Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch Review

1. Introduction2. Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch3. Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology & Configuration5. SiSoft Sandra6. PCMark 77. PCMark 88. Cinebench R11.5 64 bit9. Unigine Heaven Benchmark10. 3DMark 1111. 3DMark12. Hard Drive Performance13. USB 3.0 Bandwidth Testing14. BluRay Playback15. MKV 1080p Playback Performance16. Media Encoding17. Dirt ShowDown18. Metro Last Light19. F1 201220. Thermal Dynamics21. Acoustics Performance22. Battery Life23. Closing Thoughts24. View All Pages

The system doesn't score that highly in the Windows 8 Experience Index due to the weak integrated HD4000 graphics on the Intel 3667U processor. Lenovo have yet to update their system to the latest Haswell range of mobile processors which is unfortunate. We have reviewed several laptops featuring the latest Haswell processors, such as the MSI GE40-20C Dragon Eyes in June. The Intel Solid State drive scores well in this test, but we will look at this in more detail later in the review.

Not the cleanest of system installs, however Lenovo do install a lot of useful software for these machines which can help with updating software, controlling the trackpad and fingerprint reader and monitoring battery life. We do dislike seeing Norton Internet Security however as it takes up a lot of resources and there are equally good free packages available online.

An overview of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch in CPUz. The last generation (Ivy Bridge) 3667U (ultra low voltage) is built on the 22nm processor and runs with a maximum turbo of 3.2ghz. There is 4 MB of Level 3 cache onboard and there are two physical cores which support HyperThreading (2+2).

Comparison Systems (for specific synthetic test compares):
PCSpecialist Inferno 11.6 inch (Intel Core i7 3630QM)
MSI GE40-20C Dragon Eyes Laptop (Intel Core i7 4702MQ)
MSI GX60 (AMD A10 4600M)
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (featuring Core i5 3427U)
Lenovo ThinkPad Edge S430 (featuring Core i5 3210M)
PC Specialist Vortex III HD72 (featuring Core i7 3610QM).
Asus G74SX-91013Z (featuring Core i7 2360QM).
Dell XPS 14z (featuring Core i7 2640M).
AlienWare M18X (featuring Core i7 2960XM Extreme Edition).
MSI CX640 (featuring Core i5 2410M).
Intel Core i7 2600k desktop processor.
Intel Core i5 2500k desktop processor.

Software:
3DMark
3DMark 11
PCMark 7
Cinebench 11.5 64 bit
FRAPS Professional
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Unigine Valley
SiSoft Sandra
CrystalDiskMark
ATTO Disk Benchmark
Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra 12
Cyberlink MediaEspresso
Dirt ShowDown
F1 2012
Metro Last Light

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Asus USB BluRay Drive
Lacie 730 Monitor (Image Quality testing)
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter
Nikon D3X with R1C1 Kit (4 flashes), Nikon 24-70MM lens.

Game descriptions are taken with courtesy from Wikipedia.

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