PERFORMANCE TESTING: AMD SHOWS
ITS STUFF
For the sake of our benchmark comparisons, I gathered
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gaming laptops: the Acer Predator Helios 300, Dell GI
15 SE 2019, Lenovo Legion Y545, and MSI GL65 9SC-
- These will serve as a good point of comparison for
rating this year’s G5 15 SE and gauging its performance.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites
developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL
(formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run
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processing, spreadsheet jockeying, 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 tests yield a proprietary numeric score;
higher numbers are better.
The Dell G5 15 SE’s AMD chip does good work in
PCMark 10, proving its chops for zipping around your
desktop and through everyday multitasking. It didn’t
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than the Core i5 machines as you’d expect and bests the
Helios’s Core i7 CPU. As for PCMark 8, these SSDs are
roughly all on par with one another, providing fast boot
and load times.
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.
I have a hard
time
recommending
that anyone
buy a new
gaming laptop
with such a
small amount
of storage.