Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2014, A Fantastic Revision

Name: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (2014), A Fantastic Revision
Brand: Lenovo

by Dave Altavilla — Monday, February 17, 2014, 11:58 AM EDT

SiSoft SANDRA and Cinebench

We started 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).

SiSoftware SANDRA 2014

Synthetic Benchmarks

CPU and Multimedia Tests

Memory Bandwidth and Physical Disk Tests

There weren't many surprises here as the new X1 Carbon's CPU and Multimedia scores fall in line with performance expectations for Intel's dual-core Haswell architecture. However, notable early indicators here in the Memory Bandwidth test (19.3GB/s) and Physical Disk test (530MB/s) show a robust dual-channel memory subsystem and solid state storage (a Samsung mSATA SSD). We're happy to see Lenovo didn't cheap out on the memory configuration, opting for a single channel setup as we've seen on other Lenovo machines. The 2014 ThinkPad X1 Carbon is fully enabled for its CPU and memory config, thankfully.

Cinebench R11.5

3D Rendering Content Creation Performance

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.

Here the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon took the top spot amongst our stable of ultrabooks in the OpenGL portion of the test. Even the Toshiba KIRAbook, with its Core i7 CPU couldn't catch it due to the fact that it's based on previous generation Intel Ivy Bridge integrated graphics. In the CPU test, the new X1 Carbon lands about as expected, in the middle of the pack.