Lenovo ThinkPad W550s Ultrabook Mobile Workstation Review

Cinebench and SiSoft SANDRA are benchmark staples that provide good performance comparisons among systems with similar processors and graphics cards. For all benchmarks, we make only minimal changes to the system before testing. If a manufacturer bogs down its system with bloatware, that will weigh it down in testing. In the case of the W500s, we don’t expect preinstalled software to be a problem.

Cinebench R11.5 64-bit Content Creation Performance

Based on Maxon Cinema 4D software, this test uses a 3D scene and polygon and texture manipulation to assess GPU and CPU performance. We usually opt for the Main Processor Performance (CPU) test, which builds a still scene containing about 2,000 objects, for total polygon count above 300,000. Cinebench displays its results in points.


For comparison, we included mobile workstations and some entertainment and gaming notebooks. The consumer systems understandably can’t keep up with the W550s and its competition in certain tasks, including content creation. The W550s scored well in the OpenGL test, but the dual-core processor was up against quad-core CPUs in the other mobile workstations, with predictable results.

SiSoft SANDRA Synthetic General Performance Metrics

We put the ThinkPad W550s through SiSOFT SANDRA’s CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Physical Disk tests to look for weak spots in the notebook’s hardware configuration.


The notebook’s scores in SiSoft SANDRA don’t throw up any red flags. The W550s lags behind the Dell Precision M3800 in the Arithmetic test (45GOPS to the Precision’s 85.51GOPS), but that’s to be expected, considering the difference in processors.