As a school that offers very technology-based programs such as Video Productions and Multimedia Design to name a couple how do Tahoma’s computers hold up compared to a laptop equipped with the latest hardware? You’re going to want a few hours of TechQuickie for this one.

Our benchmarks are being presented to specifically pressure the Processing and Graphics performance of the machines with any performance limiting features disabled to isolate the true performance. We’ll be using a Dell G7 equipped with a Core I7 8750H (6 true cores w/ 12 threads) and GTX 1060 Max-Q as our baseline measurement, while this is a laptop engineered to more specifically suit the stresses that gaming can have, it still contains the most modern components for today’s workloads. In Cinebench, a program that tests the rendering of 3D a scene, the Dell G7 scored an average of 1016 in the Processing benchmark and an average of 101.7 FPS (frames per second) in the OpenGL Graphics benchmark, keep these in mind as they’ll be important scores to remember.

Our first device tested was a Dell Latitude 5580, a laptop equipped with a Core I5 7300U (2 core 4 thread) with Intel HD Graphics 620. It scored an average of 334 in the CPU benchmark and 36.7 FPS in the OpenGL Test, This is a processor that attempts to play itself as a processor with four physical cores which isn’t true, its a dual-core processor with more efficient scheduling on when to feed the physical core the next task (formally called Hyperthreading), which ends in some severe bottlenecking on how this system can perform.

Second up to bat in this brawl is the Dell Latitude 3380, its shell is entirely plastic, which plays a big role in how poorly this laptop performs with its Core I3 6100, a Dual-core CPU with aforementioned Hyperthreading. The single fan helps it squeak past with a 217 Processor benchmark and a 35.6 FPS in the OpenGL test.

At the end of this trek and the best benchmarking result thus far, with a Processor score of 818.4 and OpenGL result of 99.78fps. Apple, with its all in one iMac brings the best performance to the table with an Intel Core I7 6700k (4 core 8 thread) 4 Gigahertz a second while paired with the Radeon R9 M395X, gets the closest to what the Dell G7 offers. Although Apple may make you give up and arm and a leg to get that performance in the first place.

So what can we extrapolate from the numbers presented to us by these benchmarks? Mainly that for and rendering you may have in Adobe Premiere or otherwise, you may want to start that process many minutes in advance to ensure that is completed so you can shut down the system and get it put away before class lets out. It was a performance I had come to expect just from the networking problems they have on the Windows machines, although it’s still a far less than perfect result I’m sure any future tech levies or spending by the district will address these performance issues by replacing these machines or other measures.