Operation: Cadre One thousand-5Y70 Revisited

Within the Lenovo ThinkPad Helix is an Intel Core M-5Y70, which is the very same 14nm Broadwell part I first had hands-on time with in the Lenovo Yoga three Pro. While some aspects of Broadwell were intriguing, and I get into more detail on the hardware in my review of the Yoga iii Pro, information technology delivered performance and battery life that wasn't as impressive as I was expecting.

The Core M-5Y70 features a base clock of i.ane GHz across two cores (with Hyper Threading), with a Turbo Boost frequency upwards to 2.6 GHz. There's also Intel HD Graphics 5300 inside, clocked at 850 MHz, plus 4 MB of L3 cache. The base of operations model of the ThinkPad Helix comes with four GB of DDR3L-1600 memory, though my review unit was blessed with viii GB. The TDP for this part is just four.5W, much lower than the older Haswell low-ability parts.

Note that the entry-level ThinkPad Helix includes the slower Cadre Grand-5Y10, clocked at 0.8 GHz with Turbo Heave capabilities up to 2.0 GHz. Graphics in this model is too clocked at a lower 800 MHz, though the model remains the same. While I received the 5Y70 model to review, and the benchmarks that follow are for that processor, those that buy the 5Y10 variant should expect effectually 25% lower operation on paper.

Earlier I head into some benchmarks, one thing I did discover nearly the ThinkPad Helix is that the Core M processor inside seems much less stressed when having to render to a 1080p brandish, every bit opposed to a 3200 x 1800 display like was seen in the Yoga 3 Pro. CPU usage was noticeably lower while web browsing, particularly when scrolling through media heavy websites, a task which wasn't equally choppy on the Helix.

The Core One thousand CPU isn't made for highly intensive tasks such as gaming or video editing, so yous won't see cracking functioning from the Intel Hard disk drive Graphics 5300 chip. However information technology is possible to do some calorie-free image editing in Photoshop (specially if you get the model with 8 GB of RAM) while simultaneously editing a PowerPoint slideshow, which is great news for the worker on the become.

I interesting affair I didn't mention throughout the benchmarks above is that I ran all of them while the Helix was docked into the included Ultrabook Keyboard. Yous might recall this is a relatively trivial slice of information, merely information technology's not: functioning actually decreases when the device is used as a standalone tablet.

I can't honestly explain to you lot why the behaviour is different between the tablet mode and the docked keyboard manner. There is no extra cooling in the dock, no extra battery, and nix else that should impact functioning. However, when I removed the tablet from the Ultrabook Keyboard, performance decreased beyond the lath by around 25%.

Usually the but operation difference I would expect to see would maybe be a driblet when switching from Ac power to battery ability, only this is not the instance with the Helix: operation in either tablet or docked mode doesn't change on or off battery power. Instead, something in the Helix's software or firmware is telling the tablet to throttle when non docked to the keyboard, which quite frankly makes no sense considering the standard keyboard is a completely passive accessory.

Running Cinebench, for example, results in a CPU clock speed of effectually i.63 GHz with 100% usage when run in the dock. Undock the tablet, and suddenly CPU clock speeds drop to 1.35 GHz at peak (100%) usage with occasional dips to i.0 GHz and 75% usage. This is with admittedly no change in cooling solution or bachelor battery capacity, and strikes me as pointless throttling.

In that location is also no immediately obvious way to disable this throttling (though I can't say I spent ages looking for a solution). In the Windows power options there are noticeably fewer options than I am used to seeing on other laptops, including no processor or graphics power controls. Normally that's where I would look if I wanted to switch to, or create, a functioning way, just one simply doesn't exist on the ThinkPad Helix.

This means that if yous desire to become the most out of your ThinkPad Helix from a functioning perspective, you lot'll need to go out the tablet docked into the keyboard, fifty-fifty though the keyboard is only a basic accessory. I would understand the Ultrabook Pro keyboard with its included battery allowing the Helix to raise power consumption limits, but raising these limits makes no sense on the regular keyboard.

As for storage, the ThinkPad Helix review unit I was sent contained a 128 GB Samsung solid state drive, though more expensive models include 256 GB drives. Functioning was average from this drive: I recorded 389 MB/south sequential read and 125 MB/due south sequential write. In that location's nil especially bad nearly read operation from this SSD, but write is a tad wearisome.

Complementing the Core M CPU inside the ThinkPad Helix is Intel's Dual Band Wireless-AC 7265 bit that provides Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/thou/north/ac and Bluetooth 4.0. While I haven't had whatsoever trouble with this chip previously, on the ThinkPad Helix I had a few problems getting it to connect to my home Wi-Fi network when the signal strength was boilerplate to poor. Other devices I've tested had no trouble connecting in exactly the same areas of my apartment, but for some reason the Helix is a picayune temperamental.

Besides included in some models of the ThinkPad Helix is an LTE-capable modem, activated by inserting a SIM into the micro-SIM carte du jour slot. I tested the characteristic briefly and information technology seemed to work well on Australian LTE networks, with decent signal and good data speeds. No doubtfulness it will be a handy feature for working on a train or outside the office.