Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme (i7, 4K-HDR, GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q) Laptop Review

[confused]

@WWAN

There are plenty of things I'm not happy with Lenovo about with this laptop. (e.g. the lack of 16:10 aspect ratio and significantly worse speakers than MBPs)

That being said, the slow 4K panel is not one of them. Can you honestly name a single high colour accuracy wide gamut panel that is fast? It simply does not exist.

They're all slow. (XPS 15, Surface Book 2, MBP 15, etc)

[WWAN]

Short response times are well anticipated given this is the first modern Thinkpad with a gaming class dGPU as opposed to the P series. Personally I am searching for a professional laptop that doubles as a portable gaming rig to run some older AAA titles and competitive FPS. And especially given its "Extreme" price, I won't tolerate such compromise.

I'm afraid granular issues like screen's aspect ratio, response time, audio quality, and battery life accumulate to no longer being minor oversights. When everybody is pushing forward, a flagship Thinkpad slipping in multitudes becomes hard to overlook.

So am looking forward to the FHD review.

[S.Yu]

Short response times are well anticipated given this is the first modern Thinkpad with a gaming class dGPU as opposed to the P series. Personally I am searching for a professional laptop that doubles as a portable gaming rig to run some older AAA titles and competitive FPS. And especially given its "Extreme" price, I won't tolerate such compromise.

I'm afraid granular issues like screen's aspect ratio, response time, audio quality, and battery life accumulate to no longer being minor oversights. When everybody is pushing forward, a flagship Thinkpad slipping in multitudes becomes hard to overlook.

So am looking forward to the FHD review.

Before this is "Extreme" know that this is first and foremost X1, its positioning is obviously a professional portable, this is the correct way to make a X1 into a 15" model. 16:10 would probably be the more sensible aspect ratio but giving up screen gamut for response time is plain stupid.
1050Ti is a mediocre choice for gaming anyway but generally suitable for the Adobe suite and about as much as can fit in this form factor considering the cooling requirements.

[WWAN]

Again, I won't apologize for having high standards. I realize what Lenovo is going after, same as when they released the T25. Don't get me wrong, it's still a great machine and competitor to XPS 15, MBP 15, etc. But if corners had to be cut, then it's absolutely sensible to expect lower prices. Plain and simple. Defending X1E's shortcomings throwing around buzzwords like "professional" and "business" makes it look all the more sloppy and makes people turn elsewhere to find their right laptop.

Again, there's a sea of laptops dedicated to Adobe this and that. I would assume X1E has Geforce graphics for a reason. And S.Yu, please don't talk about how people should be using their laptops #gatekeeping :P

[Joestar]

Another fake HDR that don't have 1000nits brightness and probably non 10bit display. This is just the usual high gamut display like other laptops.

[confused]

@WWAN

It's okay to have high standards, just be aware you maybe waiting a few decades on your pursuit to perfection.

About prices, bro, it just got released 4 weeks ago. Wait until atleast Black Friday or Christmas / New Years holiday sales before passing a verdict and being so judgemental.

No company is going to reduce prices on a product they just released, unless they really screwed up somewhere.

It's true Lenovo is overcharging for it atm but so does every company when they first release a new product. It's an industry practice. The prices will get better when supply / availability improves and demand starts to level off.

The reason why there are so many laptops dedicated to adobe stuff is because there is allot of money in content creation. Whether we like it or not, there is not much money in gaming. It is a small market. Nobody cares. Even gaming laptop companies don't take gamers seriously, they still keep releasing stuff with multi coloured LEDs as if we asked for this.

I think you're confused about somethings. The T25 was a joke and a completely different product. Words like business and professional are used not to defend shortcomings but more to emphasise certain features for a certain target audience (MIL-spec durability, decent keyboard, etc).

And S.Yu is right, for modern gaming a gtx 1050 ti is not enough. A card like this is barely enough for 10 year old games, IMO. (if you care about decent minimum frame rates)

The FHD panel will be faster no doubt, but if you're expecting 144 hz panel response times, you maybe better off looking for another laptop or using an external display instead.

Just be aware that those other gaming laptops which come in similar form factor but faster panels cost just as much and come with their own fair share of compromises aswell. So it just comes down to on what you value more and willing to prioritise.

