The Acer Aspire S7-393 Review: Broadwell Comes To Acer's Ultrabook
by Brett Howse on October 5, 2015 8:00 AM ESTGPU Performance
Broadwell brought along some major changes to the GPU architecture, including more execution units and less execution units per subslice. The total of EUs went from 20 in Haswell to 24 in Broadwell, but each subslice only has 8 EUs rather than 10 on Haswell to reduce some of the bottlenecks. The i7-5500U model is an Intel HD 5500 branded GPU with a frequency range of 300-950 MHz. This is the maximum before Intel moves into their Iris branded products.
As with the system benchmarks, the second generation Acer S7 with Haswell is included to give a reference of where we have gone in a year or so. Not all of the tests were run on it, but some of the 3DMark test scores are available.
The other note about GPU performance is our one gaming test that was decent to run on integrated graphics has been significantly changed. DOTA 2 was recently updated to a new version of the Source engine which has changed everything pretty dramatically. While we work out a good way to benchmark it again, it will be left out of this review. Any scores we obtained would not be comparable with the older benchmark.
3DMark
FutureMark’s 3DMark has a list of different tests which go from very difficult to very easy. The Broadwell S7 on Windows 10 does very well here with pretty much the highest scores across the board, with the exception of Ice Storm Unlimited Physics which is more CPU bound and the faster CPU in the X1 Carbon surpasses it. For light gaming, the S7 should be able to hold its own.
GFXBench
GFXBench is basically a mobile benchmark, but it has also been released as a DirectX benchmark as well in the Windows Store. Once again the Core i7-5500U does well against its Ultrabook brethren.
As far as performance, with the amount of systems we have seen with Broadwell there are not a lot of surprises left. Skylake should make some nice changes here and we should see devices with Skylake very soon.
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Samus - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
I just had a Mushkin PCIe SSD fail entirely because one of the four 128GB SSD's failed.RAID 0 is inherently unreliable because you are increasing the failure points.
Ethos Evoss - Wednesday, October 7, 2015 - link
u such stupid whinner ..who don't thinkEthos Evoss - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
you stupid idiot you can turn raid off if you don't want it and you can carry on using your '' plain" diskWhat a bunch of retards here really
Teknobug - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link
lol RAID 0 on the same drive? What theMorawka - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
i disagree, your getting double the write and double the read speed. Copying large files (movies, ISO's, etc..) will see great benefit.it's a stop gap solution because it does'nt have PCIE SSD
Lolimaster - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
Copy to what?Copy over an aldready slow wifi/ethernet? Copy to another SSD using USB 3.0? SSD's RAID 0 makes no sense unless you have a workstation/high end PC for heavy video editing.
If you have an SSD Raid 0 you'll only see the speed copying to another SSD Raid 0 o m.2 pci-e SSD.
It's an ultrabook, any kind of speed you get is already bottlenecked by the ultrabook itself (slow external connectivity.
Morawka - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
copy to the same drive. ie: duplicating filesConverting MKV's, Ripping Blu Ray, 1080P Video Scratch Disk, Adobe Bridge Scratch Disk, 4K Video Scratch Disk and Copying.
There are tons of uses
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link
It's an ultrabook, not a mobile workstation. If you plan on doing a lot of video work an ultrabook is a wrong choice in the first place due to the limited processing power.Ethos Evoss - Wednesday, October 7, 2015 - link
u naive stupid kiddo troll.. if u don't know nothing bout computers stop embarrassing yourselfif u have no idea how to simply unRAID two storage drives then go back to school mento
Athlex - Thursday, November 12, 2015 - link
You're partly right. The S7 uses a proprietary double-sided mSATA SSD (Kingston P/N SMS"R"...) which has an identical footprint to a regular mSATA SSD. It's basically two 64/128GB SSDs in a software RAID on the same physical PCB. Fortunately, the mSATA slot can work with traditional mSATA cards if you want to get more capacity or ditch the weird RAID setup.