Samsung Galaxy Book 12 Review: OLED Display Meets S Pen And Portability

Name: Samsung Galaxy Book 12
Brand: Samsung

by Dave Altavilla — Tuesday, May 23, 2017, 09:10 AM EDT

Galaxy Book 12 Benchmarks: Storage, SunSpider And PCMark

Page 3: Galaxy Book 12 Benchmarks: Storage, SunSpider And PCMark

To get a sense of how the storage subsystem of the Samsung Galaxy Book 12 performed, we fired up a quick sanity check with ATTO. Here we'll see peak sequential throughput of the Samsung SSD on board the device, in both read and write workloads of small to larger sized file transfers.

For an M.2 SATA SSD, performance looks top-shelf with the Samsung drive on board the Galaxy Book 12. Right at about the 16K file size we hit the limit of the SATA interface for throughput. It would have been nice to see an NVMe SSD in the build here, which would have offered much higher-end peak throughput, but that would have added more cost. Regardless, these numbers are more than adequate for the average mainstream user.

We then kicked off our general purpose benchmarks with SunSpider, a JavaScript benchmark, and then ran PCMark 8, which will give us a comprehensive look at the Galaxy Book 12's capabilities relative to standard office productivity and home media tasks.

SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark

JavaScript Performance Testing

We should note that SunSpider is more of a platform test, in that different browser versions, associated with different OS types, can and do affect scores. However, among the Windows 10-powered machines here, all things are relatively equal and Microsoft Edge is our browser of choice, since it is installed by default on all machines listed here.

Samsung's Galaxy Book 12 scores in the upper quadrant here, even versus the likes of higher-performance ultrabooks. Intel Kaby Lake Speed Shift optimizations and Microsoft's Edge browser tend to score well in this test, regardless of device class.

PCMark 8 Benchmarks

Productivity And System-Level Benchmarking

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 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 GPU engines to accelerate some aspects of processing.

Here the Samsung Galaxy Book 12 is a bit more middle-of-the-pack but clearly still very competitive, especially versus some of the previous gen laptops. This test is slightly more storage sensitive than most so perhaps that's where the Galaxy Book 12 lags a little, but clearly not by much. For what is essentially a tablet device, you're getting full laptop-like performance in these mainstream types of workloads.