[WWAN]

I have no delusions and I'm not looking for perfection. After all I'm typing on a $1,000 secondhand Gigabyte Aero 14 v7 and fully satisfied. But I do recognize a half-hearted attempt even from afar. "Business and professional" might imply certain features but the underlying truth is they serve as a strategy for companies to divide and confuse a market. This also allows OEMs to make the benefits of a consumer laptop including good speakers, screen and low pricing exclusive from their rival business lines and vice versa.

From what I understand, Lenovo's Thinkpad prices are increasing annually and by hundreds of $. That doesn't strike me as a result of supply or inflation but only greed. You mistook my first comment. I wasn't asking for a 144Hz 4K DolbyVision 10 IPS screen but one that has acceptable response times for playing a little CS:GO which 62ms on this review unit unfortunately is not. But that won't matter anyway because 4 hours is woefully insufficient battery for my use case and the LTE I was hoping for is absent.

Just because companies don't know or pretend not to know what we want doesn't mean we might as well forget it too. I, for one, am definitely willing to open my wallet for a do-it-all laptop with complete sets of bells and whistles - Impeccable screen, audio, keyboard, I/O, touchpad, webcam, design, build quality, ergonomics, quality control, serviceability, reliability, expandability, customer service and battery (which btw is the most expensive component). I want it all and expect them to meet me at the top. The X1ExtremelyExpensive is merely not compelling enough to jump ship just yet.

[S.Yu]

I have no delusions and I'm not looking for perfection. After all I'm typing on a $1,000 secondhand Gigabyte Aero 14 v7 and fully satisfied. But I do recognize a half-hearted attempt even from afar. "Business and professional" might imply certain features but the underlying truth is they serve as a strategy for companies to divide and confuse a market. This also allows OEMs to make the benefits of a consumer laptop including good speakers, screen and low pricing exclusive from their rival business lines and vice versa.

From what I understand, Lenovo's Thinkpad prices are increasing annually and by hundreds of $. That doesn't strike me as a result of supply or inflation but only greed. You mistook my first comment. I wasn't asking for a 144Hz 4K DolbyVision 10 IPS screen but one that has acceptable response times for playing a little CS:GO which 62ms on this review unit unfortunately is not. But that won't matter anyway because 4 hours is woefully insufficient battery for my use case and the LTE I was hoping for is absent.

Just because companies don't know or pretend not to know what we want doesn't mean we might as well forget it too. I, for one, am definitely willing to open my wallet for a do-it-all laptop with complete sets of bells and whistles - Impeccable screen, audio, keyboard, I/O, touchpad, webcam, design, build quality, ergonomics, quality control, serviceability, reliability, expandability, customer service and battery (which btw is the most expensive component). I want it all and expect them to meet me at the top. The X1ExtremelyExpensive is merely not compelling enough to jump ship just yet.

The fact here is that this laptop fits a couple of *typical* usage cases incredibly well, which means more people paying, not just you. It has plenty of ports rivaling 17" workstations, and much more than both of its main competitiors. The battery is smaller, but the weight difference is notably more than just the battery difference, the HP also has a much slower GPU. Lenovo's X1 series also has much better reputation for the keyboard and chassis reliability. Compared to the Dell and HP, this model trades brightness for a much wider gamut, again, this is smart (but also adds to the price) because it's coherent with the other specs and the pricing, as to why the "professional" positioning makes sense, it's because this means the manufacturer assumes that either somebody will pay for your unit or it will pay for itself very quickly which means they could ask for higher margins and only in this case will they deem it worthy to add certain functions and characteristics, they're not running charities. You could yap all you want about adding a crappy TN with nothing but fast response for your quirky needs of a little this and a little that but that does not make business sense for the company and they won't make it happen. The SSD is a decent PM981 and not the cheap Toshiba models of the competition, you may not need it but it's there for the photo and video crowd. The 32GB memory option is crucial for using the Adobe suite comfortably, with only 16GB of the Dell you'd need to focus on only one task at a time, say you have LR+PS and a dozen Chrome tabs open, it's gonna lag and one of them's gonna crash eventually, similar case with some games. A 32GB option should be the new norm in anything mid-high tier model except business ultraportables but not even Razer gets this.
Again, when you look at the difference between competing models it's clear that this model is the closest to perfection. The price is 2800 euros but when you look at what you get for the 2100 euros of the XPS15 or especially the 3800 euros of the HP(nothing except the 2T SSD comes close to justifying that price, it deserves a DreamColor screen for no extra charge) this isn't so hard to swallow. If you're in the market for mid-sized high-specced portables these are your choices, and obviously none of the three companies care about CS-GO on these models. To meet other performance standards for the intended use of these models and also give you fast response time they need to add the option of a 15" OLED screen for maybe 1200 euros more, a handful of people are going to pay for that, and since larger OLEDs still have much worse efficiency than the latest smartphone panels from Samsung, it will eat into battery life, and you whine about that too.

