HP Envy Ultrabook 6t-1000 Review

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2011, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2011 suite (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth and Physical Disk Performance). All of the scores reported below were taken with the HP Ultrabook running at its default settings with full performance mode enabled and the notebook plugged into the AC adapter.

SiSoft SANDRA Synthetic General Performance Mertrics

 
SANDRA CPU Arithmetic and Multimedia Performance

 
SANDRA Memory and Physical Disk Performance

The CPU scores are exactly where we expect them to be, compared to other systems running the same CPU. It seems like a boring metric, but the synthetic benchmark is helping in determining if a system is firing on all cylinders or is being held back for one reason or another.

HP's use of fast DDR3 system memory also aids in overall performance, though the disk score is a little disappointing. This doesn't come as much of a surprise because the spindle speed is a rather pokey 5400 RPM, and if were to run this metric over and over again, the score would inevitable improve once the mSATA SSD realizes this is a frequently used program.

HP Envy Ultrabook 6t-1000 and Asus Zenbook SSD Performance Comparison with ATTO
Out of all the Ultrabooks we've tested, the speedy SSD in the Asus Zenbook still stands as the fastest storage subsystem (in this category) to date. How does HP compare?

Asus Zenbook UX21

The Zenbook put up hellaciously fast read and write times that are more on par with a desktop SSD than a notebook system.

HP Envy Ultrabook 6t-1000

HP's 500GB hard drive runs decidedly slower and isn't all that impressive even for this class of HDD. Depending on file size, transfers that involve just the disk top out at around 111MB/s.

Cinebench R11.5 64-bit 3D Rendering Performance

Maxon's Cinebench R11.5 benchmark is based on the company's Cinema 4D software used for 3D content creation and tests both the CPU and GPU in separate benchmark runs. On the CPU side, Cinebench renders a photorealistic 3D scene by tapping into up to 64 processing threads (CPU) to process more than 300,000 total polygons, while the GPU benchmark measures graphics performance by manipulating nearly 1 million polygons and huge amounts of textures.

The surprise of the day came during our Cinebench run, in which the HP system put up the highest OpenGL score. We had to double check to make sure HP didn't accidentally upgrade the graphics to a discrete GPU. This shows how far integrated graphics have come.