Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition Review: Featherweight Elegance
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13: CPU, System, Gaming And Graphics Benchmarks
We've seen this CPU in numerous laptops over the past few months, where it delivers good overall performance. This ThinkPad feels very snappy in daily use, and it's well suited to most kinds of work. Intel did make some trade-offs for efficiency's sake with this family of processors, however, and does affect some of the benchmark scores, which we'll get into below.
Lunar Lake does have enough NPU oomph to score Microsoft's Copilot+ features. However, there aren't very many of those right now. Most of the interesting features Microsoft has pre-announced or teased, like the screen-scanning Recall, are still under development. You do get a few AI-powered extras like video effects and live captions, but Lenovo didn't go out of its way to push specific AI features on this enterprise laptop.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
Now, let's get to those benchmarks. We'll start off with ATTO, a quick and dirty test that measures read/write bandwidth and IOPS across a range of different data transfer sizes. While we don't typically compare these results across multiple machines, it's useful to gauge whether a particular notebook's storage subsystem is up to snuff.
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition we tested has a 512GB PCIe Gen 5 SSD. Some models will include more storage, but the performance should be about the same. The ThinkPad X1 hits a maximum read of 10.67GB/s and maximum write of 6.47GB/s. That makes this one of the fastest laptop storage subsystems we've tested for this class of machine.
Speedometer 3.0 Browser Benchmark
We use BrowserBench.org's Speedometer test to take a holistic look at web application performance. This test automatically loads and runs a variety of sample web apps using the most popular web development frameworks around, including React, Angular, Ember.js, and even simple JavaScript. This test is an example of how systems cope with real-world, modern web apps. All tests were performed using the latest version of Chrome.
There's not much of a spread among Speedometer scores on modern hardware these days. Here, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 reaches a score of 26.6, which is par for Lunar Lake systems. Apple silicon and the latest Core Ultra 9 chips can reliably hit higher numbers, but there's no discernible difference in day-to-day web usage.
MAXON Cinebench 2024 3D Rendering Benchmark
Next up is the latest-generation 3D rendering benchmark from Maxon, based on the Cinema 4D rendering engine. It's a purely CPU-based test that doesn't make use of the graphics processor or NPU, and it scales very well with additional CPU cores. We ran both single- and multi-threaded tests on all of the machines in the charts.
Cinebench benefits greatly from more CPU resources, so Intel's Lunar Lake chips are at a disadvantage in terms of multithreaded throughput. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 scores around the same as other Lunar Lake PCs, but significantly behind the latest from AMD and Qualcomm when it comes to the MT test. Its single-thread score is the highest in our database however, which results in the snappy responsiveness we've seen from this machine.
Geekbench 6 CPU Performance Benchmark
Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real-world workloads in a wide variety of tasks, including encryption, image processing, physical simulation, machine learning, and many more. We tested the systems featured here with the latest Geekbench 6 version to get an idea of their overall system performance.
Again, the lack of core resources (Core Ultra 7 258V is an 4 P-Core and 4 E-Core chip) impacts the ThinkPad's score. All the Core Ultra Series 2 chips we've tested are in the same performance corridor in Geekbench, however, with AMD and Qualcomm-based laptops slightly beyond that.
UL PCMark 10 Applications Benchmark
The PCMark 10 Applications benchmark measures performance in the Microsoft Office suite, as well as in the Edge browser, offering native instruction set-compatible versions of the apps for optimal performance across a wide variety of workloads in tools office workers, students and home users utilize every day. The following results should show a view of performance with a best foot forward from all systems tested.
PCMark is a more holistic test that doesn't rise and fall solely based on thread count. So, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 is much more competitive here. With an overall score of 14096, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 is running even with most other recent machines we've tested. Only the Core Ultra 9 and Ryzen 9-based laptops are out in front, and not by much.
UL Procyon AI Computer Vision Benchmark
The idea of "edge AI", or running AI workloads natively on your local devices, instead of in the cloud, is only just emerging on mainstream PCs. As such, benchmarks for these workloads aren't exactly prolific. Fortunately, UL has already built a few into its Procyon benchmark suite. The following is a look at how a few machines do in this benchmark suite's AI Computer Vision benchmark, which exercises the test subject's ability to handle machine vision workloads, which you'll find in everyday tasks like webcam background blur, subject tracking, eye gaze correction and other effects, for example.
The more powerful NPU in Lunar Lake chips puts up higher scores in this test, compared to last-gen Intel CPUs, which weren't even fast enough for Microsoft's Copilot+ certification. At 1,134 in Procyon, the ThinkPad is ready for the AI-assisted future.
UL 3DMark Gaming Benchmarks
3DMark has a wide variety of graphics and gaming related tests available. In this next test, we chose to run 3DMark Night Raid, a modern DirectX 12 test specifically for mobile platforms with integrated graphics, as well as the more-demanding, cross-platform Wild Life Extreme benchmark which utilizes more modern rendering APIs.
Intel's latest Arc iGPUs on board the Core Ultra 7 258V are stellar, putting up numbers far beyond what you'll get with Qualcomm Adreno, and even slipping past AMD Radeon iGPUs on occasion. In the Night Raid test, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 manages one of the highest scores we've seen for an iGPU, running just behind the Core Ultra 9 Arrow Lake H-based machine.
As in Night Raid, the Wild Life test shows a big win for the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which is almost as fast as the Core Ultra 9 in the Arrow Lake-H powered MSI Prestige 16 AI EVO. Although, it's worth noting the Prestige is a much cheaper machine, with an MSRP of $1,399.
F1 22 Formula 1 Racing Game Benchmark
Racing simulator F1 2022 is a DirectX 12 game title that is surprisingly sensitive to certain system configurations, so we enjoy using it as a test because it can really tease out some performance characteristics. We tested the game in its High graphics preset, with upscaling disabled, and at 1080p resolution.
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 scores well enough in this benchmark, landing in the middle of the pack for Lunar Lake machines. The Core Ultra 9 remains at the top of the pile, but the ThinkPad with its Core Ultra 7 258V still chalks up almost 60 fps in this is impressive PC game, especially for a business laptop.
Gears Tactics Strategy Game Benchmark
Gears Tactics, released in 2020, still makes an excellent benchmark for integrated graphics. It's a tightly-optimized Unreal Engine title with a highly-configurable built-in benchmark that provides a wealth of performance data after each run. We tested it on High, Medium, and Low presets at 1920×1080 resolution.
Gears Tactics is CPU-bound at Low and Medium settings in this benchmark, giving the ThinkPad a chance to catch up to the MSI Prestige with its Core Ultra 9 CPU. The game's High quality setting gives the iGPU more impact on the score, which allows the Ultra 9 to pull slightly ahead. No matter how you slice it, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 has one of the best integrated graphics engines you can get right now.
