Laptop

Lenovo ThinkPad T470 Ultrabook running Linux – Part 4 – Benchmarks

Disk Benchmarks

Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is the latest industry-standard software interface for PCIe SSDs. NVMe enables drives to benefit from the same “pool” of lanes that directly connect to the CPU. PCIe 4.0 drives can offer in excess of 7,000MB/s reads and 6,500MB/writes (with very large files). We don’t find this technology on refurbished machines.  But even with the older PCIe technology, we can get read speeds in excess of 3,000MB/s and write speeds over 2,000MB/s.

You can see a clear difference in performance when you use NVMe, with a read/write throughput far higher than the hard drives and slower SATA SSDs also lagging somewhat behind. But it’s not always a huge difference.

The T470 has an NVMe but its performance is not great by current standards.

Lenovo ThinkPad T470

The GNOME Disks benchmark, of course, is a synthetic throughput that rarely corresponds with reality.

We wanted to verify the GNOME Disks tests. We therefore performed an extra disk speed test with dd. Note that we are using a blocksize of 1 MiB (whereas the GNOME Disks test is using a different sample size).

$ sync; dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024; sync
$ sudo /sbin/sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3
$ dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024

The chart below shows the findings (the test on each machine was run 5 times).

Lenovo ThinkPad T470

We didn’t test write speed. Remember, you cannot unmount a filesystem that’s in use. And the GNOME Disks write benchmark is destructive.


Specifications

Lenovo ThinkPad T47012th Gen Intel PC10th Gen Intel PC
TypeLaptopDesktop PCDesktop PC
ProcessorIntel Core i5-6300U
2.40GHz (Turbo 3.00GHz)
2 cores 4 threads
Intel Core i5-12400F
2.50GHz (Turbo 4.4 GHz)
6 cores 12 threads
Intel Core i5-10400
2.90GHz (Turbo 4.30GHz)
6 cores 12 threads
ChipsetIntel SkylakeIntel Alder LakeIntel Comet Lake
Memory8GB DDR4 (2133 MHz)16GB DDR4 (3200 MHz)32GB DDR4 (2666 MHz)
GraphicsIntel HD Graphics 520Asus NVIDIA RTX 3060 TiIntel UHD Graphics 630
Disk256GB Intel NVMe1TB Samsung 980 NVMe
2TB Crucial SSD
1TB Corsair MP400 NVMe

EliteDesk 800 G2Lenovo M93AWOW AK41
TypeTiny Desktop PCTiny Desktop PCMini PC
ProcessorIntel i5-6500T 2.50 GHz
(Turbo 3.10 GHz)
4 cores and 4 threads
Intel i5-4590T 2.00 GHz
(Turbo 3.00 GHz)
4 cores and 4 threads
Intel Celeron J4115 1.80GHz
(Turbo 2.5 GHz)
4 cores and 4 threads
ChipsetIntel SkylakeIntel HaswellIntel Gemini Lake
Memory16GB DDR3 (2133 MHz)16GB DDR3 (1600 MHz)8GB DDR4 (2133 MHz)
GraphicsIntel HD Graphics 530 Intel HD Graphics 4600Intel UHD Graphics 605
Disk256GB Samsung NVMe SSD240GB Crucial SSD128GB Foresee NVMe SSD

AWOW NYI3Gigabyte BXBT-1900Asus UX305FA
TypeMini PCMini PCLaptop
ProcessorIntel Core i3-5005U
2.00GHz
2 cores 4 threads
Intel Celeron J1900 2.00GHz
(Turbo 2.416 GHz)
4 cores 4 threads
Intel Core M-5Y10c
0.8GHz (Turbo 2.00GHz)
2 cores 4 threads
ChipsetIntel BroadwellIntel Atom Z36xxx/Z37xxxIntel Broadwell-U-OPI
Memory8GB DDR4 (1600 MHz)4GB DDR3 (1600 MHz)8GB DDR3 (1866 MHz)
GraphicsIntel HD Graphics 5500Intel HD 2GBIntel HD Graphics 5300
Disk128GB Kingston NVMe250GB Samsung SSD 860128GB SanDisk SSD

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / System
Page 2 – Processor
Page 3 – Memory / Graphics
Page 4 – Disk / Specifications


Complete list of articles in this series:

Lenovo ThinkPad T470 Ultrabook
Part 1We spotlight the condition of our refurbished T470 laptop
Part 2Specifications of the T470 laptop using the inxi utility to interrogate the system
Part 3Installing the Manjaro distribution
Part 4We run a series of benchmarks on the T470 and compare to other machines
Part 5Multimedia performance including power management
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