Dell's XPS 15z Ultra Slim Notebook Review

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

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SiSoftware Sandra and Cinebench Benchmarks

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2011

Synthetic Benchmarks

We continued our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2011, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disks). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speeds of 2.7GHz with 8GB of DDR3 RAM running in dual-channel mode.

Processor Arithmetic

Multi-Media

Memory Bandwidth

Physical Disks

SiSoft Sandra didn't reveal anything surprising; the XPS 15z posted strong scores in all categories, though obviously the lack of an SSD holds the system back in the Physical Disks benchmark.

Cinebench R11.5 64bit

Content Creation Performance

Maxon's Cinebench R11.5 benchmark is based on Maxon's Cinema 4D software used for 3D content creation chores and tests both the CPU and GPU in separate benchmark runs. On the CPU side, Cinebench renders a photorealistic 3D scene by tapping into up to 64 processing threads (CPU) to process more than 300,000 total polygons, while the GPU benchmark measures graphics performance by manipulating nearly 1 million polygons and huge amounts of textures.

Here's where we start to see some chinks in the armor. While the innards are impressive for medium-duty gaming and conventional chores, it's clear that the XPS 15z isn't cut out for mass computational work. Or, it can cut it, but it'll cut far slower than dedicated gaming or workstation rigs.