Benchmark Results: PCMark 7 And Battlefield 3
| Specifications (Architecture) | Samsung Series 9 13.3" Ultrabook | Lenovo ThinkPad X230T | Samsung Series 7 11.6" Slate |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU Family | Ivy Bridge | Ivy Bridge | Sandy Bridge |
| SSD | Yes | No | Yes |
| PCMark Overall | 4547 PCMarks | 2773 PCMarks | 2566 PCMarks |
| Lightweight Score | 4643 PCMarks | 1318 PCMarks | 1994 PCMarks |
| Productivity Score | 4063 PCMarks | 941 PCMarks | 1409 PCMarks |
| Video Playback and Transcoding | 23.15 FPS | 23.05 FPS | 23.14 FPS |
| Video Playback and Transcoding: Downscaling | 26.61853 MB/s | 43.79059 MB/s | 6.64269 MB/s |
| System Storage: Gaming | 16.25 MB/s | 3.71 MB/s | 13.44 MB/s |
| Graphics: DX 9 | 17.08 FPS | 14.99 FPS | 5.67 FPS |
| Image Manipulation | 9.51 Mpx/s | 9.56 Mpx/s | 4.51 Mpx/s |
| System Storage: Importing Pictures | 29.34 MB/s | 5.38 MB/s | 22.52 MB/s |
| Web Browsing and Decrypting / Web Browsing | 10.20 pages/s | 9.62 pages/s | 5.58 pages/s |
| Web Browsing and Decrypting / Data Decrypting | 98.80 MB/s | 86.10 MB/s | 30.89 MB/s |
| System Storage: Windows Defender | 5.41 MB/s | 1.27 MB/s | 5.03 MB/s |
| Web Browsing With 3 Tabs | 11.70 MB/s | 11.38 pages/s | 6.43 pages/s |
| System Storage: Adding Music | 1.39 MB/s | 1.18 MB/s | 1.38 MB/s |
| System Storage: Starting Applications | 58.55 MB/s | 2.06 MB/s | 30.98 MB/s |
| Text Editing | 9.62 operations/s | 0.95 operations/s | 0.57 operations/s |
Samsung's 13.3" Series 9 does well in PCMark 7, leading in most sub-tests and easily sliding past Lenovo's ThinkPad X230T. This might come as a surprise given the GeekBench numbers on the previous page. However, the fact that Samsung's Ultrabook includes an mSATA-based SSD, while the ThinkPad is hampered by a hard drive, helps explain the advantage in this synthetic that values solid-state storage highly.
The new Series 9's storage results are even a good deal faster than the Series 7 11.6" Slate, which also came with an SSD. It turns out that the older machine has a 3 Gb/s drive in it, while the Ultrabook sees the benefit of 6 Gb/s data rates.
Interestingly, Samsung chose to use Lite-On's LMT256M3M SSD in its updated 13.3" Series 9, despite its own solid 830 SSD (2.5" and mSATA). The Lite-On drive employs Marvell's 88SS9174 controller, which is what Crucial's m4 uses. Lite-On uses Toggle-mode NAND, though, which generally enables better performance.
Battlefield 3
When Intel launched its Ivy Bridge architecture, it made a big deal about the improvements made to its HD Graphics 4000 engine. Beyond better performance (which takes from slow to a little less slow), the company discussed anisotropic quality improvements. The thing is, it'd be hard to see those enhancements in the real world. Simply generating playable frame rates is a big enough challenge, and that's at the lowest quality settings and resolutions.
HD Graphics 4000 is a substantial step up from its predecessor; you simply have to live with very entry-level settings.
A recent patch alters the performance of World of Warcraft, so we had to give up our reference data from that title. In Battlefield 3, however, we see that Samsung's new 13.3" Series 9 offers comparable performance as our reference Ivy Bridge-based Ultrabook from Intel. Although the HD Graphics 4000 engine clearly outperforms HD Graphics 3000 by a huge margin, it's still barely playable at 800x600 using the Medium quality preset.
Using the latest WoW patch, we were able to confirm the more mainstream (and frankly, platform-bound) title is playable up to around 1280x720 under the High quality preset with 60+ FPS on average.