Lenovo ThinkPad P70 Mobile Workstation Review: Xeon And Quadro On The Go
3DMark 11 and 3DMark Cloud Gate
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As a synthetic gaming benchmark, 3DMark 11 puts extra emphasis on your system’s handling of DirectX 11. However, 3DMark 11 measures more than just the graphics card’s performance; the processor and a system's memory bandwith also have an influence on the score. We like 3DMark 11, as it's a good way to get a feel for how well the system can handle gaming and general computing tasks.
Don't let the presence of professional graphics fool you into thinking the ThinkPad P70 is only good for crunching numbers and running scientific calculations, it's capable of generating gaming level graphics, too. That's obviously not its forte, but a Quadro M4000M with 4GB of GDDR5 memory is no slouch, as we see in 3DMark 11.
Before going any further, let's talk about the Quadro M4000M GPU for a moment. This is the third fastest Quadro part designed for 17.3-inch llaptops, with only the M5000M and M5500M offering more performance in a professional package. The Quadrom M4000M has 1,280 CUDA cores and a 265-bit memory bus. It's roughly on par with (and a little faster than) a GeForce GTX 970M, which also has 1,280 CUDA cores but a narrower 192-bit bus.
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3DMark Cloud Gate is a separate test from the main 3DMark suite, and it's aimed at entry-level PCs and laptops. It has two subtests: a processor-intensive physics test and two graphics tests. We ran the test suite at its default 1280 x 720 resolution and at default rendering quality settings.
We noticed something interesting when running 3DMark's Cloud Gate test. During the first run, the ThinkPad P70 posted a score above 16,000 points, which would have given it a first place finish. However, we throw away the first score and take the average of three subsequent runs, which came out to 13,452. That's below the Dell Precision 15 5510 and its weaker Quadrom M1000M graphics.
The same general score was seen no matter how many times we ran Cloud Gate thereafter. Our guess is that it's a combination of single channel RAM, and to a larger degree, different drivers.
