Lenovo ThinkPad P15 review | Laptop Mag
Our Verdict
The Lenovo ThinkPad P15 delivers massive performance, but it has the toll and size to friction match.
For
- Stellar functioning and graphics
- Excellent assortment of ports
- Bright and crisp 4K display
- Comfortable typing experience
- Durable build
Against
- Weak battery life on 4K model
- Fans get loud
- Thick and heavy
- Expensive
Laptop Magazine Verdict
The Lenovo ThinkPad P15 delivers massive performance, but it has the price and size to match.
Pros
- +
Stellar functioning and graphics
- +
Excellent array of ports
- +
Vivid and crisp 4K display
- +
Comfortable typing experience
- +
Durable build
Cons
- -
Weak battery life on 4K model
- -
Fans become loud
- -
Thick and heavy
- -
Expensive
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 specs
Price: $2,449 (starting); $7,879 (reviewed at)
CPU: Intel Core i9-10885H vPro
GPU: Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 Max-Q
RAM: 32GB
Storage: 1TB SSD
Display: 15.half dozen-inch, 4K UHD
Battery: iii:56
Size: 14.8 x 9.9 10 1.2-inches
Weight: 6.1 pounds
The term desktop replacement gets thrown around too lightly at times, but the Lenovo ThinkPad P15 certainly earns it. That's not surprising when you encounter the price ($2,449 starting; tested at $4,570) or the size of this workstation, at 1.two inches, it's roughly as thick as any ii laptops stacked on top of one another.
Housed within that expensive and expansive frame are top-of-the-line components, including a 10th Gen Intel Core i9-10885H CPU, Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 Max-Q GPU and 32GB of RAM, which deliver outstanding performance. Naturally, it doesn't cease with the internals, the P15 boasts a bright 4K brandish, a vast assortment of ports and a comfortable full-size keyboard with a number pad.
While there are a number of standout features for the ThinkPad P15 Gen 1, a few drawbacks might have you giving some of the other best workstations on the market a look.
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 price and configuration options
Workstation pricing can bring tears to the optics of anyone who needs this level of operation in a mobile form cistron. I know this well, but the $7,879 retail toll of my ThinkPad P15 Gen 1 review unit of measurement nonetheless elicited a double-take.
There are a couple of of import caveats; ane is that my review unit is near the top end of the configuration options with its Intel Core i9-10885H processor, Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 Max-Q GPU with 16GB of VRAM, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a UHD (3840 10 2160) IPS Dolby Vision HDR display. The other caveat is that, every bit I write this review, my config is available for $four,570 directly from Lenovo and can be found for like pricing elsewhere online.
The base model starts at $2,449 and includes a 10th Gen Intel Core i5-10400H with vPro, Nvidia Quadro T1000 GPU with 4GB of RAM, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and an FHD (1920 10 1080) IPS brandish. That model, as of this writing, can exist found for $1,420.42 on Lenovo, so the retail pricing for ThinkPad P15 Gen one is pretty much to be ignored.
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 pattern
Commonsensical is the highest praise I can muster for the ThinkPad P15 Gen 1. It'due south a beast of a laptop at 6.1 pounds and 14.8 x 9.9 x 1.two inches. That is large even past workstation standards and the characterless matte-blackness chassis doesn't give off a premium feel. Despite the matte finish, the laptop is an absolute fingerprint magnet and the nighttime finishes are only broken upwards past the greyness hinges, a minor chrome Lenovo logo, and the slightly larger chrome ThinkPad logo that adds the one fun chemical element to the otherwise staid pattern with a cherry LED dotting the "i" in ThinkPad.
For a quick comparison, the ThinkPad P15 is larger than any of its contempo competitors similar the MSI WS66 10TMT (fourteen.2 x 9.vii ten 0.7 inches, 4.half-dozen pounds), the MSI WS65 9TM (xiv.ane ten 9.8 x 0.7 inches, 4.3 pounds) or the Asus ProArt StudioBook 15 (14.two x 9.9 x 0.8 inches, 4.4 pounds).
Every bit you lot tin encounter, the ThinkPad P15 Gen ane is the largest in every dimension, and outweighs the closest competitor by 1.5 pounds. Information technology feels like a fleck more effort could have been put into slimming this monster down.
