This is a blog looking at a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad T470 Ultrabook running Linux.
In this article we put the ThinkPad T470 through some intensive testing. We’ve run a variety of benchmarks on the laptop and compared the results to a motley assortment of machines.
The tests use the Phoronix Test Suite, unless otherwise stated. For ease of reference, the system’s specifications are listed on the final page. Together with the ThinkPad T470, we’ve run the benchmarks on two small form factor PCs (HP EliteDesk 800 G2 and Lenovo M93 Ultra Small PC), three mini PCs, and an Asus laptop. All of these machines are low-power. To put the results into context, we also benchmarked two more modern PCs hosting a 10th generation and 12th generation Intel processor.
All the machines are running identical versions of software, and configured to ensure consistency between results. The Manjaro rolling distro is used.
Let’s start with some general system tests.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark build-linux-kernel
The benchmark show how long it takes to build the Linux kernel in a default configuration. The test uses all cores/threads of a PC, but it’s not the type of test where CPU cores run at 100%. A lot of the time, the compiler is waiting on other things like RAM and disk. It’s therefore a good indicator of the general system performance of a machine.
The ThinkPad T470 took a shade over 12 minutes to build the Linux kernel 5.18. The fact that its 6300U mobile processor only has two cores didn’t impact its performance that badly compared to the beefier quad core i5-6500T and i5-4590T desktop processors. The T470’s i5-6300U fared much better than the other two mobile processors tested (M-5Y10c and i3-5005U).
Naturally the T470 lags far behind the i5-12400F which completed the kernel build in a shade over 2 minutes.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark encode-flac
The chart above summarizes benchmark results of converting a WAV file to the FLAC format, with 5 samples taken to ensure consistent results.
This tests offers a good representation of a system’s single-threaded processor performance, memory, and overall system performance.
The ThinkPad T470 put in a sterling performance in this test beating both the i5-6500T and i5-4590T desktop processors. For many desktop tasks, only 1 or 2 cores are often used. In these situations, performance of the ThinkPad isn’t too far from even the 10th generation Intel chips.
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 1 | We spotlight the condition of our refurbished T470 laptop |
| Part 2 | Specifications of the T470 laptop using the inxi utility to interrogate the system |
| Part 3 | Installing the Manjaro distribution |
| Part 4 | We run a series of benchmarks on the T470 and compare to other machines |
| Part 5 | Multimedia performance including power management |