Dell's XPS 15z Ultra Slim Notebook Review

by Ray Willington — Monday, June 20, 2011, 12:00 AM EDT

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Futuremark 3DMark 06 / 11 and PCMark Vantage

To start things off, we fired up Futuremark's system performance benchmark, PCMark Vantage. This synthetic benchmark suite simulates a range of real-world scenarios and workloads, stressing various system subsets in the process. Everything you'd want to do with your PC -- watching HD movies, music compression, image editing, gaming, and so forth -- is represented here, and most of the tests are multi-threaded, making this a good indicator of all-around performance.

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

Simulated Application Performance

Given that this isn't a true, qualified gaming notebook per se, it's nice to see it matching up with HP's EliteBook 8560p, which is yet another half business-half pleasure machine. It also surpasses a few other Core i7 machines in this class, while looking loads better than all of them. The full Vantage score is below.

3DMark06

Details: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark06/

The Futuremark 3DMark06 CPU benchmark consists of tests that use the CPU to render 3D scenes, rather than the GPU. It runs several threads simultaneously and is designed to utilize multiple processor cores.

The second-generation of Core i processors are strong performers, as shown here. The Core i7 within this machine smoked during the CPU testing, and the other 3DMark 06 aspects...well, it didn't do too poorly on those, either. The full score is below.

Futuremark 3DMark11

Synthetic DirectX Gaming

Futuremark 3DMark11

The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark11, is specifically bound to Windows Vista and 7-based systems because it uses the advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 11, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark11 isn't simply a port of 3DMark Vantage to DirectX 11, though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated four new graphics tests, a physics tests, and a new combined test. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark11's Extreme preset option, which uses a resolution of 1920x1080 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

3DMark 11 is still a new benchmark, and we're still building up our database of machines that we've ran through this test. These three were set on the "Performance" setting, just to give you a vague idea of comparisons. The full score is below.