The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme is not for the avocado-toast-eating youths. You know, the ones who take a laptop clad in brushed aluminum or maybe rose gold to Starbucks so they can fill out an application for grad school.When a real businessperson thinks about the coolest laptop they could use to put together a proposal for a hostile takeover of a multi-billion dollar competitor with 25,000 employees, they think all black and all business. And yes, Lenovo's famous ThinkPad X1 Extreme is of the latter sort. It channels Fortune 100, a bull market, and power suits. And with its 15-inch display, it provides extra real estate for that your huge spreadsheets and slick presentations—with surprisingly little weight penalty. Just don't expect the performance to be as extreme as its name. Gordon Mah UngForget the rose gold and brushed aluminum—if you're all about business, you're all about ThinkPad black.
What's inside the ThinkPad X1 ExtremeFor this review, we looked at an option-packed $3,149-version of the ThinkPad X1 Extreme, with an excessive amount of RAM and an excessive amount of pixels, too. The laptop featured:. Intel 8th -gen Core i7-8850H. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q.
How to use IBM Lenovo's Print Screen Key and CapsLock Key? #1 Post by vagred » Sun Jun 12, 2011 2:10 pm PrtSc key is at the bottom row between Alt and Ctrl, white letter, do you just press it to print?
32GB DDR4/2667 in dual-channel mode. 1TB M.2 NVMe Samsung PM981 SSD.
15.3-inch 4K screen with touch support. Biometric IR camera and finger-print readerThe screen represents Lenovo's first foray into a ThinkPad X1 with a 15.6-screen. The company doesn't scrimp, either. Our review unit came with a beautiful 4K UHD touch panel with a max brightness of 400 nits. The AU Optronics IPS panel (or IPS-like anyway) is an 8-bit panel, but Lenovo's partnership with Dolby lets the panel support Dolby Vision HDR content. So, while not a true 10-bit panel, it can look richer if the content actually supports it.Lost in the specs might be one of the most amazing features of the ThinkPad X1 Extreme: its weight. Coming in at exactly 4 pounds with a 4K UHD touch screen (which typically adds a few ounces), it's noticeably lighter than, say, Dell's XPS 15 at 4.25 pounds.
Add touch to the XPS 15 (most of it is the Gorilla glass in the panel) and you're up at 4.5 pounds. Many other workhorse laptops actually push up closer to 5 pounds.The only other laptop we can think of that's this light and svelte is Apple's MacBook Pro 15, also a flat four pounds. (without touch). But the MacBook Pro 15 compromises on performance for its weight and size—does the ThinkPad X1 Extreme do the same? More on that later.
Gordon Mah UngThe power brick of the ThinkPad X1 Extreme is fairly compact for 130-watts of power. ThinkPad X1 Extreme trackpad and keyboardThe keyboard and trackpad on top of the hardware matter, too, and the ThinkPad X1 Extreme sticks with tradition. Sure, some ThinkPad aficionados will always think fondly back to a 'their favorite'ThinkPad keyboard design that dates back to the George Herbert Walker Bush administration, but the company's keyboards have always been among the best. If your Mac friends tell you something doesn't 'feel right' about the ThinkPad's keyboard, tell them it's the generous 1.7mm of key travel.The trackpad is correctly and proportionately sized, without being so large that you have to pray to the palm rejection gods to keep from wiping whole sentences by accident. The surface of the trackpad has a very slightly friction to it, the usefulness of which will fall to personal preference (our fingertips prefer glass-smooth trackpads these days).There is also, of course, the famous TrackPoint. Folks who grew up on this side of the millennium probably have no idea what that nub is or what purpose it serves, given the quality of today's trackpads, but it's essentially a very small joystick that acts like the mouse.
The tip can be replaced with any number of nubs. While it may seem like a useless redundancy, we actually find the nub pretty comfortable to use when, say, standing above the laptop. It's just good to have options. Gordon Mah UngBesides the trackpad, the ThinkPad X1 Extreme also includes the beloved TrackPoint navigation nub. ThinkPad X1 Extreme PortsAs a workhorse laptop, the ThinkPad X1 Extreme has a good port selection. On the left side there's a full-size HDMI 2.0 port, an analog headset jack, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and a dedicated ethernet dongle port using a proprietary connector. Don't confuse this with a miniUSB or miniDisplayPort.
