Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme 2019 Laptop Review: The second generation of Lenovo's premier multimedia laptop has gotten worse

[Redaktion]

New CPUs, a faster GPU and a greater choice of displays, that is the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2 in a nutshell. Lenovo has only slightly modified the second-generation model, with the chassis remaining unchanged for this year's model. We have put the device through its paces, specifically the one with a matte 4K panel, which has a massive impact on battery life.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Extreme-2019-Laptop-Review-The-second-generation-of-Lenovo-s-premier-multimedia-laptop-has-gotten-worse.453860.0.html

[Kirill Ignatev]

So it has quieter fans and worse CPU performance.
Pretty sure it's possible to tweak the fan curve to make it as loud and at least as fast as the predecessor.

[Jtl]

It actually has quite a laud fan, at least compared to my old Asus zenbook or current macbook pro.
What I did was to undervolt the cpu and limit the power consumption to 35W while on battery - lower performance and noise, but better battery life. You can go quite wild - on my i9 I managed to decrease 0.12v whiteout issue or trying to go to the limit. On AC mode, that might help with noise or performance too. The cpu is tweaked conservatively, to prevent issues on those unlucky to have worse cpu.
In performance

[HwGeek]

There is a limit how much Intel could milk the 14nm Skylake, soon the Ryzen 4000 lineup will show how much Intel needs 6C+ 10nm parts.

[Andrew]

Be aware that you should avoid the Lenovo X1 Extreme gen 2, P1 gen 2 etc with 4k OLED touch option. Lenovo has put a touchlayer on top of the OLED that screw up picture quality big time making a 4k UHD screen look like grainy interlaced 1080p at best.

More info can be found on the Lenovo forum. Search for "Small dots on OLED screen"

[_MT_]

Have you tried playing with power limits, supply voltage or fan curve? The question being, can it be made to behave like the predecessor? GPU swap doesn't explain the poor performance in pure CPU workloads. It sounds more like someone decided to lower power limits and reduce fan speeds if indeed the cooling is the same.

[niciuffo]

I've been using this laptop since October of last year and I'll admit it's not what I hoped it would be but I'd still like to clarify some points made in the review.
My machine is equipped with the 4k IPS screen and the i7-9750H (6 cores).

The screen is excellent. I see that Notebookcheck's reviews tend to judge laptops with high resolution quite harshly because HiDPI screens have a noticeable impact on battery life. While I agree with this point, the text rendering and overall user experience while using the laptop is improved a lot with a high resolution display especially on a 15 inch laptop. I couldn't imagine having such a powerful machine held back by a 1080p panel. This is my subjective opinion of course.

Battery life is average at best. I can get around 4-5 hours as tested with very light workloads.

What I understand but don't fully agree with the review is the CPU performance. With an undervolt of -150mV and raising the power limit to 60W, my i7-9750H can reach 3.7-4.0GHz on all cores in synthetic stress tests (this is with fans on full). I wouldn't expect anything more from such a thin and light laptop. Sure, Lenovo's stock limits are unbelievably low but they can be tweaked to use almost the full CPU's potential.

Other than that, the keyboard issue is also present in my system and I hope that a future BIOS update will be able to fix it.

For the next generation of X1 Extreme laptops, Lenovo should:
- Increase the battery capacity close to 100Wh
- Use more energy efficient panels, possibly offer 1440p variant
- Same thing with newer CPUs (maybe go with AMD?)

[Denied]

niciuffo, while i agree with almost anything you wrote, one thing buggs me, and isn't just about this laptop, but about any laptop that can be found nowdays in the market. They all have problems with CPU heat, and i cannot understand why companies don't do anything to solve this. You can always see on many laptops bigger fans, or even 2 fans dedicated to GPU only and you can rarely see a laptop with GPU overheating problems, so why they don't offer the same solution for the CPU? Also, i do't agree with the fact that it should be tweaked by user. I mean - i buy a laptop that should work well, at full potential, because the company producing it (especially when we talk about 2k+ laptops) should take care of that (they should tweak it accordingly!), not the user. And i don't say this because i don't like or know how to do it (i tweak almost anything that can be tweaked) but is just annoying to know that you have to do it because was poorly optimised by the company producing the machine, not because you chose to..you see, is about the free will..i do it because i want to, not because i have to if i want my laptop to perform as it originally should by default..

