58 PCWorld MARCH 2021REVIEWS PORSCHE DESIGN ACER BOOK RS
lower scores are better for HandBrake).
So, how did the Book RS blow away its
competitors so convincingly? The HandBrake
test is all about beating the heat, and Acer
souped up the laptop’s cooling capacity with
dual copper heat pipes. A lifted-hinge design
also props up the chassis, enhancing airflow
around the vents. That thermal design helped
the quad-core Tiger Lake CPU in the Book RS
stay cranked north of 2.5GHz (spiking to
2.8GHz and higher) for the majority of the
HandBrake test, rather than dialing down to the
2.1GHz range as many other laptops do.CINEBENCH
If our HandBrake benchmark is a marathon, our
Cinebench test is more of a sprint. Rather than
encoding a lengthy video file, Cinebench
involves rendering a 3D image in real time, a
task that takes mere minutes to complete
instead of an hour or more. Here, CPUs with the
fastest boost clocks will get a leg up, so look for
Core i7–powered laptops to take the lead.
And there it is: The beefier Core i7 Tiger
Lake–packing Acer Swift 5 and Dell XPS 13
land in first and second place, respectively,
while the Porsche Design Acer Book RS with
its i5 Tiger Lake chip settles for a close and
hardly embarrassing third place.
We are a little concerned about the Book
RS’s lackluster single-thread Cinebench score,
which is sixth place to the multithread result’s
third place. We are reassured by the Porsche’s
strong PCMark 8 showing, however, andanecdotally, I didn’t notice any hiccups while
performing everyday tasks on the laptop. So
for now, we’ll let it slide.3DMARK SKY DIVER 1.0
Acer isn’t positioning the Porsche Design Acer
Book RS as a gaming laptop, given that it packs
merely Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics core
(not to be confused with the company’s Iris Xe
Max discrete mobile graphics [go.pcworld.
com/xmxx]). That said, Acer is touting it as a
workhorse for content creators, so we were
eager to check out its graphics performanceThe Porsche Design Acer Book RS is fast out of the
gate, although not quite as fast as its competitors
packing the i7 Tiger Lake.Cinebench R15.038
LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCEAcer Swift 5 SF514-55TA-74ECCore i7-1165G7
Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 9310Core i7-10610U
Porsche Design Acer Book RSCore i5-1135G7
Asus ZenBook Flip S UX371ECore i7-1165G7
Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 14IIL05Core i5-1035G1
HP Envy 17t-cg000 8MX93AVCore i7-1065G7
Dynabook Portégé X30-LCore i5-10210U
Acer Swift 3 SF313-52-78W6Core i7-1065G7
Lenovo Yoga C640-13IMLCore i3-10110U169
914188
579962226921213782210608166Single-core performance Multicore performance155
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