LENOVO ThinkBook 15P Review

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In this article, I give you my Lenovo ThinkBook 15P review with specs included. This laptop comes in a stripe two-tone gray color that’s a little bit different than on other Lenovo laptops.

This is a Lenovo ThinkBook, not ThinkPad. This is their SOHO line of laptops and this one, in particular, is the ThinkBook 15p. Not to be confused with the ThinkPad P15, that I also reviewed, which is a business mobile workstation. Check out that review here: Lenovo ThinkPad P15 (Gen 1) Mobile Workstation Review.

This one is not just SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) for small and medium businesses or home use but particularly this is for creative types. It’s a 15.6-inch laptop as you can probably guess right away from the size of it and it has Intel H-series 45-watt CPU inside so the more powerful kind.

Lenovo ThinkBook 15P is available with a Full HD IPS full sRGB display or R 4K 10-bit HDR display that’s been color calibrated using X-Rite Pantone. So, that’s starting to sound pretty appealing and when you hear about the price too you’re going to be interested.

Speaking of that price now don’t be fooled by Lenovo’s website. I mean they often have great sales too but sometimes for brand new models that come out the price is pretty high. For example, they list a core i5 with a full HD display for $1449 but if you look on popular retail sites you may find much better deals.

My configuration was available for only thirteen hundred thirty five dollars and that has the Intel tenth-gen six Core i7 CPU. Plus, an Nvidia GTX card, the 1650Ti Max-Q graphics card, and a 4K wide-gamut display.

So that’s a pretty nice laptop for the price. You might think there must be something going on like the build quality is lower. But, no. It’s actually pretty good besides the fact it looks kind of cool in that two-tone look with that angle on the back going on.

It’s an aluminum lid on it. I didn’t find what the bottom is made of, it might feel plasticky but it gets pretty cold to the touch so I think it is aluminum as well.

Lenovo ThinkBook 15P is very rigid actually. The lid has no flex, the keyboard deck is firm on this so the build quality is good.

In terms of aesthetics and all that sort of thing, I don’t think it looks as chic as a Razer Blade or an XPS 15. It also depends on your taste but for this price, it looks pretty darn good.

So, all in all, that’s pretty powerful mobile workstation stuff going on. And, that Nvidia GTX card, the 1650Ti Max-Q (or the lower level that has 1650, not Ti, Max-Q) that’s still a pretty performing GPU. It is designed for creatives more than for gamers.

So if you’re looking for acceleration in Adobe Premiere, for example, or whatever video editing suite that you use and Photoshop (not that Photoshop often needs as much help honestly from dedicated graphics these days) you’ve got it.

And you’ve got a well-calibrated display to match that GPU and the wide gamma is sweet. But, even the full HD with full sRGB coverage is good enough for people who are designing content for the web.

Lenovo ThinkBook 15P Specs

Lenovo ThinkBook 15P has two RAM slots. Yes, it has upgradeable RAM which we kind of would expect for a laptop in this size range and in this class of machines, so that’s good.

The laptop I have has 16 GB of DDR4 2933 megahertz RAM. It has two slots, I have a single 16 GB module so that means it’s single-channel. If you add a second one you can go to dual-channel.

And it has an M.2 NVMe SSD that performs pretty well. Also, there’s a second slot that’s available too. So, if you want to add in the second drive, video editors, for example, who need more storage or if you have a big photo library and you’re using Adobe Lightroom, well, it’s there for you.

So it’s all sounding really good right. How about the keyboard. Keyboard’s not bad. I’m not in love with it but it’s not horrible either. It’s fairly tactile it has nice key return not much travel. You know but not abnormally low. It’s backlit and white the usual lenovo way. Fn plus space bar turns your white back lighting on. It’s fine.

As you can see it has a number pad on board it’s up to you as to whether you find that useful or not some people love that some people don’t. And the track pad on it is centered under the space bar which i appreciate. It’s a little weird when it isn’t for me.

It’s a microsoft precision track pad with a mylar sheet covering on it it works fine no complaints with that. You do have a fingerprint scanner on board as well. Ports aren’t bad either. We have an ethernet port not something you can take for granted anymore even in this size machine.

