TESTING THE THINKPAD X13: AN UNDER-
THREE-POUND PERFORMANCE BRAWL
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ultraportables. The Acer Swift 3 and Microsoft Surface
Laptop 3 have 13.5-inch screens with a squarer 3:2
rather than the usual 16:9 aspect ratio for extra
scrolling space. The Dell XPS 13 is a premium class
favorite, while the Asus ZenBook 13 joins the Acer in
coming close to the ThinkPad’s low price. (This is the
10th Generation “Ice Lake” version, here with low-end
but dedicated GeForce graphics; a new 11th Generation
Core “Tiger Lake” one just debuted, as well.)
Productivity and media tests: PCMark 10 and 8 are
holistic performance suites developed by the PC
benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark).
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centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet
work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8,
meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess
the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both yield a
proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
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4,000 points that indicate an excellent score in PCMark
- Their solid-state drives sped through PCMark 8’s
storage exercise.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test,
which is fully threaded to make use of all available
processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the
CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image.
The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s
suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Unlike many
touch screens,
the Lenovo’s
touch-input
panel isn’t
annoyingly
reflective, so
room lights
aren’t a bother.