Lenovo ThinkPad W540: Who Needs A Desktop?


SiSoft SANDRA and Cinebench

Based on its specs, you were probably assuming that Lenovo's laptop was an absolute beast on our benchmarks. If so, you were right.  Sort-of.

SiSoft SANDRA 2014.SP3e
Synthetic General Performance Metrics

The first benchmark we fired up was 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).

SS1 SS2

SANDRA CPU and Multimedia Benchmarks

SS3 SS4

SANDRA Memory and File System Benchmarks

As we expected, Lenovo's laptop blew past competing systems like the Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus and Dell's 2014 XPS 13 for general performance. However, its File System test—mainly focusing on the laptop's storage—wasn't the strongest. That's not to say that the laptop's integrated 256GB Samsung SSD isn't fast, it just wasn't the fastest we've seen. Similarly, Lenovo's laptop wasn't the speediest for memory performance either, likely due to the fact that it's only running a single stick of 8GB DDR3 memory (1600MHz).

Cinebench R11.5 64-bit
Content Creation Performance

Cinebench R11.5 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon—a 3D rendering and animation suite. To say it's demanding of one's computer resources is a bit of an understatement.  We like it, as it's a good test of both a system's raw computing power and graphical capabilities.

Cinebench2

Lenovo's laptop trumped the competition by a fairly significant degree—more than double the performance of the next-fastest laptop in the benchmark's OpenGL test and CPU test. Advantage: Lenovo.

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