Popping open up the chapeau greets you with a full keyboard with a number pad and a traditional ThinkPad look. Of course, the red eraser (TrackPoint) is present which, forth with the scarlet trim on the upper touchpad buttons, gives a little color to the interior of the keyboard. The lettering on the keys is bright white and easily legible with excellent backlighting for dim environments.
The built-in fingerprint sensor is only below the cursor keys and color-matched to the chassis, only slightly recessed so it's easy to detect. At the bottom right, you have a large chrome ThinkPad logo mirroring the one establish on the lid.
The Lenovo ThinkPad P15 might also be the paradigm you lot see in the dictionary when you wait up "workstation." It has a bland pattern that gets the chore done.
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 security and immovability
Security is a high priority for business users and the ThinkPad P15 has you covered in this regard.
From a concrete security standpoint, there is the IR camera for Windows Hullo facial recognition every bit well as the previously mentioned fingerprint scanner. This should help keep your laptop and files secure without necessitating entering passwords all the fourth dimension. A Kensington lock is present besides to keep your laptop from existence hands snatched.
Turning to the internal security measures, the ThinkPad P15 houses a detached TPM 2.0 scrap to ensure the encryption of your files. An optional Smart Card Reader is too bachelor should that be necessary for your work.
The tank-similar build of the ThinkPad P15 is at least slightly justified by its MIL-STD 810G certification, which should allow it to handle a variety of tough environments from drops to shocks and farthermost temperatures. The keyboard is as well spill-resistant in case a beverage incident should occur.
The left side features a security lock slot, 1 Thunderbolt 4 port and a headphone jack, while the right side holds room for some other Thunderbolt 4 port and an HDMI port. This thing desperately needs at least one USB Blazon-A port.
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 ports
If you were hoping the massive size of this laptop meant a solid array of ports, then y'all won't be disappointed. While it doesn't characteristic any brand new Thunderbolt 4 ports, it does an otherwise first-class job of covering both legacy and modern connections.
Along its left side you have an HDMI ii.0 port, a USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 port (always on), and a philharmonic headphone/mic jack.
The dorsum is where most of the powerful ports can be found, including a power port, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a USB Blazon-C three.one inputs and an RJ-45 Ethernet port.
Finally, on the right side, yous get a Kensington lock port, a second USB Type-A iii.2 port, an SD card reader and an optional Smart Card reader.
That should encompass the needs of the vast majority of users, but with USB Type-C ports on the back, yous tin add a USB Type-C hub to comprehend any other potential connectivity requirements.
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 brandish
The ThinkPad P15's 15.6-inch, 4K (3,840 x 2,160-pixel) display offers a precipitous and brilliant image, allowing you to display a wealth of information on the screen if yous stick to the native resolution.
My review unit of measurement doesn't feature a touchscreen, but that option is bachelor in the 4K OLED configuration. The bezels on the ThinkPad P15 are well-nigh comically big, making the laptop feel like a throwback to the early on 2000s. I'grand sure this is the consequence of needing the physical space to accommodate the full keyboard and number pad, merely it seems like a 16-inch panel would have been a amend fit.
Watching the 4K trailer for the Mortal Kombat reboot, the ThinkPad P15 Gen one display showed its remarkably crisp image and faithful color reproduction; the tracking shot of the crystalline structure taking shape as Sub-Cipher formed an ice blade was gloriously detailed. However, the display isn't as vibrant as some. Having watched the trailer on a Milky way Annotation 20 Ultra previously, this was quite a fleck more muted, although phone screens tend to exist more bright than those on laptops.
Our colorimeter agreed with me, showing that the console covers 84% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. That bests the MSI WS66 10TMT (78%), but falls just behind the category average (85.6%) and considerably behind the Asus ProArt StudioBook 15 (121%) and MSI WS65 9TM (178%).
Brightness, on the other hand, was excellent with the Lenovo ThinkPad P15 peaking at 522 nits. That put it well beyond whatsoever of its competitors with the MSI WS65 9TM (393 nits) coming closest and the WS66 10TMT (346 nits) and Asus ProArt StudioBook fifteen (339 nits) a afar third and fourth.
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 keyboard and touchpad
Typing on the ThinkPad was a very comfortable experience. I've been bouncing between mechanical keyboards and extremely depression travel options and this barbarous pleasantly betwixt those. Keys bounced back chop-chop and provided a nice clicky feel without being overly noisy.
