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日本[Video Review] Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 – A titan of a workstation
Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 in-depth review
Mobile workstations are weird devices. They are usually not very good-looking and have powerful hardware. They appear as a bodybuilder, who wears a suit. And most of the time, the powerful hardware inside is some pro-grade tech, which is good only at pro stuff.Well, the ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 is a different beast. Not only because of its thick body but also because of what it can do. First and foremost - there is the HX processor series. It provides 55W of base TDP and crazy fast boost clocks. Of course, this needs good cooling.And if this machine is anything close to resembling the 15-i[...]
Pros
- Up to 128GB of DDR5 ECC RAM
- Very good thermals
- 740 nits max brightness (LG LP160UQ1-SPB1 (LEN41B1))
- No PWM (LG LP160UQ1-SPB1 (LEN41B1))
- 88% of DCI-P3 coverage (LG LP160UQ1-SPB1 (LEN41B1))
- Comfortable spill-resistant keyboard
- 2x Thunderbolt 4, SD card + optional IR face recognition and fingerprint reader
- LTE support
Cons
- Thick and heavy
- Quite pricy
- Needs a more powerful power adapter
- Gets noisy during extreme load
Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 - Specs
- HDD/SSD
- up to 8000GB SSD
- M.2 Slot
- 2x 2280 PCIe NVMe 4.0 x4 See photo
- RAM
- up to 128GB
- OS
- Windows 11 Pro, Windows 10 Pro, Windows 11 Home, Windows 10 Home
- Battery
- 94Wh
- Body material
- Plastic / Polycarbonate, Aluminum, Glass Fiber, Magnesium alloy
- Dimensions
- 364 x 266 x 30.23 mm (14.33" x 10.47" x 1.19")
- Weight
- 2.95 kg (6.5 lbs)
- Ports and connectivity
- 1x USB Type-A
- 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps)
- 1x USB Type-A
- 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps), Sleep and Charge
- 1x USB Type-C
- 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps), Power Delivery (PD), DisplayPort
- 2x USB Type-C
- 4.0, Thunderbolt 4, Power Delivery (PD), DisplayPort
- HDMI
- Card reader
- SD
- Ethernet LAN
- Wi-Fi
- 802.11ax
- Bluetooth
- 5.1
- Audio jack
- 3.5mm Combo Jack
- Features
- Fingerprint reader
- Web camera
- FHD with privacy shutter, fixed focus
- Backlit keyboard
- Microphone
- Dual Array Microphone, far-field, Dolby Voice
- Speakers
- 2x 2W Stereo Speakers, Dolby Atmos
- Optical drive
- Security Lock slot
- Kensington Nano Lock
All Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 configurations
[Intro]
Lenovo is looking to spice up the workstation market with the ThinkPad P16 Gen 1. The laptop is built anew from the ground up, in order to accommodate a larger 16-inch display as well as the more powerful HX-series Alder Lake processors and RTX A-series GPUs.
[Design]
In typical ThinkPad fashion, the P16 uses a lot of different materials. The lid and base are a mixture of aluminum, magnesium, and chromium [97.25% aluminum, 2.5% magnesium, and 0.25% chromium].
As for the bottom panel and the back vent covers, they use a polymer of plastic and glass fibers mixed together. All of these materials make for a laptop that’s durable, but quite bulky at the same time, with a weight of 2.95 kg and a profile of 30.2 mm. By the way, we really like the red stripe on the back, which captures your attention right from the start and gives the laptop some noticeable characteristics, amidst all the silver and boring laptops the workstation market usually gets.
[Input devices]
Moving down to the base, we have a vertical grill on top and a power button next to it. Yes, it does have a fingerprint reader, so you’re secure. Below it, there’s a full-sized keyboard with a backlight, spill resistance, and a TrackPoint. The key travel is long and the keys feel tactile, so typing is as good as it gets. The touchpad has a large surface area and a Mylar cover, as well as a set of physical buttons to work with the TrackPoint.
[Ports]
Similar to a lot of gaming devices, Lenovo has put some of the ports on the back, with the power plug, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and an HDMI connector all being back there. Turning left, we find an optional SmartCard reader, an SD card slot, and a USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) port. On the other end, there’s one more Type-A port, a USB Type-C 3.2 (Gen. 2) port, and a NanoSIM slot.
[Display]
There are plenty of display options to pick from, but we tested the 4K IPS display. To say that it’s crispy would be an understatement. Images appear very sharp and really pop on the screen, thanks to a peak brightness of 740 nits. Colors also appear punchy and vivid, with 99% sRGB coverage and 88% DCI-P3 coverage. On the other hand, the panel’s accuracy only goes as down as 2.6 and that’s with our Design and Gaming profile applied in the DCI-P3 gamut.
We’ll link our display profiles in the description below, which also includes profiles for limiting Blue light exposure, as well as one for Office work, in case you go through a lot of texts or code, or maybe even Spreadsheets.
[Sound]
The front-firing speakers produce surprisingly good audio, while also being clear of deviations, so music and movies sound good.
[Performance]
Moving on to the performance of the P16, it offers several Alder Lake HX-series CPUs, of which we chose the 16-core Core i9-12950HX. Right from the start, it loses to the ZBook Fury 16 G9 in Cinebench R23, however, it is faster in the Photoshop test. For graphics, we had the best possible GPU, an RTX A5500 with 16GB of GDDR6 memory and a 130W power limit. It uses a similar chip to the RTX 3080 Ti and it shows in benchmarks. The TGP is still pretty high, allowing the GPU to excel in both professional workloads as well as games.
[Cooling]
It does that by having a bulky cooling setup, with four total heat pipes, two fans, and big cooling plates on top of the CPU, GPU, and VRMs. It performs really well, pushing the CPU to high clock speeds and wattages in both long runs and short bursts, while maintaining reasonable temperatures as well.
It does justice to the RTX A5500, maintaining its 130W power limit through the entire test while keeping temps in check. In terms of comfort, the laptop does get noisy when you put it through a torture scenario like we do, while the keyboard heats up to 53°C.
[Teardown and upgradeability]
Lastly, the ThinkPad P16 brings back an old-school feature, the service door, which allows easy access to two SODIMM slots and one M.2 PCIe Gen 4 SSD slot. But that’s not everything, as the keyboard is removable as well, revealing two more SODIMM slots, for a total of 128GB of DDR5 RAM, along with a second SSD slot.
If you want to see how to access all of the slots of the P16, we’ll have our teardown video linked in the description.
[Verdict]
The ThinkPad P16 is a laptop that puts all the focus on performance and being as useful as possible, bringing a wide selection of ports, a super bright display, as well as enough performance to last a lifetime. However, all of it comes at the expense of some extra bulk, which you’d have to get used to, so you better arm yourself with a sturdy backpack and start working out.
