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日本Lenovo ThinkBook 15p Gen 2 – Top 5 Pros and Cons
The ThinkBook series has been very successful, offering high-quality notebooks with features and performance to spare. Today we have a heavy hitter in the face of the ThinkBook 15p Gen 2, which comes with Tiger Lake H-series processors and RTX Graphics to deliver a good package for any occasion. You can definitely game on it, thanks to the RTX graphics, which are also really helpful for productivity and rendering.
Today we are presenting you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the Lenovo ThinkBook 15p Gen 2.
Lenovo ThinkBook 15p Gen 2: Full Specs / In-depth Review
4 reasons to BUY the Lenovo ThinkBook 15p Gen 2
1. Design and build quality
The laptop is mostly made out of metal, with the lid and the bottom panel being crafted out of aluminum. The base is plastic, however, the finish on top is so good, that you can barely tell the difference. The lid has a very appealing two-tone finish, with the ThinkBook wordmark on the bottom part. The laptop is quite rigid. According to the press release, it has passed the MIL-STD-810H certification exam, which is nice to have. Despite the hardware inside, Lenovo manages to keep the laptop portable, weighing 1.90 kg and having a profile of 19.9 mm.
The lid opens with one hand, albeit with some difficulty, thanks to the stiff hinges. The top and bottom bezels are a bit thicker, but we can excuse the former thanks to the FHD Webcam. On the base, we find a separated power button with an optional integrated fingerprint reader, a very good keyboard with a NumPad, spill resistance, and clicky feedback. The travel is a bit short, however.
2. I/O
The I/O is pretty wide, coming with a LAN port, an HDMI 2.0 port, two USB Type-A 3.2 ports with one Gen. 1 port and one Gen. 2 port, a Thunderbolt 4 port, a 3.5 mm audio jack, and an SD card reader.
3. Upgradeability
The laptop is very upgradeable, using two SODIMM RAM slots that can fit up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM running in dual-channel mode. Storage-wise, there are two M.2 PCIe x4 slots, one of which has PCIe Gen 4 support.
Here is our detailed teardown video, which showcases how to access both the RAM and SSD slots.
4. Cooling
The hardware that we have here requires some serious cooling, so we are kind of shocked to see only two heat pipes for both the CPU and GPU, two fans bunched up together, and several heatsinks around the motherboard.
Max CPU load
In this test we use 100% on the CPU cores, monitoring their frequencies and chip temperature. The first column shows a computer’s reaction to a short load (2-10 seconds), the second column simulates a serious task (between 15 and 30 seconds), and the third column is a good indicator of how good the laptop is for long loads such as video rendering.
Average core frequency (base frequency + X); CPU temp.
| Intel Core i7-11800H (45W TDP) | 0:02 – 0:10 sec | 0:15 – 0:30 sec | 10:00 – 15:00 min |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lenovo ThinkBook 15p Gen 2 | 3.45 GHz (B+50%) @ 84°C @ 90W | 3.41 GHz (B+48%) @ 96°C @ 86W | 2.80 GHz (B+22%) @ 77°C @ 55W |
Despite the seemingly low-effort cooling solution, we see the Core i7-11800H reach good working speeds while not overheating at all.
Real-life gaming
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti | GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 2 min) | GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 30 min) | GPU frequency/ Core temp (Max fan) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lenovo ThinkBook 15p Gen 2 | 1539 MHz @ 69°C @ 50W | 1536 MHz @ 69°C @ 50W | – |
The same can be said about the GPU, with the lower 50W TGP keeping the temps low, while the clock speeds are good enough.
Gaming comfort
The good thing about this solution is that it keeps the noise down, resulting in a quiet working environment even under full load. The outside temperature is also very good, at 40°C.
1 reason NOT to buy the Lenovo ThinkBook 15p Gen 2
1. Battery life
The Tiger Lake H-series processors haven’t been the most efficient units, and that can be seen in the battery life tests of the device, which comes with a 57Wh battery. The addition of a 4K panel also means that you are powering 4x the pixels of a traditional FHD display. This results in a bit under 8 hours of Web browsing, or 5 hours and 39 minutes of video playback.
