Lenovo ThinkPad P53 in Review: Classic workstation with a lot of GPU performance

[Redaktion]

Lenovo is now offering the new ThinkPad P53 with the high-end GPU Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 that is usually reserved for larger devices. The cooling solution inside of the Lenovo workstation reaches its limits, which negatively affects the CPU performance.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-P53-in-Review-Classic-workstation-with-a-lot-of-GPU-performance.442599.0.html

[anon]

When you say "with power delivery" in reference to its three type-C ports, you mean one can charge it with a USB-PD power brick?

Because laptops with both a fast GPU and USB-PD charging seem very rare. I want to see more of them, especially if they'd cost half as much as this one.

[JD0]

No replaceable battery, 60hz 4K display... Nope, pass. Let's see what Asus comes up with their pro line

[vincent2]

Have you noticed any coil whine or any other high pitch noises while you were reviewing this ThinkPad P53?

[ufster]

4200€ for i7, it seems like Lenovo is trying to go bankrupt. They should realize they can't milk the Thinkpad name forever. Sony destroyed the Vaio and the Xperia brand, Bravia is following suit with mediocre, overpriced products. Lenovo is on a similar path, especially now that Apple has started paying attention to their Macbook / Macbook Pro lineup.

[bioscrasher]

I pulled the plunge on the 17" competitor of this brand: the HP ZBook 17G6 with a rtx3000 maxQ, a 8850H cpu and 32 gigs of RAM.
I tried two models that both suffered of COIL WHINE and returned both to HP.
I really liked the absolute silent fans that kept the gpu below 60 degrees Celsius on 98% load and the ease of swapping battery (lenovo glues?? the battery now?) and upgrading RAM, SSD's and cellular modem (antenna's already premounted)
The downside howeve is Hpnotresponding well to my question when the rtx3000 modell without annoying coil whine will be available.
The refunded with no hassle and my money for both models is back on my bank account but I am really sad HP won't take actions to help out a disappointed customer that was eager to spend €3000+ for a workstation.....

[jog1]

4200€ for i7, it seems like Lenovo is trying to go bankrupt.

So don't go for a top of the line Quadro RTX 5000 then, they are the significantly expensive part in the equation there.

[kony]

I pulled the plunge on the 17" competitor of this brand: the HP ZBook 17G6 with a rtx3000 maxQ, a 8850H cpu and 32 gigs of RAM.
I tried two models that both suffered of COIL WHINE and returned both to HP.
I really liked the absolute silent fans that kept the gpu below 60 degrees Celsius on 98% load and the ease of swapping battery (lenovo glues?? the battery now?) and upgrading RAM, SSD's and cellular modem (antenna's already premounted)
The downside howeve is Hpnotresponding well to my question when the rtx3000 modell without annoying coil whine will be available.
The refunded with no hassle and my money for both models is back on my bank account but I am really sad HP won't take actions to help out a disappointed customer that was eager to spend €3000+ for a workstation.....

This coil whine is Intel's fault, not really HP's or Lenovo's. Modern Intel CPU cause coil whine, and there's not much companies can do. Disabling C-states in BIOS helped in my Dell XPS, but I don't know if Lenovo or HP have this setting. If you want a laptop without coil whine you'll have to consider AMD CPU.

[Roksi]

I've had this laptop for half a year with the top end xenon + quadro rtx5000, + oled touch and I'm beyond disappointed.

The screen is horrible, the touch layer has a mesh that is clearly visible in front of anything you view (saying its not noticable is bs), the colors distort to to blue and red with the slightest viewing angle, even visible from head on, and most importantly, the screen looks like it has a crappy uneven backlighting even if its OLED. If your screen is not full white or full black, the brightness or value of grey will be inconsistent and have clear horizontal and vertical lines. HDR Causes issues with Windows10 and doesn't play back properly if you have multiple displays connected to your laptop.

Lenovo software caused throttling which made the GPU get less than a quarter of the score of a laptop gtx 1060 in Unigine benchmarks. I had to manually test out all possible drivers from nvidia to find ones, not recommended by Lenovo, that were able to bypass the throttling software.

The laptop froze once a day if I was afk long enough for it to go to sleep, it would not wake up no matter what and it had to always be hard restarted. I had to disable sleep completely, and even then, the workstation dock causes similar freezes once or twice in a few weeks due to bad drivers and software.

On top of all of this, the thing gets absolutely sizzling hot under NO LOAD AT ALL, and has already bent the chassis so that only three of the four feet touch the table surface.

The windows has already been re-installed twice due to crashing and being unable to boot to windows.

There have been loads of refunds going in for the P53 and its taken Lenovo many months to refund any of the Laptops, nor do they address or admit any of these COMMON issues with the P53. There was a huge thread on the Lenovo user forums about the issues and refunds but some of the issue threads have even been removed.

[Petru Isari]

Hello,
I bought computers by your guidance. Was not good for me. The difference between Europe and USA it is about 25 years. Low technologies in America, all.
PS: I see your photos with computers. I cannot believe, there are so dirty. Boys, clean your hands. Ok, it is about education. 