Overall, I constitute the key spacing was reasonable; but would take loved to run into more spacing between the number pad and the balance of the keyboard. However,t I understand there are space constraints fitting all of this into a 15.6-inch laptop. This is most apparent at the bottom-correct section of the keyboard where the cursor cluster and other keys are reduced to two-thirds or half size.
When information technology came to testing my typing speed, I averaged 83 words per minute with 96% accurateness on the 10fastfingers.com typing test, which is just slightly off my current boilerplate of 86 wpm. Not having used a ThinkPad recently, it took me about fifteen minutes of typing to adjust to the depression surrounding the ruddy TrackPoint nub located at the intersection of the 1000, H and B keys, but after that, I didn't accept any problems with it.
Turning to the touchpad, the 3.9 x two.7-inch surface feels a bit small relative to the size of the laptop itself, but it'south perfectly reasonable to use and more than than sufficient to carry out Windows x gestures. I had no issues with the speed or responsiveness of the touchpad and depressing the left or correct side to click was fine, if a bit mushy.
Longtime ThinkPad fans may opt to stick with the aforementioned TrackPoint for navigating around the laptop. My lack of skills with it aside, the rubber nub remains equally instantly reactive as ever and can be considerably faster than using the touchpad.
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 audio
The Lenovo ThinkPad P15 has superlative-firing speakers that get impressively loud. They easily filled my 18 by 12-foot listening space. However, even by laptop standards, the speakers fail to deliver basically any bass.
I listened to "Everything We Need" by A Day To Think, which ended up playing into the strengths of the Lenovo ThinkPad P15's speakers. The vocals and guitar came through clear and crisp without baloney even at full volume. However, jumping over to a pair of wireless headphones revealed a punch from the percussion in the groundwork that I was missing on the ThinkPad P15.
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 performance
The Intel Core i9-10885H processor coupled with 32GB of RAM and an Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 Max-Q GPU will eviscerate any normal task that you can come up upwards with for this laptop. Later loading upwards 40 Google Chrome tabs, including five YouTube videos running at 1080p and a trio of Twitch streams, the laptop didn't skip a crush or drop a frame. Of course, the Lenovo ThinkPad P15 is meant for far more taxing computing tasks and for that, we ready it loose on our many varied benchmarking tests.
The ThinkPad P15 absolutely tore through the Geekbench five.3 overall performance test, with a multi-cadre score of 7,784. This placed it alee of all of its competitors, like the MSI WS66 10TMT (6,735, Cadre i9-10980HK), the Asus ProArt StudioBook 15 (6,076, Cadre i7 9750H) and the MSI WS65 9TM (v,573, Core i7-9750H).
Its success carried over to our real-world Handbrake video transcoding test, which requires the laptop to convert a 4K video to 1080p resolution. The ThinkPad P15 completed the task in 7 minutes and 36 seconds. That was most a total minute ahead of the MSI WS66 10TMT (8:28) and over three minutes faster than the Asus ProArt StudioBook 15 (10:25) and the MSI WS65 9TM (ten:35).
The Lenovo ThinkPad P15's 1TB SSD did well, managing a 924 MBps transfer rate in our 5GB file transfer test, but this was behind the MSI WS66 10TMT (1,254 MBps, 1TB NVMe SSD). It was still practiced enough to best the category boilerplate of 807 MBps besides equally its other competitors, the MSI WS65 9TM (727 MBps, 512GB PCIe SSD) and the Asus ProArt StudioBook xv (628, 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD).
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 graphics
The Lenovo ThinkPad P15 features the tiptop-of-the-line Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 Max-Q GPU with 16GB of VRAM, which absolutely crushed the 3DMark Fire Strike synthetic graphics benchmark with a score of 17,296. That was enough to top the charts confronting its opponents, the MSI WS66 10TMT (16,788, Quadro RTX 5000), the WS65 9TM (xv,364, Quadro RTX 5000) and the Asus ProArt StudioBook 15 (13,767, GeForce RTX 2060).
Obviously, if gaming is your principal goal, one of the all-time gaming laptops is going to deliver a better price-to-functioning ratio, but if y'all just want to do some gaming in your downtime with the Lenovo ThinkPad P15, it is more up to the task. The Lenovo ThinkPad P15 churned out 93 frames per second on Sid Meier's Culture 6: Gathering Storm in 4K, tripling our 30-fps playability threshold.
