MacBook 1.2 vs Lenovo X230 - Benchmark

[mkelly]

I've seen a few posts on here from folks trying to decide between the MacBook and various Lenovo devices. I've been tossing around the idea of picking up a MacBook and wanted to see how it compared against hardware that I already own/use.

I have a Lenovo X230 that I dig out from time to time when I don't feel like booting up VMs on my 15" rMBP. The X230 is generally well-regarded - a bit old, but certainly a solid business ultrabook (I use the term generously - it's rather thick). I actually run a number of VMware VMs on my X230 and have never really had an issue with poor performance. In fact, if my rMBP died tomorrow, I could probably do all of my day-to-day sysadmin and development work on the X230 (aside from XCode-related stuff, of course).

So, I decided to run Geekbench on it and compare against the 1.2 GHz 12-inch MacBook. And, interestingly enough, they're very close, with the MacBook winning overall. My X230 has a 2.6 GHz i5 3320 CPU (not a ULV processor)

Lenovo X230:

Single-core: 2108
Multi-core: 4670

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2952550

MacBook 1.2:

Single-core: 2385
Multi-core: 4797

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2952267

Not sure if this is interesting to anyone else or not, but it certainly helped me decide. If I can get away with the X230 for my workloads (Linux VMs, Python and Ruby development, some PostgreSQL stuff and general system admin), then the 12-inch MacBook will do the trick too.

 

[Gav2k]

Nice comparison.

 

[cbautis2]

Typical of Lenovo throttling the CPU too much...

 

[Dark Void]

Thanks, hopefully some can find it useful if they are deciding between the two.

 

[Billcat]

I used a X230 (i5 3320 with 8GB ram, 256SSD+500HDD) for three years and I switched to rMB 1.2 since May.

Generally speaking, the processing power of these two machines are at the same level, it depends on what is important to you.

On X230, I never really felt “slow” from the system, the CPU can boost it up when needed, well, you hear the fan roaring but you got the power needed.

On rMB, guess the system don’t want to push the CPU to its edge due to passive heating, you actually feel a little bit slower than X230. You feel it on the UI responsiveness, time needed to launch applications and load big files, especially when you have heave multiple sessions usage – when I do research on web, it is common to have 20 chrome tabs open and running (considering 50% of them have flash running), this is not a problem for X230 at all, but it is sometimes to rMB (either latency switching among them or some tabs refuse to refresh to save power).

However, if you tune your expectation a little bit, wait for 2s for an application to launch instead of have the window open & ready instantly (I have to say that Outlook for Mac really sucks, it is 10-15s for my outlook to load comparing with 2s on X230), you feel very comfortable with the rMB.

Again, it depends on what is important to you, for rMB, the below features a something I can never get from X230:
1) long hours of battery. I sit in an 100-minute meeting, taking notes with rMB, the battery drops to 87% from 100%, it is probably going to be 100%=> 60~70% range for X230.
2) Ultra light weight and extremely compact form factor. It does save you some travel space, for the volume of the computer and charger together. For my rolling tote, the space it saves allows me to fit a pair of shoes into it.

So, I feel the rMB runs at 85-90% of overall speed comparing with my X230, but it gives me some other benefit which I really appreciate. It was a good choice.