The Dell Venue 11 Pro 7000 Review
by Brett Howse on April 16, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Dell
- Windows 8.1
- Core M
Tablet Performance
So far we have compared the Venue 11 Pro with its Windows PC based brethren. And that is a fair comparison to make, since the Venue 11 Pro is offered with accessories to transform it into exactly that. But to complete the picture we should take a look at how it performs as a pure tablet.
We do not have all of the same benchmarks available on Windows as we do on iOS and Android, but we will make what comparisons we can to get a general feel for how this tablet compares against competing devices.
Web Performance
Core M offers a lot more performance than any of the ARM based tablets when it comes to CPU bound tasks. It is easily double the performance of the best ARM or Atom based devices. It is a pretty great achievement when you look at how far back Intel was in the mobile game a few years ago. Atom got them to somewhat competitive performance and TDP, but Core M has pushed them well past. Of course that is ignoring the huge price differential, with the Core M CPU having a tray price of more than many Android tablets, as well as the larger circuit board that Core M requires. Intel still has Atom, and for good reason. They can and do price Core M at a premium, but have Atom to provide the less expensive option.
3DMark Unlimited
Ice Storm Unlimited is rendered off-screen, so that it can be used to compare across devices and platforms. As we have seen in the PC comparison, the Venue 11 Pro can perform quite well if given such a short benchmark. This does show to capabilities of the GPU inside, but unfortunately it is more limited in performance when doing longer workloads.
GFXBench
On the CPU side, Core M dominates the ARM competition, but on the GPU front it is not the same story. As we saw in 3DMark, the GPU can perform very well, but on a test like this where sustained performance is required, the performance does drop off quite a bit. The GPU is not terrible, but it cannot compete with the top GPUs available in a tablet today. Perhaps that will change with Skylake. At the moment, it is only ok.
NAND Performance
The Venue 11 Pro has an older model of SSD, but it is still a SSD, where as most tablets are outfitted with some form of eMMC storage.
Building a tablet out of PC components still has its upsides, and storage performance is one of them. There is still quite a gap between a true SSD and eMMC storage. The Venue 11 Pro has the SanDisk X110 SSD, which is an older model drive, yet performance is still a good bit better than the average tablet.
Tablet Performance Summary
The Venue 11 Pro, with Windows 8.1, a Core M CPU, and a SSD, has very competetive performance compared to the standard tablets of today. There are certainly advantages to a true tablet, such as weight and thickness, but as far as performance, the Venue 11 Pro outclasses these devices in everything except GPU performance. The GPU performance is still good, but it is not class leading.
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evonitzer - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
Um, you know Brett Howse writes for Anandtech and is the author of this article, right? So I'm going to guess that he finds Anandtech's methodology for battery life to be accurate, or at least more accurate than Gizmodo (since benchmarking is always an approximation). And I feel like we go through this all the time, but unless there is calibration of displays and a clear process, battery life tests are MEANINGLESS!hlovatt - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
It would be really interesting to see new MacBook in the tables for comparison. I know we can get the data but that is not quite the same as reading the article since you loose the flow and your thought train.frozentundra123456 - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
I think core m is a lot better product than people give it credit for. The performance is actually pretty amazing for such a low power device. The problem I see, is that it may be a product for a quite limited market. And the price is too high. I am just not sure with all the competition from cheap atom x86, android, phones, etc. that there is much of a market for such an expensive, relatively low performance device. Possibly in business, where the company wants to impress and is picking up the tab, but personally, I would go with a more powerful ultrabook or even a (gasp) desktop, and some cheap atom tablet or convertible for using on the go.(or even just a smartphone unless you absolutely have to have x86).ingwe - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
Agreed. I think that enterprise will be the largest user of these until (if?) the price comes down.If the price does come down, it would probably obliterate a lot of the low-end market though.
haukionkannel - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
It seems that Prices Are getting higher. New surfface 3 with only new Atom is as expensive as this with core-m... So I am not very hopefull for cheaper products.There is not enough competition In x86 at this moment.
xthetenth - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
Even non-pro surface is a very premium product apart from the CPU.sorten - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
Overall performance for the CoreM processor looks great. I'm really hoping that Microsoft has waited long enough so they can go with Skylake in the SP4.xthetenth - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
That would be great to see, and I'm hoping the SP4 has a range from Core M to i7.sorten - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
I agree. I'm on the fence between a fanless Core M and a more powerful i5. It would be great to have both options. I suspect that the Core M will be plenty for my usage scenarios, which would include web surfing, movie watching and programming (Visual Studio, WebStorm). But I may decide that some lower end DirectX games would be nice as well.xilience - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
It would be great to see Core M performance vs low end Core i3 and the new Atom chips. That would really help provide perspective for how these chips perform so people can decide if the portability is really worth it.