[oneandmillionvoices]

this model has gone down the toilet since P52. P50 was last solid laptop.
If you touch-type this keyboard is as horrible as it gets.
It's smaller than standard - in EU/UK version last two columns of keys are SMALLER!!!. Top line of keys feels cheap. It is way too hard for comfortable typing. Perhaps they knew that you will be rather bashing it with anger.
I experienced constant problems with graphic card. Either it does not wake up, or does not do native screen resolution or does not recognize external displays. The touchpad is ok, but the top keys could be lit.
I can't wait until I get rid of it.

[AcE Krystal]

I'm really confused what is happening to the good quality laptops these years.

I'm in the market again for a good quality 14/15.6" high performance well build laptop. But I just can't find/trust any good once anymore. I tried many brands but they all seem to fade away :

My experiece / History :
Sony Vaio Z - Awesome laptop with full voltage CPU in a 13,3" machine. But now Vaio is gone.
Dell XPS 15 - Looks and feels great, but coilwhine was really bad, started to have bluescreens, ended up on the shelf as Dell service was horrible, and battery was blown up a year later.
MSI GS60 - Really flimsy build quality (not for road warriors) and after 1,5 week bluescreens and after 2 weeks GPU was dead. Returned for repair, took 1,5 month. When arriving back at MSI service (from the country doing the repairs) it was full of big dents and scratches so I got my money back.
Lenovo Thinkpad T450s - FINALLY a good machine again, although really expensive for what your get and a little low on CPU performance for me. I swore to stick with Lenovo ultrabooks for in-field Datacenter work.
Alienware 15 R3 - Also a name that I thought had a good image, but it seems they are dying. I had high hopes the first month, but later discovered the electronics and support is miles apart from the good build quality that it still does have. Ofcourse, just outside warranty it fully blew up leaving the customer with a overpriced piece of scrap and nobody was intereted in the cause to improve future laptops.

So Lenovo Thinkpads are the only good high quality utrabook machines that I thought where still on the market. Only to discover the T-serie is now dead. The X1e and P1 what seem like awesome machine on paper but are far from that in practice while being even more overprices. The P-Serie makes me feel like they don't have people anymore that know how to build good machines so just stick with old working designs and just slap higher spec hardware in it while adding a price on it as if its top notch quality. I thought about taking a P53 with only a quadro 2000 as it should work good on cooling designed for more, but I found out they remove heatpipes on the 1000 and 2000 models leaving them also with thermal throttling, why?!?

How come that Lenovo's gaming department understands more about serious cooling solutions then their "professional" department?

So, what brand do I go to now? What brand makes good quality laptops that can be used in mission critical situations (army/space) while also going with the time in good hardware performance and not clinging onto an old image that they pretend to still be?

[Jools]

In defense of this machine, I purchased one used for team training purposes it cost me 500 dls,   

Intended use is to serious VMs emulation (Clusters with 8 nodes using 6 GB RAM each vm), and was a total bang for the buck since very few laptops (Business, Gamer trim or workstations), can support 128 GB ram,  And something I noticed is when you have a discrete GPU with actual VRAM, OS video memory usage is minimum, this is recommended for VMs.

It came with quadro T1000 which is very power efficient with low heat,  I don't see an objection if this machine is purchased as a cheap gaming machine but could be an overkill.   

Adding more disks were easy since in China, Lenovo compatible SATA adaptors are incredible cheap, so added an extra 1 TB NVME disk and a 1 TB SATA disk, and in total 96GB RAM (16+16+32+32),  used already installed 16GB ram and purchased 2-32 GB timetec and 1 - 16GB Kingston 2666 non ddr.   We didn't replace the intel 660P 512G NVME because it will only host the OS (windows 11 with VmWare workstation player fully licensed) to avoid tricky network configurations since we need to focus on the automation and control of the cluster's nodes. And we are departing from ESXI for training machines due to cost concerns.


To perform upgrades you need to be extra careful; because to upgrade upper side ram you need to remove keyboard and by mistake broke 1 key, but like I said in China replacement was easy and cheap to find, so I replace keyboard without no issues.  I got the lighted US version but since this machine is meant to be accesses always in RDP, we repair it anyway for consistency since brand new machine P series will cost us 10 times what we paid for it.

There are OLED and IPS 4K display options for this machine, What we got was a Full HD IPS I attested the same result than this review,  good colors and brightness but noticeable light bleeding,  And in this model basically you need to destroy your old display in order to upgrade it to a new one, since it is not bracket based, it uses a double adhesive tape which hardens with age; so you basically need to tear it apart with an exacto knife and maybe use a heater and result depends on your luck because is easy to damage the display and maybe the chassis.  So for our intended use is was a big NO-NO,  but I saw in China 120 dlls 4K displays and 250 dlls OLED respectively,

please remember a similar laptop with a 128GB ram, 3 TB disks, 4K Oled was +5000 dlls only 3-4 years back, so from a cost perspective is worth to be considered.  We could not find a better deal.