Dell XPS 13 2-In-1 Review - Portable And Flexible Living On The Infinity Edge

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 computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral "No Keyframes" animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below, along with results from Cinebench's built-in OpenGL graphics benchmark.

Cinebench R11.5 3D Rendering Benchmark

Cinebench ranks the XPS 13 2-In-1 square in the middle of the pack for graphics performance but more in the lower quadrant with respect to CPU horsepower. This is likely due to the fact that the Core i7-7Y75 under the hood is hitting the upper limits of its thermal capacity in Dell's configuration. That said it's still very much in the hunt here versus the likes of previous generation Core i5-5200U and 6200U processors, and it absolutely skunks the Skylake Core m5-6Y57 Skylake chip in Dell's Latitude 13 from last year. 

Futuremark PCMark 8 v2 Full System Benchmark

PCMark 8 v2 is the latest version in Futuremark’s series of popular PC benchmarking tools. It is designed to test the performance of all types of systems, from tablets to desktops. PCMark 8 offers five separate benchmark tests to help consumers find devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for their particular use case. This latest version of the suite improves the Home, Creative and Work benchmarks with new tests using popular open source applications for image processing, video editing and spreadsheets. A wide variety of workloads have also been added to the Work benchmark to better reflect the way PCs are used in enterprise environments. Though this is technically a "synthetic" benchmark, PCMark's trace-based workloads utilize real-world software and performance measurements.
PCMark 8 is right back at a similar ranking to our initial SANDRA and SunSpider tests. Here the XPS 13 2-In-1 and Kaby Lake-Y handled the productivity and consumer content creation workloads of this benchmark very well. This is again a bursty, real-world application-based benchmark that tends to favor the quick-hit responsiveness of the machine and its Intel Kaby Lake-Y processor.