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 battery life
There is some expectation with a workstation that all that ability volition yield less than stellar battery life and my Lenovo ThinkPad P15 review unit of measurement adds a 4K UHD display into the equation, so it'south unsurprising that its battery life is as bad as it is.
It managed a weak 3 hours and 56 minutes in our battery test, which involves continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of effulgence. Stacked up against other 4K workstations, that runtime is well behind the MSI WS65 9TM (6:57), but slightly alee of the Asus ProArt StudioBook 15 (three:39).
Naturally, the 1080p display of the MSI WS66 10TMT (10:x) gives information technology a significant border here. Users are presumably using their workstation plugged in anyhow, merely if on-the-get utilize is a gene, you lot would be wise to go with the 1080p display option on the ThinkPad P15 Gen 1.
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 webcam
The massive bezels on the ThinkPad P15 should accept given it plenty of room for a solid webcam. Instead, you have a standard 720p photographic camera that delivers pretty poor results even in adept lighting.
Snapping a few selfies in my function where I accept solid lighting control, I found a sweet spot where the shooter delivered some detail without beingness blown out past the light. However, it's an extremely fine line. Suffice it to say, that if y'all do a lot of video conferencing or video chat and intendance about prototype quality at all, y'all will desire to pick upward an external webcam.
We addressed it already in the security section, but it does also have a helpful IR camera for Windows Hullo support, and so that'due south at least a prissy touch.
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 heat
The Lenovo ThinkPad P15 has a considerable drove of vents: one on each side, 2 beyond the back and roughly half of the underside of the laptop is vented. The fans on the laptop volition not permit you forget about them, either. They spin up early on and often and are quite loud with a bit of a high-pitched whine when going full nail. Fortunately, all of these heat dissipation efforts are successful.
In our testing, which involves playing a fifteen-minute, 1080p video and and so taking temperature readings on diverse parts of the laptop, no role of the laptop yous are in contact with went over our 95 degrees Fahrenheit threshold. The touchpad was a reasonable 81 degrees, the keyboard was slightly hotter at 89 degrees, and the underside was just a tick hotter at 90 degrees.
Lenovo ThinkPad P15 software and warranty
The Lenovo ThinkPad P15 ships with Windows 10 Pro and is blessedly free of well-nigh any bloatware. Given the price and the intended audience for this laptop, yous would hope that's the case, but I've been surprised before.
Lenovo Commercial Vantage is the primary arrangement management tool that comes pre-installed on the ThinkPad P15. It gives you a quick glanceable system health dashboard and monitors for any necessary updates to your system. This includes BIOS and Lenovo specific updates besides as general Windows x updates. You can also enable Lenovo Wi-Fi Security from Commercial Vantage which volition analyze your network for any security threats in existent-time.
Lenovo also includes a couple of smaller utilities, Lenovo Quick Clean and Lenovo Functioning Tuner. The first is to disable everything on the laptop to allow it to be physically cleaned, this is largely for medical applications. Performance Tuner gives you a dashboard with current system performance and can be used to optimize for specific applications.
Commercial Vantage also displays your electric current warranty status with links to assist you accept advantage of or upgrade your warranty. The Lenovo ThinkPad P15 comes with a 3-year limited warranty. You tin meet how Lenovo fares in full general on this front in our Tech Support Showdown and Best and Worst Brands special reports.
Lesser line
The Lenovo ThinkPad P15 is a remarkable laptop in many regards. Its virtually unmatched functioning can handle any conceivable task you could throw at information technology. But it has a few articulate misses that make it a less compelling option for some users.
The sheer size and weight, at over 6 pounds and 1.2 inches thick, means the P15 shouldn't be the first choice for anyone who regularly needs to pack their workstation in a laptop bag. These same users would probably want to skip the 4K model due to the limited battery life. Finally, the fan noise is oppressive at times, and can be abrasive if you can't wear headphones while you work.
With all of that said, if you need this level of operation and but demand to occasionally motility the laptop from location to location, it is an accented joy to try to claiming this hardware. The screen is bright enough to handle well-nigh any environment and the keyboard is a pleasure to type on. The extensive selection of ports should keep your desk dongle free and the durable build ways that you tin can feel confident that it will hold upward to the rigors of use for years to come.
Source: https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/lenovo-thinkpad-p15
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