Results: Sandra And TouchXPRT
Naturally, a low-voltage dual-core chip isn't going to stand a chance against a faster quad-core processor in a synthetic measure of CPU performance like SiSoftware’s Sandra Arithmetic module. Lenovo isn’t just shooting for a lower price on this one, though. It's also trying to equip you with usable battery life for those times when you want to pick the IdeaCentre Horizon up and lay it down on the coffee table in your living room. The Dell system doesn’t even have a battery.
The IdeaCentre Horizon enjoys a win in Sandra's Memory Bandwidth sub-test thanks to its use of DDR3-1600. Curiously, although we found DDR3-1600 in Dell's XPS 2710 as well, the company had it configured to run at 1333 MT/s.
This is the first review where we've used TouchXPRT, a home media benchmark that synthesizes a touch-oriented workload. It doesn’t actually require that you have fingers in order to run.
Of course, Dell's XPS 2710 wasn’t around by the time we rolled this metric into our all-in-one test suite. You'll see it applied to other systems moving forward though, giving us a larger library of comparison data.