Thinkpad W520 PCMarkVantage Benchmarks - Post Yours Here!

Here are some PCMarkVantage Is Your PC Fast Enough? PCMark Vantage Basic Tells You | PCWorld benchmarks:

W520 i7-2820 8GB 1333 Mhz RAM (500GB HDD): 8,614 PCMarks
W520 i7-2920 8GB 1333 Mhz RAM (500GB HDD): 9,970 PCMarks

W520 i7-2820 16GB 1333 Mhz RAM (single OCZ Vertex3 SSD): 16,006 PCMarks
W520 i7-2820 16GB 1333 Mhz RAM (single Intel 510 SSD): 16,302 PCMarks
W520 i7-2920 16GB 1333 Mhz RAM (single OCZ Vertex3 SSD): 18474 PCMarks

W520 i7-2820 8GB 1333 Mhz RAM (2x240GB Intel 510 SSD in RAID0 - 128k stripe): 19,000 PCMarks
W520 i7-2820 16GB 1866 Mhz RAM (2x240GB Intel 510 SSD in RAID0 - 128k stripe): 19,228 PcMarks
W520 i7-2920 8GB 1333 Mhz RAM (2x240GB Intel 510 SSD in RAID0 - 64k stripe): 20,700 PcMarks

Results:
i7-2820 vs i7-2920 improvement: +15%
HyperX improvement: +1%.
Sata III SSD improvement: +89%
RAID0 improvement: +16%

Your results may vary. Please post yours, especially if they are better. If you have a different model or brand it would be interesting to see improvements on these results.

 

Discrete Graphics W520 i7-2720 16GB 1333 Mhz RAM (single 256GB Crucial M4 SSD): 14,545 PCMarks

Integrated Graphics W520 i7-2720 16GB 1333 Mhz RAM (single 256GB Crucial M4 SSD): 13,004 PCMarks
*Forgot to switch it before I ran the test so I threw it up here for comparison sake*

 

tried again after wiping and changing fw on ssd and changing nvidia drivers, here it is.
Result

 

Did you have the "write back" cache on? (programs>intel>rst>manage)

 

18,834 !!!. Whew! That i7-2920 rocks! (FirmWare update helped too.) Your results and those of storagereview.com convinced me to exchange my W520 i7-2820 for an i7-2920!!!

 

You know the disk benchmarks are designed for platter drives and SSDs totally screw up the value of the point system, right?

 

Hmm, I have never heard that. Do you have link you can refer me to?

As far as I understand, PCMarkVantage measures a series of typical productivity tasks. It just happens that SSDs are helping the system to get them done faster...

 

My W520, I7 2820QM, C300 128 GB OS, C300 256 GB Data Drive, quadro 1000 got 9448 PCMarks while my X220, I7 2620, Intel X-25M, got 12079 PCMarks?!

I am much happier with the old Gen 2 SSDs than the new Gen 3s. That is the only reason I can see that the quad core with quadro would test slower than a dual core with less graphics power.

Yup, in checking the detailed results all the HDD intensive tasks in the benchmarks are much quicker on my Intel X25-M than on my Sata 3 C300s and all the tweaks on each system are identical. I just think the older Intel controllers on the larger Nand media work better with the current machines.

Interesting enough the SSDs all benchmark about the same with AS SSD or CDM.

 

Think about it: Platter drives and SSDs operate in completely different ways and bear very little resemblence to each other. A benchmark valid for judging the performance of platter drives will generally not hold for SSDs.

Is increase of 2000 points for the disk score from 16,000 to 18,000 really worth the same as from 2000 to 4000?

For example, if you RAID 0'd your 500GB platter drives, would the performance delta between the non-RAID setup be worth the increase in the synthetic benchmark?

 

I would have to disagree. The real world tasks run by PCMark Vantage don't care what the hardware is they just need to occur and be timed.

If an SSD gives a better result than a platter HDD that is because it is faster.

Just like I am willing to pay more for a SSD than a HDD because it is naturally faster, not because it can benchmark a higher number. The benchmark is only the measure. The result we want is the speed. So if the benchmark is at all valid it should give a better result to a SSD equipped computer.