It's actually for Lenovo's Ethernet Extension Cable, which supports remote management features for the laptop that can't be done with most conventional USB ethernet adapters.The large square plug at the end isn't a USB Type A plug, but rather Lenovo's proprietary square prong adapter that it's used since 2012. Although many will groan that a proprietary plug is old-fashioned, the plug means companies with barrels of Lenovo laptop power plugs will always have a spare. The longstanding use of the plug also means aftermarket plugs are very affordable.The stock 130-watt power brick that comes with the ThinkPad X1 Extreme is quite petite, so you shouldn't mind keeping it with you while traveling. You could also charge using one of the Thunderbolt 3 ports, but only at very reduced rates. In our tests, we couldn't get more than 20 watts out of a 45-watt HP USB-C charger or Innergie PowerGear USB-C 60 watt adapter.
Gordon Mah UngThe Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme (top) has a decent array of ports. For size comparison, a Dell XPS 15 9570 sits beneath it.Moving on to the right side of the ThinkPad X1 Extreme, we see two USB Type A 5Gbps ports, a Kensington lock port, and an SD card reader. The port is semi-flush, so you can leave an SD card inserted most of the time and not notice.
Performance of the slot, however, was pretty lackluster: The best we could coax out of a Sandisk Extreme 256GB card was 84MBps reads and 67MB writes. Gordon Mah UngThe right side of the ThinkPad X1 Extreme boasts a nearly flush card reader (albeit slow) and an optional smart card reader slot. ThinkPad X1 Extreme UpgradesAnother perk you'll find with larger corporate laptops is generous upgradability. The available storage upgrades are plentiful and easy. Remove a set of Philips-head screws from the bottom of the laptop and carefully lift off the cover, starting from the rear of the laptop. Once the magnesium lid is if off, you have easy access to two SO-DIMM slots and two M.2 NVMe slots, as well as the wireless radio module and battery. While some might bemoan the lack of a 2.5-inch drive bay, the size and cost of M.2 SSDs have come down tremendously.The decision to go with dual M.2 slots is probably a better option as well. Laptops that do offer 2.5-inch drive support, such as the XPS 15, do so at the cost of battery capacity.
The dual M.2 setup maximizes battery potential. IDGThe Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme features two M.2 slots with support for NVMe, two SO-DIMM slots for up to 64GB of RAM, and even a replaceable WiFi module. ThinkPad X1 Extreme CPU PerformanceWith a name like ThinkPad X1 Extreme, you might understandably assume this laptop would blow everything else out of the water in our performance tests. It doesn't, but it does hang tight with similarly configured systems.The first test we run is Cinebench R15. It's a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives you an indication of how well the laptop's CPU will perform when all of the cores are in use.The ThinkPad X1 Extreme starts with an apparent advantage: its Core i7-8850H, which features clock speed ranges from 4.3GHz to 2.6GHz.
When we compared it to laptops with Core i7-8750H chips that range from 4.1GHz to 2.2GHz, however, we didn't see the expected gap due to clock speed differences. For example, the Dell XPS 15 9570 with the step-down Core i7-8750H actually pulls just even with the ThinkPad X1 Extreme in Cinebench multi-threaded performance. IDGDespite having a faster CPU, the ThinkPad X1 Extreme fails to outpace most of the comparable laptops in multi-core performance.The ThinkPad X1 Extreme also somewhat disappointed us when we set CineBench R15 to use just a single thread. Again, while it's a 3D rendering task, it's a decent stand-in for what you're likely to see in single-threaded tasks such as Microsoft Office and Google Chrome. On paper, we'd expect to see a small performance bump from the faster clock speed on the ThinkPad X1 Extreme's CPU, but once again it falls slightly behind the XPS 15 9570.Remember: The ThinkPad Extreme X1 did not perform poorly, it just didn't perform better than other very fast laptops. The culprit is likely the design.
Laptop performance is typically dictated by choices the vendor makes to manage cooling and noise. Add in the desire to keep a laptop light or thin, and performance can be all over the place. IDGThe ThinkPad X1 Extreme's single-threaded performance is fine, but a little underwhelming for its model rating.We should also add that under longer loads, which heat up the CPUs for a longer duration, it's mostly a wash.
