We started our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, File System).
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| 3D Rendering Content Creation Performance |
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CPU and Multimedia Tests
Memory Bandwidth and Physical Disk Tests
There weren't many surprises here as the new X1 Carbon's CPU and Multimedia scores fall in line with performance expectations for Intel's dual-core Broadwell architecture. However, notable early indicators here in the Memory Bandwidth test (19.8GB/s) and Physical Disk test (531MB/s) show a robust dual-channel memory subsystem and solid state storage (a Samsung mSATA SSD), though it's not as fast as some of the PCIe SSD configs we've seen in recent ultrabook builds like the
HP Spectre 360. To be fair the X1 Carbon's drive is also a self-encrypting model as well, which is a feature that might be more important that flat out performance, for many.
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Cinebench R11.5
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3D Rendering Content Creation Performance | |
Cinebench R11.5 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.
Here the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon took the third spot amongst our current stable of ultrabooks based on Intel Broadwell CPUs in the OpenGL portion of the test. What's interesting is that it couldn't quite catch the Dell and HP machines, though it technically sports as slightly faster Core i5-5300U CPU. We test things "out of the box" here, though we do always check for the latest Windows patches and driver updates first. Regardless, the X1 Carbon does offer solid performance and handily beats out last year's model, as you can see.