Which by the way weighs 1.9 kilograms which is about 4.19 pounds. We have two usb a ports on board we have hdmi 2.0 quickly becoming the standard so that can drive a 4k display at 60 hertz. We have a headphone jack a full-size sd card slot and a usbc gen1 port.

Now here’s the bad news. And this is not supporting this usb c port displayport display out. So the only thing you can do is use the hdmi if you want to hook up an external display. There are some caveats that would be one of them. Battery life well that’s another one too.

So 57 watt hour battery. If that was a 13 or 14 inch ultrabook we’d say hey that’s a great size battery. But for a laptop this size and this performance that’s not much of a battery. And even lenovo’s battery claims aren’t that high.

The full hd obviously will get better battery life than the 4k that’s the way things work. But yeah i’m unplugged even though it says nvidia optimus switchable graphics mostly i’m seeing about four and a half five hours with moderate use of 200 nits and display brightness doing some photoshop work some productivity stuff some social networking a little streaming video.

If you’re doing something like adobe premiere expect less. So you’re going to want to carry the 135 watt charger with you for doing heavy duty work with this guy. Sound on this is better than average. Again being a media content creation and consumption sort of machine that is something we would love to see we actually do see or hear. Literally here.

You have two two odd stereo speakers harmon branded and it has dolby audio software. There’s actually some bass here and it’s pretty loud it’s pretty full and not grading and shrill and tinny and all that sort of thing. So as laptop speakers go it’s pretty good.

All right the undersize here plenty of ventilation that’s a good thing and it’s a dual layer grille i like that so well too much junk doesn’t get sucked up the bottom. And our speaker grilles flank on the side. These are down inside firing speakers mostly down.

And to take off the bottom coverage phillips head screws they’re all visible not hard. Getting it off you’re going to want to use a guitar pick or a pry tool because it’s pretty tenacious. And here’s the lid the underside here. And because it has this massive plastic clip struck structure and reinforcement around the edges.

So those things all well they grab on and we have some copper heat shielding right here too. So here are internals. There’s our 57 one hour battery not a very big battery but hey. The speaker drivers are actually you know on the small side. They sound surprisingly good given their size but hey nice.

This big empty space here that’s a mysterious thing isn’t it. Well not really. This is your second m.2 ssd slot so you can put a half height or a full height in there’s mounts for each. And also the boot drive that we have here is a little shorty half height one under the heat goo right here.

And in case you wanted to replace it with a longer one full 2281 you could this is the mounting there. Still a little extra space but. The ram is under this shield right here one of those pry off little metal ones. Helps if you have some fingernails. And there you go.

Two ram slots again we have a 16 gig with a single channel one 16 gig module instead of two eights .their benefit is that you don’t have to throw ram away if you want to upgrade it and get dual channel in more capacity but the downside is a little bit lesser performance with single-channel ram out of the box.

And we have two fairly large hand fans here considering the fact that this is not a gaming laptop that’s reasonably good design there. Two heat pipes going to our cpu and gpus. Tripod heatsinks the last not the one on each corner for a little bit better pressure.

But then again the the cooling on this has been fairly adequate. You will hear the fans if you’re pushing this hard no doubt but nothing out of the ordinary let’s put it that way for a machine in this power class. And performance with our six core i7 is exactly where we would expect it for this kind of machine.

Again you can get it with the core i5 which is a four core and the eight core i7 is also available which would be pushing the thermals a bit. And the socketed intel wifi six card it’s the ax201 with bluetooth 5.1 is right there. There’s no option for 4g lte on this model since it’s not a business laptop.

So that’s the Lenovo thinkbook 15p a new model from Lenovo and i like it a lot. The looks and the build quality are excellent. It’s the display option particularly this 4k display very very nice. The dedicated graphics it’s enough that if you want to do some light gaming you can do it or more than light gaming honestly.

You know it’s not going to be playing cyberpunk 2077 at high frame rates or something but older games less demanding games it’s definitely even a go for that. And well the only drawbacks I can really say are the battery life is not going to be great on this because the battery’s not very big and the usb c port is just for data only. So no display out. So that that hdmi 2.0 port is going to be what you’re working with if you need an external monitor.

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Lenovo ThinkBook 15P
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