hey uh we got us a lenovo thinkpad p15 gen 2 this is basically a workhorse laptop
if you are at a big company and you tell your boss to buy you a laptop to get real work done
heavy workloads this is what they buy you the box doesn't have tape on it because i
don't know came directly from lenovo that means it's probably from a lab somebody
made sure turned on and everything but we're gonna open it up this is not what you call
a thin and light laptop it is a thick and heavy laptop 6.2 pounds 15.6 inch 16 9 panel
boy i should have broken out we have some older think pads here it's it feels like it's it's
about as big as those it doesn't have a lock latch some of the older think pad customers you remember
these have the thing to lock it shut oh so now uh a couple things i want to point out very think pad
you get your joystick whatever they want to call it i love this because you can
if you're standing up at a laptop at a desk at a bench what i find is great this is easier to
use than this it's really hard to use a track pad sometimes if you're standing over it i like stand
over it 10 key people love 10 keys right full but the correct 10 key a lot of laptops with 10 keys
from asia have more of a phone where the zero is truncated it's just a single button this is
more like somebody who would use accounting if you're actually a 10k user like me this is what
you get 1.8 millimeters of travel famous think pad laptop keyboard these keyboards are just lovely
uh of course not exactly no bezel look 16 9 let's see what's inside i really don't know
what the specs of this particular model are so we're going to crank it up and find out
but uh the p15 gen 2 does pack of course the latest in hardware we'll get to that in one
second i want to see which screen option we got so there's actually two 1080p let's see it's a
touch not touch so really all work here no no touch so there's really two up two options at
1080p there's uh in this laptop you have a 4k hdr 500 panel that's oled you have an hdr 400
that's uh 600 nits and then you have two 1080ps uh one it's just a 300 nits pretty plain it's
probably the base level and you have one step over that is dolby vision anti-glare brighter 500 nits
let's see what how bright this is too bright yeah this is probably the 500 panel looks like
inside this laptop core i9 11950h that is intel's newest 11th gen tiger lake h
the of course it's an i9 there's a xeon option but this particular i9 has all the special v pro stuff
see the special v pro sticker that means you get all the manageability that you get in the company
so your it departments love these because they can manage them remotely
those are premium features they only push out to corporate focus cpus the 11950 does do a turbo
of up to five gigahertz it is an eight core cpu built on 10 nanometer super finfet as they call it
sounds consumer but a more commercial version of it on the gpu side this has a quadro
see if i can get this right quadro rtx a5000 i know a lot of people probably are not used
to what that is that is basically the quadro version version of the geforce
rtx 3080. same amount of course tensor cores and all that stuff look this this no this is thick
and i know some people are like what i like thin in my workhorse laptops thick means more cooling
more battery more performance oh let's look at the port since we're here what do we got what do
we got here type a sd card no smart card reader in here lock port if you want to chain this down to a
desk gigabit ethernet another type a we actually had um two isn't that the battery oh you're right
i can i didn't see that for a second you're right this is the this is the lenovo charger
which is always a little confused me because it looks like a usb port as you can see it's
not lenovo's actually had this for a lot of years it's lower profile than a round one and the nice
thing is most companies have about a billion of these things so you can get these um power bricks
from their bin this is a 230 watt model yep 230 watts two thunderbolt fours because this uh tiger
lake a usbc and on this side uh full-size hdmi another usb-a i don't know what this is
this probably is maybe in a certain model that's for a sim card possibly headset port
oh let's look this is nice this is like old school right you don't really see this that often
it is unfortunate companies have gone away from including ports there we go
oh nice okay so this gives you easy access lenovo's done this for a while
i guess this probably protect the memory i don't know it's not really for thermals
maybe add a little bit of insulation or protection not really sure so you're gonna get two ddr4
and then of course storage let's try to get this without messing it up
two m.2s ah open so this laptop already has a single m.2 gen4 one terabyte and then if you
want to add more right here easy to get to of course you have the thermal pad keep it cool
you have this little bit of protective layer here but look at this it's in a door this is so old
school but i love it because you don't have to pull the whole bottom of the stupid laptop off
to get to it's easy to service if i get this door back but this is the way it used to be
in laptops you can do this of course because this laptop is thicker
oh wait a minute this might be a laptop that will come with windows 11
because that does not look like a windows 10 sticker to me this particular laptop
though does not have windows 11 so and most corporate customers will re-image their own
version of windows on there anyway so six pounds uh this particular laptop 32 gigs uh not
ecc ecc of you need the xeon version but you get the quadro cuadro of course for people who don't
know is basically the version of geforce with the special drivers that they send
to auto autodesk and other content creation any other professional workstation application makers
they take the drivers they make sure that you get what you get on the hardware that
you're running it on and you pay a butt load more than you would for geforce i know people
say there's no performance difference but i've actually been recently seeing data shown to me
showing there's a huge difference going from a g-force to a quadro in certain applications
say if you happen to be a defense contractor and you're making a new fighter jet the application
you're using will be faster because these the drivers support it that is mostly an artificial
decision by the makers but if you're basically doing it for a living and you're making a
