile CPU is over twice as fast as the fastest ultrabook score we've recorded to date. To be fair, all of the other machines in this graph are running dual-core processors, including the Yoga 900. We'll be comparing the XPS 15 to beefier setups shortly, but you'll also notice the XPS 15's discrete GeForce GTX 960M GPU powers it past our best score in the OpenGL test by almost 2X as well.