This next chart shows you how the laptops performed when encoding a 30GB, 1080p file using the free HandBrake utility. The mobile 6-core chips are all about the same. IDGUnder long loads, it's mostly a wash among the six-core laptops. Here's why you might want the Core i7-8850HThe reasons to choose the Core i7-8850H in the ThinkPad X1 Extreme go beyond performance.
If you look at the CPU at, you can see three other notable features besides clock speed: VPro, Trusted Execution Technology, and Stable Image Platform Program.All three play to the business suit corporate bonafides of the ThinkPad X1 Extreme. VPro relates to fleet management, Trusted Execution Technology addresses security, and Stable Image Platform Program means the CPU will be around and supported for at least 15 months. SIPP means companies buying laptops by the pallets can feel warm and fuzzy that the image they have for a laptop won't change for a long, long time. ThinkPad X1 Extreme Graphics PerformanceThe ThinkPad X1 Extreme has another important chip: Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with Max-Q tech.
ThinkPads have traditionally stuck to integrated graphics.To measure the performance of the GPU, we first use 3DMark's FireStrike test, which is a synthetic graphics load. The closest laptop with the same GPU is Dell's XPS 15 9570, which takes a slight lead in performance. IDGThe ThinkPad X1 Extreme is slightly slower than the Dell XPS 15 9570 which features the same GPU.Using a real game, Rise of the Tomb Raider, we see the graphics performance of the ThinkPad X1 Extreme come in just a hair slower than the Dell XPS 15 9570's. IDGIn Rise of the Tomb Raider, the XPS 15 9570 has a very slight lead over the ThinkPad X1 Extreme. ThinkPad X1 Extreme Battery LifePerhaps the most important number in any laptop you'll actually use unplugged is the battery life. To measure that, we set the screen to a relatively bright 250 nits to 260 nits and loop a 4K movie, with a set of in-ear headsets plugged in, and the radios set to airplane mode.Battery performance of the ThinkPad X1 Extreme was fair given its specs. If you're looking at our result charts and frowning at the mere 331 minutes it lasted, you should remember that the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme packs a 4K UHD panel. With four times the resolution of the 1080p panel of the Dell XPS 15 9570 we tested, you're going to consume a lot more power to drive light through those smaller holes.Although it likely won't get the same battery life as the XPS 15 9570 (which can have a nearly 20-percent larger battery) it, we suspect you'd get another two hours at a minimum by going with the lower-res screen.
If you want better battery life (at the cost of resolution, of course), skip the 4K panel.We should also remind you that video playback is a cakewalk for modern laptops. Your mileage will vary. Hammer the CPU or GPU hard, and battery run time will drop to 90 minutes if you're lucky. IDGThe 4K panel in the ThinkPad X1 Extreme takes a big toll on battery life. ThinkPad Exteme X1 ConclusionOverall, the ThinkPad X1 Extreme is an impressive laptop, but is it a Dell XPS 15 killer? That depends. On the performance front, it tracks closely. But where it really shines is weight.
While you may scoff at an 8-ounce difference (when similarly configured with touch panels), you'll feel that in your bag and on your shoulder.As to corporate features, the ThinkPad X1 Extreme certainly aces the XPS 15 with its support for vPro, SIPP and TXT. (Dell, of course, would like to remind you of its corporate offerings in the.)Where the ThinkPad doesn't win any contests is in price. Our packed ThinkPad X1 Extreme will push the price to $3,149 (although it's been on sale for $2,362). The XPS 15 configured with 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and 4K touch can be had for $2,600 or when on sale, down to $2,100.Those corporate features don't come cheap. Whether that's worth it probably depends on your view of what a business laptop should be.
How long have I longed for a ThinkPad? Every time in my life that I’ve considered buying a laptop, the latest ThinkPad models have inevitably figured high on my list of desired computers. They once bore the IBM logo, now Lenovo, but they’ve always been that paradigm of no-nonsense work machine that you know you can rely on. Sturdy, hardy, and covered in deep matte black, ThinkPads are iconic.But the reason I haven’t owned a series of ThinkPads over the past two decades is twofold: one part is that Apple’s MacBooks have been superior in battery life and user experience, while the other is that the proper ThinkPads have generally been out of reach financially. Lenovo has mostly been a good guardian of the ThinkPad brand, but it did misapply the label on its plasticky ThinkPad Edge laptops. I owned one of those and it definitely didn’t live up to the storied reputation of this portable PC.These considerations have been turned on their head in 2017 with Lenovo’s fifth-generation, which seems to be the beneficiary of a perfect confluence of events. Apple has made its MacBook line worse, not better; Lenovo has lowered the entry price to its legit ThinkPad range; and I’m once again on the hunt for a new laptop.
