Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga 3rd Gen Review (2018): Full-Featured Convertible
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 3: Storage, Productivity And Content Creation Tests
To start things off and get a sense of how the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga's storage components perform, we fired-up ATTO for a quick sanity check on sequential disk transfer speeds across various file sizes with both read and write workloads.
ATTO Disk Benchmark, Testing NVMe Solid State Storage
The Samsung SSD included in the ThinkPad X1 Yoga offers outstanding performance in our testing. Throughout the various queue depths the performance stayed very consistent. With there only being a small dip in throughput at 1MB. The performance of the X1 Yoga was much better than that of the Dell Latitude 7390, we recently tested, which sports a HK hynix SSD.
Geekbench, Cinebench
We kicked off our general-purpose benchmarks with a cross-platform CPU compute benchmark called Geekbench, and then ran Cinebench R15, a 3D rendering benchmark that tests both the CPU and GPU engines in the processor. Cinebench is developed by Maxon, which is better known for its Cinema 4D software employed in professional 3D rendering and animation studios. We use both of Cinebench’s integrated tests for CPU and GPU.
The results in Geekbench put the ThinkPad X1 Yoga slightly behind the other ultrabooks we have tested with similar specs. We found similar results in Cinebench as well, which was due to a bit of thermal throttling. We had to test both these benchmarks multiple times to get results to line up because CPU temps would rise and clockspeeds would drop to between 2.3GHz and 2.6GHz, well below the config's 3.2GHz maximum boost clock.
Cinebench stressed the CPU harder than any other benchmark we ran during out testing. This resulted in OpenGL scores as low as 32FPS, and a CPU score of around 490. After we let the X1 Yoga cool for a bit, however, resulting scores started to improve. Again, as we saw when testing Geekbench, CPU temps were in the 90s and the CPU throttled with clocks hovering in the low to mid 2GHz range.
PCMark 10 Benchmarks
Next, we'll move from pure content creation in Cinebench, to productivity and mixed usage with PCMark. We're representing all tests from the PCMark 10 benchmark suite, including the Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation and and total PCMark score. The Essentials test covers workloads like web browsing, video conferencing and app start-up times, while Productivity tests everyday office apps from spreadsheets to word processing. Finally, Digital Content Creation tests performance of a machine with respect to photo and video editing, as well as rendering and visualization workloads.
We didn't experience the same thermal throttling while testing PCMark 10. Instead the results were very consistent with the other ultrabooks in this class of machines, that we have tested with Intel's Core i5-8250U processor. While it wasn't quite as fast as the Acer Swift 3, the X1 Yoga it performed right where you would expect it to, with its given hardware in the test configuration we received.
