Lenovo ThinkPad E15 Gen 4 – Top 5 Pros and Cons
The E-series from the ThinkPad family is the most budget-friendly option that the brand offers, and it can be a good value offering for those who want to dip their toes into the business computing segment.
For 2022, the E15 Gen 4 laptop is pretty empowered, thanks to the Alder Lake P-series and U-series, which totally enable the notebook to perform really well, while preserving battery and being relatively well-priced.
Today we present you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the Lenovo ThinkPad E15 Gen 4.
Lenovo ThinkPad E15 Gen 4: Full Specs / In-depth Review
4 reasons to BUY the Lenovo ThinkPad E15 Gen 4
1. Input devices
As with most ThinkPads, the keyboard is always great, offering long key travel, clicky feedback, a backlight, and spill-resistance. On top of that, you have a fantastic touchpad with a smooth Mylar cover that has no dead zones and accurate tracking. You have a third Input method in the form of a Red Trackpoint, with dedicated physical buttons on top of the pad.
2. Upgradeability
The Upgradeability of the notebook could have been better, especially with the 15.6-inch form factor, however, we are still glad to see a SODIMM RAM slot, along with half of the memory being soldered to the board. Storage-wise, we see two M.2 PCIe x4 slots, with only one of them (the right one) supporting Gen 4 drives.
Here is our detailed teardown video, which shows how to access both the RAM and the storage slots on the ThinkPad E15.
3. Performance
CPU benchmarks
The performance output of the notebook is good but could be better. While the Core i7-1255U does outperform every Tiger Lake U-series CPU in existence, the cooling setup could use some work, or maybe a more impressive fan curve, in order to squeeze a bit more from the 10-core Core i7.
Results are from the Cinebench R23 CPU test (the higher the score, the better)
GPU benchmarks
The onboard graphics do a much better job performing against the competition, as you can see from the benchmarks below. Until AMD comes out with its RDNA 2 integrated graphics, Intel is sitting on top of the iGPU game, both in terms of entry-level gaming and productivity.
The results are from 3DMark Time Spy (Graphics). Higher is better.
Results are from 3DMark Fire Strike (Graphics) benchmark (higher the score, the better)
The results are from 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited. Higher is better.
Results are from the Unigine Superposition benchmark (higher the score, the better)
4. Battery life
The 57Wh battery pack is ideal for this laptop, lasting for 11 hours and 15 minutes of Web browsing, or 7 hours and 25 minutes of video playback, which is plenty for a whole day of work. Now, we conduct the battery tests with the Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits, and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with.
1 reason NOT to buy the Lenovo ThinkPad E15 Gen 4
1. I/O
The I/O on the laptop is alright, but it could have been better. What we have is a Thunderbolt 4 port, one USB 2.0 port, which we advise you to use for a mouse, one more USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) port, an HDMI 2.0 port, which is pretty good for signal output, a LAN port, and a 3.5 mm audio jack.