Blog

In this article, I give you my Lenovo ThinkPad P14s (Gen 2) review with specs included. As you might guess the second generation of the Intel-based model. They also made an AMD Ryzen model with Ryzen 4000 Pro processors but we’re looking at the Intel one here.

So, this is an interesting and no doubt a confusing thing, the Lenovo ThinkPad P-series are their mobile workstations. Some of them can get pretty big and relatively heavy by today’s standards. Because they’re very powerful they’re meant for people who are doing rendering, CAD, all that sorts of things.

This obviously is a thinner and lighter sort of laptop. There’s also a 15-inch model which is the P15s, very similar. This one does not have H-series 45-watt hexa-core CPUs or something like that or heavy-duty graphics. This is more like a delight for programmers in the company and also for those who have to show some CAD drawings whether you’re not doing a whole lot of rendering and all that sort of thing.

Lenovo ThinkPad P14s (Gen 2) is very thin and very light and one of my favorite things about it is the luscious 4K display. It’s something you won’t see for example in the Thinkpad T14 series of laptops. If you’re trying to differentiate and figure out which one you want.

Inside we have Intel 11th gen U-series ultrabook quad-core CPUs and we have Nvidia Quadro T500 graphics. That’s quite low-end GPU and consumer GPUs that would be closest to something like the Nvidia MX150. It’s better than nothing is about what you can say for this.

Lenovo ThinkPad P14s (Gen 2) does have many ISV certifications (What is an ISV? ISV is an acronym for Independent Software Vendor. ISVs create software for some industries) for things like Solidworks and Creo and ArcGIS. So, more for showing designs than actually doing a lot of design work on it, then this laptop can be used.

It’s available with full hd display ips but what i really like and wow when i opened it up i was like oh this is nice the 4k ips display. Which is wide gamut also quite bright and is hdr 400 certified. In fact ours measured 541 nits of brightness.

For those of you have to actually use this outdoors especially given the fact that this is a matte non-touch display without glare wow it’s great. By the way if you do go for the full hd versions they’re 300 nit and you have your choice of touch or non-touch.

As usual you can get this with core i5 and core i7 cpus. A variety of those you can see that when we list the specs for you. It has a single ram slot plus some ram soldered on board. Uh when we look at the internals i’ll explain what i mean by that a little bit more fully.

There’s an m.2 nvme ssd slot and you can get this with optional wn 4g lte. And of course you have intel wi-fi 6 on board. And that is the ax210 card which means that’s wi-fi 6e. We are forward-looking with bluetooth 5.2. So not bad. What i like about the laptop the size effect is quite thin and quite light is the keyboard very nice.

Your traditional thinkpad keyboard. Granted this is not a chunker so you’re not going to get like two millimeters of key job or something. But key travel on this is quite reasonable. It feels nice and tactile. For those of you who didn’t like the x1 carbon maybe as much because you felt the key travel was a little less than you liked or something. This feels a little bit more traditional in terms of the tactility of it. Good stuff here.

And of course you have the usual track pad and the eraser stick pointer. Like a mobile workstation it has a lot of ports. Which is something you don’t always expect to see especially on an s series thinner lighter laptop. We have two thunderbolt four ports we have two usba one on each side conveniently enough.

You have an hdmi 1.4 port you have a micro sd card slot that’s uhs too. And ethernet too gigabit ethernet of course the headphone jack. So not bad in terms of connectivity. You’re not certainly assigned to dongle life here or desperately needing a docking station.

Of course lenovo does offer docs for all their laptops. Oh and of course there’s an optional smart card reader because it is a business laptop. In terms of security you have a fingerprint scanner and a windows hello ir camera is optional on this. In terms of durability it’s the usual thing pad stuff dust vibration shock cold weather hot weather you know that sort of thing.

Definitely sturdy rigid build here and their usual matte black understated think paddy kind of look. In terms of performance again core i5 and core i7 these are the used series ultrabook cpus and the nvidia t500 graphics card inside. So performance wise it performs like your average ultrabook with a little extra umph.

Again sort of like an nvidia mx150 if you were going to have some fun and play a little older game or something like that it would certainly help with the frame rates a little bit to make something playable to 30 frames per second that might have not been otherwise.

Uh in terms of serious cad architectural work arches that sort of thing and. If you’re the person who’s actually doing those designs again you’re going to want something stronger. If you’re the person presenting those designs it’s great. If you’re a programmer given the nice keyboard and the sharp display on this it will be very nice. The fans on this our fan.

It’s not terribly loud but you’ll hear it with some frequency even if you’re not doing heavy lifting. But it’s again it’s an ultrabook fan it’s well tuned. So it’s not loud it’s more like a little and definitely not roaring that sort of thing. Surface temperatures are fine on this if you push it super duper hard you can get a little hot on the bottom underside sure. But in general surface temperatures are not much of an issue here.

The carbon fiber kind of design that they use is nicer to the touch than your average aluminum thin and light ultrabook. For a battery we have a 51 watt hour battery which is perfectly fine for a 14 inch laptop and a 65 watt fast charger it plugs into the usb c port on this.

And as you would expect because we’re not talking about a lot of heavy lifting horsepower here and even that nvidia t500 card is not going to use up a lot of power. This is pretty good for nine to 10 hours of use business light use that sort of thing at 200 nits a brightness with wi-fi on and active. So that’s not too bad is it.

To take off the bottom cover you unscrew the phillips head screws they are all visible. These are captive screws so they will stay connected to the bottom cover. Be sure to remove the nano sim card tray from the back first though so you can actually get this cover off.

And then you’re going to have to pry around a little bit more than average for think pad. And as you can see it’s a wrap around edge so that’s why you’re going to have to use a pry tool. A little bit more than you would usually have to do with a thin pad because well again the wrap around design.

And there’s the underside. And here are our internals. So notice that we have one ram slot which is better than no ram slots hey yay that. This does have memory soldered on board depends on which configuration you get. It could either be 8 or 16 gigs soldered on board.

So you can order it with up to 32 gigs of ram if you do that 16 gigs will be soldered. If you order a 16 gig model then eight gigs will be soldered on and the rest will be in a module here. Our heat sinks for our cpu and gpu right here.

Of course the cooling fan is over here pretty decent size. Since we’re not talking about serious heavy lifting in the horsepower department we don’t need massive cooling here. Under here this is where the 4g LTE card would go if you ordered it with that feature. The wi-fi card however is soldered down so that is not replaceable that’s right here.

The m1.2 SSD is here. Again anything from 128 gig up to 2 terabytes and vme fast ssds and the battery is right here 51 watt-hour. So that’s the Lenovo thinkpad p14s again a mobile workstation category but not exactly a true mobile workstation but a lot of ports a really nice sharp 4k display option that you won’t find say on the t series of laptops from Lenovo.

Yes it gets confusing they make so many laptops that are so similar. So those are the things that stand for this laptop. Really there’s nothing i can say terribly against it as long as you like the thinkpad look which is fine with me.