[WWAN]

"Lenovo's X1 series also has much better reputation for the keyboard and chassis reliability."
As much as I'd like to agree with your opinion there's no actual evidence to back it up, so until then it's debatable.

"Compared to the Dell and HP, this model trades brightness for a much wider gamut, again, this is smart (but also adds to the price) because it's coherent with the other specs and the pricing"
To the majority of people, a small percentage gain in ARGB coverage is far less noticeable and practical than an extra hundreds of nits of brightness that makes the colors look unmistakably more vibrant or "pop", as they say.

"You could yap all you want about adding a crappy TN with nothing but fast response for your quirky needs of a little this and a little that but that does not make business sense for the company and they won't make it happen. "
I don't need any of it. But I do want it all. And that is the sole reason why any business decide to take a leap of faith and invest in innovation. Look at the improvements in laptop hardware throughout the last decade. They've added OLED screens, active pens and precision touchpads just last year. And this year we get USB-C charging, TB3 docking, HDR screens, and a consumer grade GPU in the X1E itself. Why the effort? Because we asked for them.

"The SSD is a decent PM981 and not the cheap Toshiba models of the competition, you may not need it but it's there for the photo and video crowd."
You seem to be under the impression that OEMs cherry pick superior and more reliable components for their business class laptops. That is simply not true. In case you didn't realize, the widespread practice of component lottery plagues all OEMs, not just Lenovo.

"The 32GB memory option is crucial for using the Adobe suite comfortably, with only 16GB of the Dell you'd need to focus on only one task at a time, say you have LR+PS and a dozen Chrome tabs open, it's gonna lag and one of them's gonna crash eventually, similar case with some games. A 32GB option should be the new norm in anything mid-high tier model except business ultraportables but not even Razer gets this."
Don't know what you are getting at here. Again, if you were unaware, X1E / P1, XPS 15 9570 / Precision 5530 / Blade 15 are all likewise competitors with x2 DDR4 SODIMM slots up to 64GB of memory.

"The price is 2800 euros ... this isn't so hard to swallow"
Maybe not for you. I am still recommending the XPS 15 that starts at $1,030 as a go-to laptop for anyone looking into this category. The price difference far outweighs what little edge the X1E might have.

"If you're in the market for mid-sized high-specced portables these are your choices, and obviously none of the three companies care about CS-GO on these models."
But I do. And I do a lot more of everything on my laptop. And that is all that matters.

[danielee0707]

@WWAN

If you want to continue recommending XPS, then go ahead. After all, I can't stop your way of making money lol. But for people who are in the business environment or simply want to have a decent keyboard as well as normally placed camera, and perhaps play some games at leisure, X1E is one of few best choices, and of course your XPS is not one of them. Plus your XPS is way uglier and duller.

[KumaHIME]

@WWAN i don't know if you have an XPS 15 9570 yet or not as i haven't read everything you have typed but...be warned, do NOT update the BIOS to 1.4.1. if you are on 1.3.1, do not update. Dell nerfed the 1050ti quite heavily and broke touch function (whenever you close the lid and reopen, touch and pen function is gone), among other issues. i just returned my XPS 15 9570 because i can't trust dell to make a sane decision, or even role out with it properly. I felt like i was beta testing the XPS 15 at my expense. Some things i will agree with you. you cannot get such a well rounded machine, with great build quality, at such a low price relative to competitors, like this lenovo.

also, it seems like the notebookcheck reviewers didn't bother reading my messages that i posted in the XPS 15 9570 4k review as well as the precision 5530 review. To get full Adobe RGB, you have to disable "Color Accuracy" from the intel graphics control panel. Once done, you can achieve 100% Adobe RGB, which i confirmed with my Xrite i1 Display Pro + DisplayCAL. Notebookcheck would probably get their 88% ARGB reading they normally get for displays rated at 100% ARGB. Backlight bleed is less noticeable on the Sharp 4k panel vs the AUO 4k panel. Brightness also appears more uneven on the AUO panel.

