The Blade Stealth did well here, though it wasn’t the highest scorer. That should
actually be expected given some of the high-end gaming competition, and
among the other 13-inch laptops (the XPS 13 and the previous Blade Stealth), it
was the fastest. That bodes well for everyday use and matches the generally
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these systems use SSDs, the storage speeds were very even across the board.
MEDIA PROCESSING & CREATION TESTS
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. Our test
model had the lowest score, at 585.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video-editing trial,
another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well
with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they
transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open source Blender demo
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better. Here, the test unit tied with the prior Stealth model at 15, the second-
highest score.