Lenovo LaVie Z And LaVie Z 360 Reviews: Taking Thin And Light To A Whole New Level

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2014 -- the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2014 suite (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Physical Disks and Memory Bandwidth).

SiSoft SANDRA 2014 System Level Synthetic Benchmark Testing

SANDRA CPU, Multimedia and Arithmetic

Memory and Physical Disk Tests

Intel’s Core i7-5500U has performed well in the past on SANDRA tests, and it handled the gauntlet with poise here as well. The included Samsung 256GB SSD saw bandwidth north of 500MB/sec, with access times in the 0.01ms range. 

SunSpider JavaScript Processing Test (CPU)

The Webkit Open Source Project suggests the following about the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark:

Unlike many widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is:

Real World - This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples.

Balanced - This test is balanced between different areas of the language and different types of code. It's not all math, all string processing, or all timing simple loops. In addition to having tests in many categories, the individual tests were balanced to take similar amounts of time on currently shipping versions of popular browsers.

Statistically Sound - One of the challenges of benchmarking is knowing how much noise you have in your measurements. This benchmark runs each test multiple times and determines an error range (technically, a 95% confidence interval).

No surprise here -- the LaVie Z scorched the SunSpider test, ranking just a millisecond behind the Inspiron 7000 SE which ships with nearly identical innards. For those curious, this score was achieved with Internet Explorer. True to form, Google's Chrome browser saw a result nearly twice as big, though we still found browsing with Chrome to be delightfully fast in practice.