Lenovo ThinkPad X280 Review: Powerful, Business-Class Ultraportable
Lenovo ThinkPad X280: ATTO Disk, Cinebench, And PCMark Benchmarks
To start things off and get a sense for how the ThinkPad X280's storage components perform, we fired-up ATTO for a quick sanity check on sequential disk transfer speeds across various file sizes, with both read and write workloads.
ATTO Disk Benchmark, Testing NVMe Solid State Storage
The ATTO Disk benchmark measures sequential transfer speeds on a drive with a range of file sizes. By the time it hit 128KB and larger transfers, the read speed of the Samsung SSD in the X280 blew past 2500 MB/s and stayed there for the duration, peaking at almost 3000 MB/s with the 16MB file test. In the meantime, writes climbed to nearly 2000 MB/s by the time file size hit 64KB, and remained consistent for the remainder of the test.
Cinebench R15
Cinebench R15 is a 3D rendering benchmark that tests both the CPU and GPU engines in the processor. Cinebench is developed by Maxon, which is better known for its Cinema 4D software employed in professional 3D rendering and animation studios. We use both of Cinebench’s integrated tests for CPU and GPU testing.
The X280 put up much more respectable scores in this benchmark, hitting about the middle in terms of OpenGL rendering and overtaking all but the Dell XPS 13 (2018) in the CPU test.
PCMark Benchmarks
We also ran two Futuremark PCMark system benchmarks, PCMark 8 v2 and PCMark 10. We selected the Open CL "Accelerated" modes in PCMark 8, allowing the benchmark to take advantage of current generation integrated CPU/GPU parts, and we run PCMark 10 in default mode.
The X280 performed well in the trio of PCMark 8 v2 tests we ran. The systems scored 3790 in the Home Accelerated test, 4750 in the Work Accelerated test, and 5065 in the Storage test. We're not graphing the numbers because we don't have fair comparison data from post-Spectre / Meltdown patches and with all of the latest Windows updates, but wanted to present the results nonetheless.
In the PCMark 10 benchmark, the Lenovo ThinkPad X280 competed well with similarly configured machines, but ultimately landed about in the middle of the pack.