With prices starting at just over $1,100, the X1 Carbon is a 14-inch no-nonsense work computer that’s easy to fall in love with, whether you’re coming from the Mac or Windows camp. The model I’m reviewing is priced at $1,275 and comes with an Intel Core i5-7300U CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a worthwhile upgrade over the base X1 Carbon: a 256GB NVMe SSD. That storage drive is double the size and substantially faster than on the entry-level model, working over the PCI Express bus rather than the more typical SATA. For another $50 you can upgrade the 1080p display to 1440p, for $111 more you can double the memory, or for $120 you can double the storage again to 512GB.
These are all reasonably priced upsells from Lenovo, subject to the company’s arcane “instant savings” mathematics, and I can see the attraction in all of them. But for my needs and preferences, the review unit was ample. Lenovo has built this laptop to withstand the test of timeThe thing that doesn’t change with any of the X1 Carbon variants is the build quality. There is no creaking to be heard or keyboard flex to be felt. The brutally minimalist black surfaces (this laptop’s also available in silver, but that’s a sacrilegious color for a ThinkPad) have a soft-touch finish that resists fingerprints and other blemishes admirably well. The hinges are a thing of metal beauty: they open out to a full 180 degrees and feel strong enough to hang a door on.
The first laptop I ever bought was a Samsung X10, but its right hinge broke a month after the warranty expired. I still regret not getting the ThinkPad X series I was eyeing back then. Also universal across X1 Carbon models is the keyboard. I love that, too. Each key is a vast island of loveliness, perfectly shaped and positioned to give me the best typing experience. For such a thin laptop as this ThinkPad is (15.95mm / 0.6 inches), the key travel is cavernously deep, which compares very favorably to Apple’s almost-flat MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards and practically everything else in the same category. If I had to give you my reasons for why I continue to favor laptops over 2-in-1 hybrids, I’d point to this keyboard first and the X1 Carbon’s hinges second.The traditional ThinkPad TrackPoint — the red nub in the middle — is present on the X1 Carbon and it works well.
It’s a very alien experience for anyone habituated to the swiping and gesture controls of a touchpad or screen, but it will please old-school types, and it doesn’t get in the way of my millennial ways of using a PC either. It adds a couple of hard mouse buttons above the laptop’s trackpad, which I often use in combination with the trackpad. The trackpad itself is reliable and accurate, giving me no cause for complaint.
The X1 Carbon is the same weight as the thin paper pad it resemblesAt 1.13kg / 2.49lbs, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon weighs exactly as much as the 2017 with its keyboard attached. Which is to say that this ThinkPad is the same weight as the thin paper pad it resembles. I’ve only known the to be a lighter computer with a 14-inch screen, but that was a flimsy plastic affair whereas this ThinkPad is perfectly rigid and reinforced with carbon fiber. Lenovo has protected the screen very well, too, and its newly trimmed-down bezels make the X1 Carbon’s footprint much more compact than before.
I can envision no scenarios, other than an especially minimal bag or backpack, where a 12-inch or 13-inch laptop would present a meaningful advantage over this 14-inch Lenovo PC. The one thing I miss from the Surface Pro, Spectre x2, and my trusty Chromebook Pixel is the 3:2 aspect ratio. With their squarer screens, those computers are more useful as work machines, displaying more of any given webpage or document without forcing me to scroll. Lenovo’s choice of 16:9 with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is not controversial, but I do find it suboptimal.
It would have made more sense on a computer designed to consume media and entertainment rather than one for composing spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides. Some might also take issue with the X1 Carbon’s 1080p resolution, but I’m not among them. It’s perfectly adequate to give me a sharp picture, and I like that it’s more forgiving on the battery than the current trend for high-res displays everywhere. HP’s Spectre x2 might give you 6 megapixels of resolution, but it doesn’t last beyond six hours.