[Jorge Riquelme]

Keyboard problem fixed; Update will be released very soon

I have this notebook since november. The exact same model, with the same 4K IPS Display with 500-nits and X-Rite Pantone factory calibrated, 32 GB RAM and 1 TB NVMe.

It is not what I had hoped for the price. I was expecting something really Premium, specially the keyboard.

I noticed the mentioned keyboard problem inmediately out of the box. Me and several Lenovo users complained since november for this problem on the official support forums and asked for a fix. We were very angry because Lenovo adopted a 'radio silence' on January and February. At this point I just wanted to return the Notebook and ask for a refund, but I couldn't do it because the problem wasn't recognized by Lenovo in other countries and I feared that my computer will be badly manipulated while in service diagnostics.

I can confirm that, after five months, Lenovo sent me last monday privately a 'second' EC Firmware Update that fixes this issue and improves the experience a lot. The keyboard still has some sort of problem: if you press the keys corners very softly, you miss the keystroke. But if you type harder or in the center of the key, everything works fine. I am not sure if this is normal, but I can live with this. Anything is better than the ugly previous experience with this keyboard I had for months.

I hope Lenovo release this fix to GA in the coming days. But, I personally confirm that the issue is finally fixed and the situation will be very improved.

The other things about this notebook:

- With this 4K panel, battery life is really really bad. I can only get 3 hours, max, with 80% brightness and energy saving mode on Windows
- The bottom cover of the keyboard, on the right side, doesn't attach good (quality problem)
- There is Software/drivers problems with the Dolby Vision and HDR feature
- There is sound crackling but only sometimes

I think this is a good notebook overall. The 4K IPS factory-calibrated is superb, but it has poorly response time (no gaming capable really) and impact battery life. And the quality materials are Okay, but has this issue on the bottom cover that ruins the 'Premium quality' grade.

Connected to an HDMI monitor or TV, the game performance is good for most games in Medium or High. Windows Hello camera works really really good, the same the fingerprint scanner.

Summary: Good ThinkPad, but not worth the 'Extreme' high price. Get a MacBook Pro 16 instead if you want serious performance and high quality. If i could turn back time, I would get that Mac instead.

[Jorge Riquelme]

By the way, I want to congrat and thank this website (Notebookcheck) because this is the only REAL and COMPLETE review of this Notebook on the entire Internet.

It is the only that mention the keyboard problem, the paltry battery life, and tested this kind of high spec and price Notebooks as it should.

I saw several YouTube reviews and read some other on the internet. All praised the computer, compared it even to the MacBook Pro 16. "Best notebook ever" and other similar kind of conclusions.

So, I brought it based on that experiences. I was so mad and dissapointed when I received the notebook, specially for the amount of money I spent.

So, starting today, for me this will be the only reilable source of information for new notebooks.

[Jorge Riquelme]

Update: Keyboard problems fixed in BIOS Update version 1.30, released on 04-06-2020, six months after the first report.

Good Notebook, but it's not worth the 'Extreme' high price.

[j8048188]

What I understand but don't fully agree with the review is the CPU performance. With an undervolt of -150mV and raising the power limit to 60W, my i7-9750H can reach 3.7-4.0GHz on all cores in synthetic stress tests (this is with fans on full).

How did you raise your power limit to 60W? Not seeing that type of setting in XTU.

[HelloThere]

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 3 is available since July 2020, and also stocks outside the Lenovo store on compare.eu, idealo.eu etc.

My experience so far:
1) same thermally constrained chassis with identical cooling
2) Intel i7-10750H is on average 6% faster than i7-9750H and far away from AmD Ryzen
3) still thick bezels
4) Fingerprint magnet surfacea
5) same noisy fans that randomly spin up during idle
6) no AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, 4900H or HS option
7) move from GTX 1650 Max-Q to GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q results in negligable 4% performance improvement in gaming. Biggest bottle neck is 4GB RAM and 128bit bandwidth
8) Still no GTX 1660 Ti option
9) same 720p average webcam
10) same excellent keyboard (the best I ever used
11) same speakers (better connect them to your iLoud Micro Monitors or MTM for oof)
12) same low quality, dried up thermal paste