65 million dollar plane it doesn't matter anyway so we're going to run a couple quick tests i just
want to remind you this is not a review we're doing a quick preview just a couple cpu tests
i will do maybe a little bit on the quadro but we're not really outfitted to be running cad
software that you're going to build the f35 on but we're going to run a couple things just to
give you an idea so come right back hey so we're back just finished rolling a few benchmarks um
not everything i wanted to run but we're going to kick this off with cinebench r20 of course it's a
3d modeling application which you might actually do on a laptop like this this is a core i9 11 950h
performances for this it's okay not doesn't knock knock it out of the ballpark there are faster
laptops frankly those laptops are also bigger generally 17.3 inch screens um but as you can
see the this think pads it's not bad although the i7 in a bigger laptop can outperform it there's
also a lenovo performance tuning application i was not able to download and run on this you
might be able to goose a little bit more out of that tiger like h part but when you're looking
at single threaded performance again in cinebench r20 uh it's actually pretty good we're looking at
performance running right there with an i9 11 980 hk and that is a really hot cpu for light thread
lightly threaded task single threaded test and you can see again bam right there almost as fast as
the the top-end i9 uh we did also run v-ray this is basically doing 3d rendering on the c well you
can do it on the cpu but the cool kids today they do it all in the gpu so we actually ran it on the
cpu using a cpu compute it's that compute it's actually called a cuda version although it runs
on radeon which makes no sense so i think it's really just a gpu version of v-ray and there's
also one that runs using the hardware ray tracing heart components in the rtx cards performance of
the thinkpad p15 uh not bad doesn't blow away those 3080s at 150 watt 130 watt or 165 watts
uh this by the way this a5000 quadrille rtx a5000 is 110 watt tgps so performance is pretty good
but you're probably not going to touch some of those really hot big fat laptops of course
this is not exactly a thin laptop so you're going well gordon why do i want a quadro rtx a5000 then
because a 3080 g-force looks like it's actually faster or as fast in a lot of circumstances
i was trying to download spec view perf a an industry standard workstation benchmark
i'm still downloading it i've been downloading it for an hour and a half
so uh i don't really have the numbers to give you right now so i'm actually going to show you
some numbers from a competing laptop vendor yes sorry lenovo this is the results from asus but it
does give you an idea of what you're going to get out of the quadro a5000 in this laptop this is a
performance of the quadro series rtx a3000 a 4000 a 5000 you can see on the right hand side in the
beige those are the quadro parts the rtx parts
these of course are in a different laptop but you can expect very similar performance deltas between
conventional g-force and quadro and you can see that quadro pretty much kicks the crap out
of g-force and a lot of that is that special magic you send the drivers off to siemens and
katya and creo all these things where you know this is real industry stuff and you get special
magic out of them a lot of that is somewhat artificial because i don't doubt that a g-force
could be as fast but it's not going to be as fast because essentially if you're paying to ride in
a quadro rtx you're going to get more performance and in fact look at that siemens score it's insane
g-force just sucks there and a quadro rtx a5000 is like 19 times faster than a geforce
rtx 3080. of course you would argue well that's because they don't let that other card go as fast
and i would agree but when you're getting paid a lot of money to do work on a laptop
like this it's going to be worth paying for that real workstation level graphics card so
that's it for the benchmarks for now i do want to show you this really special treat
this is a a thinkpad t430 it's been sitting around kicking around a lab forever
it's about 10 years old i think maybe nine years it's an i7 original original i7 aarondale i think
this is actually a it's a smaller screen i think but it's actually it's really funny to me because
it's almost like lenovo really knows there's that that retro people who buy think pads want a think
pad this keyboard is awesome uh the little nub has been the nut the nub has been rough you can still
buy replacements for them these things are built like tanks i know people don't understand why but
um think pads are built like tanks i love them the keyboards are lovely
and if you're into a thinkpad you're probably into like an old
you know round volvo that's the kind of thing you're going for this is all work no play here
it's just amazing to me that it's so similar you've got the access door for the memory
you've got access door for the memory on this baby and it's probably almost about the same
thickness this one of course is a little bit wider because it has a bigger screen so pretty nice um
if it ain't broke don't fix it and people who want think pad that's what they want they in fact
lenovo this has been a feature for a while thinkpad the little eye lights up that's just
a waste of power but people want that in their thinkpad this this tells you i'm doing serious
work i could be working in the pentagon with one of these they're not going to give you some sleek
aluminum thing you're going to get something like one of these in the pentagon so uh i do want to
talk about the price i don't know the exact price of this unit looking at other p15 gen 2s that
lenovo has on its website it's going to be stiff i found this same laptop with a 128 gigs of memory
this thing has four apparently four uh ddr4 slots in here so you can run up to 128 gigs of memory
so 128 gig 4k version with the a5 000 and 11 950 h is about 5
000 that's like apple pricing so of course you're getting 128 gigs of memory but uh it's not cheap
but again this is a laptop designed for somebody who's going to sit uh in the in the pentagon or
design something that's going to be be used at the pentagon uh and it comes with a price tag attached
to it so we are going to try to get a full review of this we don't normally do full reviews of
of workstation laptops like this but i'll i'll try to crank some up some benchmarks
out of spec view performances finish downloading but come back to pcworld.com for the full review