This ThinkPad X1 Carbon gets me a solid eight hours of active use and is one of the rare new laptops (or laptop-replacement hybrids) this year that I can comfortably use for a whole day on a single charge. If I’m just writing and browsing the web, as I’m doing for this review, it stretches past the 10-hour mark. Lenovo’s charger is conveniently small, and it’s USB-C, so it charges my phone, too.I have to return to the display, though, to commend Lenovo on being one of the rare few companies to still sell matte screens. I can use this laptop in a brightly lit environment without having glare, my reflection, or little speckles of dust distracting me. No, it’s not the most saturated or contrasty viewing experience you’ll ever get on a mobile computer, but then neither is a MacBook Pro or Surface Book when used for its intended purpose as a mobile computer. Those laptops get blighted by even the hint of any sunlight over your shoulder, whereas the ThinkPad maintains its legibility in unfavorable environments.
No touchscreen, no glossy high-resolution antics, just getting all the laptop fundamentals rightSo the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is thin, light, reasonably affordable, built to last, and has a battery that actually lasts. It sounds almost perfect, right? It would be, if Windows was perfect. Back in April, I wrote about that re-created basic macOS functionality in Windows. I still like them, but I no longer use them, because they turned out to be rather buggy and unreliable. The fact remains that macOS gives you a smoother user experience, even if it doesn’t last as long now that Apple has kneecapped the battery life of its laptop line. In macOS, I don’t have to uninstall Candy Crush Saga, reject the injection of ads into my Start menu, or ward off Cortana’s pushiness.Basic things like compatibility with external audio gear (digital-to-analog converters or USB sound cards) are seamless with macOS, but require driver downloads and debugging on Windows.
In Chrome on Windows, I can’t do a two-finger swipe gesture to move between pages. That’s debilitating to me and the way I work, and MacBooks in general make much better use of multitouch input than their Windows counterparts. I also never know what sort of sleep mode this ThinkPad will go into, with it often entering a deep hibernation that takes multiple seconds to exit.I miss the ease and fluidity of operation of macOS (and even the banal simplicity of being able to type out an em dash instead of copying and pasting it every time), and for that reason I can’t endorse the ThinkPad X1 Carbon as the best laptop user experience available today. Though it comes very close. Performance is consistent and reliableCompared to other Windows laptops, I feel no sense of loss for lacking a touchscreen, a stylus, or a high-resolution display that covers 120 percent of three different RGB color spaces. Hardware specs are not a shortcoming for this laptop, and its performance over the months I’ve tested it has been satisfyingly quick and responsive.
I have done some casual work in Photoshop without feeling in any way slowed by the Core i5 processor, and I’d credit the fast storage for helping to keep everything moving. I can’t even recall what this laptop’s fan sounds like, because it almost never has to kick in — and if you don’t try to edit 4K video or a batch of 50MB RAW files in Lightroom, you might never hear it either — which wasn’t always the case, so I’m guessing Lenovo has improved its software over time.The X1 Carbon has a few other niceties, including a fingerprint sensor for Windows Hello authentication. It’s a little slow, but Lenovo tells me it’s extremely secure because it employs that fully encapsulates the ID process and information, insulating them from any potential hacking of the laptop itself. It’s a good business-friendly touch, and so is the inclusion of two classic USB-A ports alongside the two USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 / charging jacks and one full-size HDMI port.I’d love to see Lenovo go all the way with user-friendly features and include an SD card slot, but the company compromises with microSD instead. Can’t complain about this anymore, however, as the SD card slot has gone the way of the dodo and the DVD drive this year. Another thing that would have made this laptop more enjoyable for me is better headphone audio hardware: the sound coming out of the X1 Carbon’s speakers is perfectly fine for its class, but the headphone output is horribly dull and unimpressive. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is Lenovo’s version of a crossover SUV.
Lenovo X1 Best Buy
It’s got the larger screen, durable build, and spartan looks of a business machine. But it’s also slim, light, and, in some beholders’ eyes, handsome.
This is a computer designed to serve almost all laptop purposes, and the surprising thing about it is how well and how often it succeeds. Lenovo’s design choices are overwhelmingly correct, and what I see with this PC is the refinement and approaching perfection of the clamshell computer.To satisfy your mobile computing needs, you can now pick among iPads, Chromebooks, and 2-in-1 Windows devices next to the traditional macOS and Windows laptops.
That’s a choice you’ll have to weigh before considering Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon. For me, the delights of this laptop’s keyboard and the absolute peace of mind that comes with its hardy construction are an unbeatable combination. With good battery life and an enduring commitment to austere matte surfaces, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is the sort of no-nonsense ThinkPad I’ve always wanted.