Fun fact, Gigabyte Aero 15x 4k model (which i was able to personally test) uses the same panel as the lenovo thinkpad x1 xtreme.

[M2018]

@ danielee0707
,,Plus your XPS is way uglier and duller."

Only hell is uglier, than Crapovo!  :D

[splus]

Quite disappointing to read the review. I've expected more of this laptop, since it was hyped to be a XPS/MacBook killer.

But in the end it looks like it's just another laptop trying to compete with XPS and MacBook in the segment they dominate, and are arguably better where it matters most (good battery life being the most important, followed by performance and screen).

I suppose if you're a business user you'd be better off with a proper thicker and heavier ThinkPad (or the 14 inch X1), and if you're a consumer then better go with an XPS 15 or a MacBook Pro 15, depending on whether you're a Windows or MacOS user.

[S.Yu]

"there's no actual evidence to back it up"
For the keyboard there's practically no debate, as for "actual evidence" it's hard to quantify a somewhat subjective typing experience but when enough of the reviewers say so you've got a general consensus. For the chassis I could only say that there are more reports of failure for XPS chassis, and there's generally more creaking to indicate low structural strength which is often noted here at Notebookcheck.

"To the majority of people..."
You can stop here because you started off on the wrong foot, this is the high end panel and is not meant for "the majority of people" but for "a couple of *typical* usage cases" as I already mentioned, and if Notebookcheck's methodology is correct(I trust it is most of the time) color gamut is rated at a certain brightness, usually around 200 nits, the further you push the panel away from this brightness the less of the tested gamut you'll get, your fake "pop" mainly comes from the boosted contrast and brightness and is of very limited use to the targeted professionals, thus it can be said that HP and Dell's compromised efforts to potentially impress "the majority of people" on their top tier options leads to reduced usefulness in "a couple of *typical* usage cases" that are instead more likely to generate sales at this specific price level.

"Why the effort? Because we asked for them."
That's your opinion. I don't think that's the case at all, it's what competition's for, and many advancements are linear and we're bound to get there some day.

"You seem to be under the impression that OEMs cherry pick superior and more reliable components for their business class laptops."
I am not, what I'm saying is some models are while expensive, with better-than-average components that genuinely raise costs but are not apparently better unless you dig for specifics, however, some models are expensive yet still cheap out on components(like Surface Studio) and *no* cheap alternative is going to get you components like that.
Component lottery is while widespread practice, but not certain to plague every model, for example I have a tablet that only used ToTL(at the time) SM951 for every tier except the base tier. So unless you have proof that X1E's 1T SSD is a lottery this isn't an issue.

"...with x2 DDR4 SODIMM slots..."
Not part of the discussion, you're assuming that most buyers will immediately upgrade RAM by themselves after purchase, and even assuming that, the X1E's maintenance is the easiest. Another assumption needed for this to be of any relevance is that you can get the better GPU with different tier RAM in any combination, but that's not the case and to get the much faster 1050Ti you'll need to start at 2x8GB, which then go to waste when you swap them out for 2x16GB or 2x32GB, and RAM price will most likely need another year or so to return to 2016 levels, so currently buying your own isn't a cheap affair either.

"I am still recommending the XPS 15 that starts at $1,030..."
You completely missed the point, I was talking about top tier models and "closest to perfection" the entire time, at base tier they're all far from perfection and frankly they could be treated as completely different models just in the same shell.

"But I do...And that is all that matters."
Being so self-important isn't gonna get any of these companies to budge. This brings us back to the beginning:"The fact here is that this laptop fits a couple of *typical* usage cases incredibly well, which means more people paying, not just you."

[WWAN]

@S. Yu:
Clearly you've missed my point since I've been here talking about my own use case and my wishes on a whim the entire time, while you were over there making false assumptions about everyone and everything.