Dell XPS 13 Review: Kaby Lake Makes A Fantastic 13-Inch Laptop Even Better
We'll start here, in the same place as our previous XPS 13 review, with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2016, or the System Analyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Our testing consists of four of SANDRA's built in subsystem benchmarks: Processor Arithmetic, Processor Multimedia, Physical Disks, and Memory Bandwidth. Then we'll take a quick peek at ATTO, which is a low level disk throughput benchmark.
In SANDRA, as expected, we see Intel's Kaby Lake platform offering sizable gains versus previous generation Intel notebook processors in the CPU and multimedia tests, along with a healthy 21GB/sec+ of memory bandwidth. Also, SANDRA rates the Toshiba NVMe SSD on board our XP13 around 1.48GB/sec, though ATTO shows the drive topping out at 1.7GB/sec for reads and a oscillating average of about 1GB/sec for writes.
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The Webkit Open Source Project suggest the following about the SunSpider Javascript benchmark...
Unlike many widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is real-world with actual developer applications, balanced with different areas of the language and differnet code types and statistically sound, running each test multiple times to determine and average with error range and 95% confidence interval.
SunSpider shows us a tight grouping of scores, though something dialed in on the Asus ZenBook 3 enabled it to edge-out all challengers by up to 10%. Regardless, the Dell XPS 13 still scores well here. Let's move on to more strenuous testing, shall we?
