Whereas Futuremark’s venerable PCMark benchmarks weigh lightly on our assessment of a gaming notebook, they’re important to assessing the performance of other laptops – particularly business class systems. Both benchmarks run the computer through typical office and entertainment tasks.
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Futuremark PCMark 7
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Simulated Application Performance
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PCMark 7 provides an overall score, which makes for an easy comparison. We use PCMark 8 to break a system’s performance down by certain categories of tasks.
The ThinkPad W550s handled itself well in PCMark 7, taking 2nd place in our comparison pool. The processor (and storage configuration) can have a large impact on PCMark 7 and that probably explains why the W550s doesn’t take the top spot. Even so, it’s clearly a powerful system.
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Futuremark PCMark 8
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Simulated Application Performance
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We selected three tests from PCMark 8. The Home test is just as it sounds: a collection of everyday tasks, including web browsing and chatting. The Work test is more demanding and has business-oriented tests, while the Storage test gives you a close-up look at what your SSD or hard drive can do.
The W550s really shines in the PCMark 8 tests, putting up Home and Work scores higher than the Dell Precision. On the storage front, the two systems have nearly identical performance, though the W550s we tested offers more storage space as configured.
