Lenovo ThinkPad W550s Ultrabook Mobile Workstation Review

Name: Lenovo ThinkPad W550s
Brand: Lenovo

by Joshua Gulick — Wednesday, July 15, 2015, 12:05 PM EDT

Whereas Futuremark’s venerable PCMark benchmarks weigh lightly on our assessment of a gaming notebook, they’re important to assessing the performance of other laptops – particularly business class systems. Both benchmarks run the computer through typical office and entertainment tasks.

Futuremark PCMark 7

Simulated Application Performance

PCMark 7 provides an overall score, which makes for an easy comparison. We use PCMark 8 to break a system’s performance down by certain categories of tasks.

The ThinkPad W550s handled itself well in PCMark 7, taking 2nd place in our comparison pool. The processor (and storage configuration) can have a large impact on PCMark 7 and that probably explains why the W550s doesn’t take the top spot. Even so, it’s clearly a powerful system.

Futuremark PCMark 8

Simulated Application Performance

We selected three tests from PCMark 8. The Home test is just as it sounds: a collection of everyday tasks, including web browsing and chatting. The Work test is more demanding and has business-oriented tests, while the Storage test gives you a close-up look at what your SSD or hard drive can do.

The W550s really shines in the PCMark 8 tests, putting up Home and Work scores higher than the Dell Precision. On the storage front, the two systems have nearly identical performance, though the W550s we tested offers more storage space as configured.

Tags: Nvidia, Intel, core i7, Lenovo, ThinkPad, Quadro

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.