Maingear Pulse 15 3K Gaming Laptop Review
Cinebench and SiSoft SANDRA
So, how did the Pulse 15 fare?
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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.
In CPU performance, the Pulse 15's Intel Core i7 4710HQ pulled ahead of the pack, though it's a close race among the top contenders. Turning our attention to OpenGL, the Pulse 15 finished the benchmark run at 61.24 frames per second, which is good enough to take fourth place -- that's exactly where we expected it be when looking at the GPUs of each configuration. What's really impressive about the Pulse 15's NVIDIA GeForce GTX 870M GPU is that it only trailed the Alienware's dual GTX 780 GPUs in SLI by a few frames per second.
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We continued 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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Here again we see the strength of the Core i7 4710HQ, a 22nm part based on Intel's Haswell architecture. It touts four physical cores, eight processing threads, 6MB of cache, and a 2.5GHz to 3.5GHz (Turbo) clockspeed. Put another way, it brings desktop-class performance to the mobile side of the fence.
Of equal interest, if not more so, is the ultra-high disk read score in Sandra's disk benchmark. With a pair of 128GB mSATA solid state drives in RAID 0, the Pulse 15 hovers just short of 1,000MB/s. While this is a synthetic benchmark, we observed lag-free performance in real world chores, as well. Booting into Windows 8.1 is blazing fast, and programs open up with minimal load times, depending on the application.
