To get a sense of how the 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. The Samsung
SSD that Lenovo employed for the machine ended up offering impressive results, as we've seen in other recent versions of the
ThinkPad X1 line-up.
ATTO Disk Benchmark, Testing NVMe Solid State Storage
You have to love NVMe's ubiquity at the moment, especially when it comes to mobile architectures. We've seen this level of bandwidth and throughput on the desktop for a while but in a laptop? In a nutshell, with up to 1TB of this kind of blazing-fast storage at your disposal (depending on how you config the machine), whatever you'd expect in terms of disk IO from a laptop, is handled without breaking a sweat on this machine.
Sun Spider And Cinebench
We kicked off our general purpose benchmarks with SunSpider, a JavaScript benchmark, and then ran Cinebench, a test that works both CPU and GPU engines of the processor in the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2. Cinebench is developed by Maxon, which is better known for its Cinema 4D software employed in professional 3D rendering and animation. We use both of Cinebench’s integrated tests for CPU and GPU.
In our SunSpider test, the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2 takes the top spot for any ultrabook we've tested to date, likely a result of its higher clock speed Core i7 chip. In Cinebench, the machine puts up strong scores as well, in the top quadrant with Dell, Asus, and other ultrabooks based on similar 7th Gen Core processors.
PCMark 8 Benchmarks
We selected three tests from the PCMark 8 benchmark suite: Home, Storage and Work. Futuremark recently improved all three tests with PCMark 8 version 2 that offers a nice swath of mixed-media workloads, from document editing, to video conferencing and video editing. We selected the Open CL "Accelerated" options for both the Home and Work modules, which let's the benchmark take advantage of current generation integrate CPU/GPU engines to accelerate some aspects of processing.
With its snappy PCIe SSD, and bursty-fast Core i7-7600U dual-core chip that Turbos up to 3.9GHz, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2 scores the best PCMark numbers we've seen from a similar weight-class ultrabook yet.