Lenovo ThinkPad T410s with NVIDIA Optimus Review


PCMark & 3DMark Testing


As we normally do, we kicked off our gauntlet of benchmarks with Futuremark's unforgiving PCMark Vantage benchmark and the less stringent 3DMark06 suite. At some point we'll likely drop the latter, but in the meantime, it gives us a quick point of reference as to how the T410s stacks up against previous notebooks we've had in our labs.

The notebook's 1440 x 900 native resolution did not meet the minimum required by 3DMark Vantage. So we connected an external monitor to run the DX10 benchmark in order to get some performance numbers.

Futuremark PCMark Vantage
Total System Performance


PCMark Vantage

Futuremark's PCMark Vantage simulates a range of real-world scenarios and workloads, stressing various system subsets in the process. Everything you'd want to do with your PC -- watching HD movies, music compression, image editing, gaming, and so forth -- is represented here, and most of the tests are multi-threaded, making this a good indicator of all-around performance.



 

The T410s jumped ahead of the competition in this benchmark. The wide performance gap is largely due to the 128GB SSD found on the Lenovo notebook, but the 2.66GHz Core i5 processor is definitely pulling its weight as well.


Futuremark 3DMark06
Synthetic Gaming Performance


3DMark06

The Futuremark 3DMark06 CPU benchmark consists of tests that use the CPU to render 3D scenes, rather than the GPU. It runs several threads simultaneously and is designed to utilize multiple processor cores.

In 3DMark06, the T410s scored 3755 3DMarks, and a CPU score of 3069. That was enough to edge out both the Asus U43F (Core i5 450M 2.4GHz) and Dell XPS 14 (Core i5 460M 2.53GHz). 

 

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
Synthetic DX10 Performance


3DMark Vantage

Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage, is specifically bound to Windows Vista-based systems because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark Vantage isn't simply a port of 3DMark06 to DirectX 10 though.  With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, in addition to support for the latest PC hardware.



With a score of P1121 3DMarks, the T410s has nothing to brag about. Of course, this is a business class notebook so we don't expect mind blowing gaming numbers. On the next page, let's see how well the T410s handles real gaming titles. 


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