Lenovo ThinkPad L14 Review: AMD Does It Again

[Redaktion]

The predecessor suffered from a dim display and a throttled Whiskey Lake processor. For the first time ever we also take a look at the AMD SKU of this year's Lenovo L-series ThinkPad and are excited to see how well the Ryzen 5 4500U hexa-core performs. After all, the AMD-equipped ThinkPad E14 and T14 notebooks managed their Intel counterparts by significant margins.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-L14-Review-AMD-Does-It-Again.511268.0.html

[Antonis K]

That's a lot of ram in that spec sheet  :p

[fdsfjksldj]

That's a lot of ram in that spec sheet  :p

Oh wow I just right now. lol that's actually hilarious

[xpclient]

Now that Intel has opened up the Thunderbolt spec and yet AMD isn't adopting it, "— No Thunderbolt" should be listed as one of the Cons for every AMD laptop since you list it for quite a number of Intel laptops. It is available but AMD, not the manufacturer is choosing not to support it.

[Nam]

16:10 in the next gen? Seems like a lot of room empty inside for better speakers.

[iUser]

Now that Intel has opened up the Thunderbolt spec and yet AMD isn't adopting it, "— No Thunderbolt" should be listed as one of the Cons for every AMD laptop since you list it for quite a number of Intel laptops. It is available but AMD, not the manufacturer is choosing not to support it.

Yep!
Few years ago Thunderbolt was only in premium laptops, but now even ThinkPad E14 G2 with Tiger Lake have Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 40Gbps port.

[Intool]

I would like to see Lenovo use a consistent metallic chassis for all Thinkpads. Otherwise I feel like Lenovo is just watering down the Thinkpad brand. Oh well, ever since Thinkpad got purchased by Lenovo, this has been the trend.

[Indypad]

How is the keyboard in this worse than in the T14? It lost points over something.

[vertigo]

Yet another laptop that pairs AMD with a crap display. They're really trying to hinder AMD.

Now that Intel has opened up the Thunderbolt spec and yet AMD isn't adopting it, "— No Thunderbolt" should be listed as one of the Cons for every AMD laptop since you list it for quite a number of Intel laptops. It is available but AMD, not the manufacturer is choosing not to support it.

Yep!
Few years ago Thunderbolt was only in premium laptops, but now even ThinkPad E14 G2 with Tiger Lake have Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 40Gbps port.

I don't know when exactly the standard was opened by Intel (sometime 2017 or later), but it's quite possible that by the time it was, it was simply too late for it to be added to Renoir, and since Lucienne is basically a refreshed Renoir, the same would apply there. Cezanne should have it, so I agree there (assuming TB was open in 2017 or possibly even 2018), but I'd rather USB4, since it can accomplish the same things but is even faster/better and, more importantly, sticks with an entirely open standard vs one that is based on a closed one and is only open now. So going forward, I feel new laptops should support one or the other (again, I prefer USB4), and as long as they do, that should be enough and they shouldn't be knocked for not having the other.

[ChinaWorldThreat]

Where is the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme or at least T15p with AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS (35Watt) and RTX 3060 Max-Q?

There's plenty of room in this chassis, and the Asus G14 showed it works with decent thermals.

The Legion 5/7's keyboards are trash compared to a ThinkPad if you need to type all day.

[AZBattery]

This review on 27Feb2021 says the battery is not user-replaceable. I see multiple videos showing a simple removal. Error, or am I misunderstanding?

[Ogu]

Good review! Thanks for the color profile!

[Somya]

Its design is NOT AT ALL GOOD
Most frustrating part --
* Voice is so LOW. Reason when kept on the table(which is always the case), speakers are at the bottom which always gets covered by tabletop.
* Fan is at the right-hand side...  It heats up my mouse and hand. Which is really frustrating.

[duzenko]

I'm late to the party, but have just bough one of these (4650U)
Case/frame looks ok to me
CPU performance is great
GPU didn't so much impress. Furmark 720p: 14fps. In real game about 2x fps compared to HD630@45W. This is still single-channel RAM, but I don't expect much difference with dual-channel, and I'm not a gamer.
Regretfully mine came with no KB backlight
Battery life reasonable, ~6hrs of web
The biggest disappointment is screen. Technically it's 300nit 72%ntsc, but color depth is 6bit with obvious color banding even on stock windows wallpapers. What's even worse, the gamma is borked and dark-grey texts on modern websites appear too light... ARGH!