We kicked off benchmarking with SiSoftware SANDRA 2012, PCMark 7, and Cinebench, which provide a look at how the system’s individual components perform as well as how the ultrabook as a whole handles everyday work and multimedia tasks. We compared the Dell Latitude 6430u's scores to similar systems we have tested recently, keeping in mind each system is likely to have different software and low level hardware configurations. We test each system we review in the condition it arrives in from the manufacturer, though we disable security software and sleep settings so they won’t affect the benchmarks.
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| SiSoft SANDRA |
| Synthetic benchmarks: CPU, RAM, and Storage |
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SiSoft SANDRA 2012 lets us take a look at the way particular components perform. We ran benchmarks that test the system’s processing power, memory, and storage performance. SANDRA 2012 is the latest version of this benchmark and it is compatible with Windows 8. Each SANDRA benchmark compares the system being tested to comparable systems.
We see in the SiSoft SANDRA tests that the Dell Latitude 6430u bests the field in Processor Arithmetic--albeit by a narrow margin--and it slides into second place in the Multimedia test, behind only the ASUS Zenbook UX32VD, which boasts a burlier Core i7 (Ivy Bridge) processor to the 6430u’s Core i5.
Among the ultrabooks we’ve tested, the Latitude 6430u stands out with its speedy SSD, which delivered a score of 501.42 in the Physical Disks test. That’s good among the systems we have data on for a narrow second, behind only the Dell XPS 13’s 503.08. Our 6430u also takes the cake with a memory score 20.44, thanks to its 8GB of DDR3-1600MHz SDRAM.
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| PCMark 7 |
| General Application and Multimedia Performance |
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Futuremark’s PCMark 7 is a well-known benchmark tool that runs the system through ordinary tasks, including word processing and multimedia playback and editing. Graphics and processor power figure prominently in this benchmark, but graphics power doesn’t play as big a role here as it does in another Futuremark benchmark, 3DMark (which is designed for testing the system’s gaming capabilities).
It’s not shocking that the Dell Latitude 6430u posted the top score in PCMark 7, although it’s a little surprising that it did so with so much authority. We’ll chalk this up to a nice combination of a solid Ivy Bridge chip that’s slightly better than most others in this lineup and satisfactory Intel HD 4000 graphics, plus a relatively fast SSD.
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| Cinebench R11.5 64-bit |
| 3D Rendering Performance on the CPU |
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Next, we ran Cinema 4D’s content creation benchmark, Cinebench. This benchmark generates a complex image in the CPU test. The GPU test includes a chase scene involving two cars. The CPU test is measured in points, while the GPU test results are the chase scene’s frames-per-second.
The CPU scores in this chart are clustered fairly closely together, ranging from 2.21 to 2.8, with most systems hitting between 2.31 and 2.59. Our Latitude 6430u tied for second with a score of 2.59, and it had the second-best OpenGL score, falling only to the ASUS Zenbook’s outlier score of 26.95.
