Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 review: Is it better than the Dell XPS 15? | Laptop Mag
Our Verdict
Lenovo says the ThinkPad X1 Farthermost Gen 4 was congenital for professionals with heavy workloads, simply the xvi-inch laptop is best suited for a narrower consumer segment.
For
- Durable chassis
- Ultra-fast file-transfer rates
- Zippy video transcoding
- Robust speakers
- 1080p webcam
Confronting
- Expensive
- Fingerprint-attracting chassis
Laptop Mag Verdict
Lenovo says the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 was built for professionals with heavy workloads, just the 16-inch laptop is best suited for a narrower consumer segment.
Pros
- +
Durable chassis
- +
Ultra-fast file-transfer rates
- +
Zippy video transcoding
- +
Robust speakers
- +
1080p webcam
Cons
- -
Expensive
- -
Fingerprint-attracting chassis
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Farthermost Gen 4 specs
Price: $ane,623 (starting); $$ii,074 (every bit reviewed)
CPU: Intel Core i7-11800H CPU
GPU: Nvidia RTX 3060 (6GB of VRAM)
RAM: 16GB
Storage: 512GB SSD
Brandish: xvi-inch, 2560 x 1600-pixel
Battery: 7:50
Size: xiv 10 x x 0.78 inches
Weight: 4 pounds
Lenovo couldn't take picked a better proper noun for the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 — extreme is the operative word here. When I think of "extreme," phrases similar "to the max," "out of hand" and "exorbitant" come up to mind, which perfectly describe this sixteen-inch monster. The toll tag is definitely extreme with a shocking starting price of $2,951. Whew! This sixteen-inch laptop, packed with farthermost internals such as a top-of-the-line 11th Gen Intel Cadre i7 CPU and powerful Nvidia 30-serial graphics, was built to brand its rivals sweat. Someone check on the Dell XPS 15!
This Lenovo laptop is a major improvement from the last ThinkPad X1 Extreme nosotros reviewed (Gen 2). It's got more battery life, a brighter display and zippier fries. But of course, every monster has its kryptonite. The ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen iv is no different, specially since it'southward up against some fierce competitors.
Still, the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 is platonic for handling farthermost workloads for professionals, whether you're a creator, architect or engineer. Equally a scarlet on summit, they tin relax and play their favorite graphics-intensive games later a long mean solar day of productivity. It's easily 1 of the all-time video editing laptops you can buy.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen four pricing and configuration
The ThinkPad X1 Farthermost Gen 4 has a starting toll of $2,951. Subsequently a price slash, an entry-level configuration at present costs $i,623 (much better!) and comes with an 11th Gen Intel Cadre i7-11800H CPU, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of SSD storage, a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Max Q GPU with 4GB of VRAM, and a 2560 x 1600-pixel display.
Our review unit costs $2,074, which bumps the specs up to 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD storage and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 with 6GB of VRAM. If you lot choose to purchase this configuration, make sure to snag the dual-channel RAM (two sticks of 8GB of RAM) as opposed to the single-channel RAM (one 16GB stick of RAM). It's the aforementioned price, but you'll get better operation.
The most extreme — heh, heh — configuration has a $3,900 price tag and boot things up a notch with an 11th Gen Intel Cadre i9-11950H CPU, 64GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Max-Q GPU, and a 3840 10 2400-pixel brandish.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 blueprint
The ThinkPad X1 Extreme is the political party guest who doesn't intendance to stand out of the crowd. "I'll just wear an all-black ensemble and hopefully no one will observe me," the Lenovo laptop would say. However, simply because it'south a wallflower doesn't mean that it's neglectful of its appearance. Information technology withal has a clean-cut, urbane, sophisticated wait that would earn a nod of approval from professional crowds, but information technology won't catch anyone'due south center.
Don't leave this laptop at a crime scene! Non only does the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 attract a lot of fingerprints, only it'due south difficult to become rid of them, too.
On the acme corner of the chapeau, you'll observe the words "ThinkPad X1" in which a portion of the 10 (and the I'south dot) is stamped in red, adding a much-needed splash of color to the laptop. Open the lid, and you'll discover that it'southward low-cal enough to open with i finger. The display is framed by thin bezels with the top one housing a 1080p webcam.
The deck features a keyboard — flanked by two speakers — with black, scallop-shaped keys and white symbols, as well every bit the little red nub, a tell-tale sign that you've got a ThinkPad in your hands. The keyboard takes upwards most half of the deck, leaving room for a spacious touchpad that features a carmine trim, post-obit the hat's blackness-and-red motif.
The underside has three rubber anxiety — two modest ones and one long one — to continue the laptop elevated so that information technology has room to "breathe" while the vents do their task.
The ThinkPad X1 Extreme has dimensions of xiv x x 10 0.78 inches and weighs 4 pounds. It's lighter, but thicker than the Dell XPS xv (thirteen.6 x 9.one x 0.7 inches, 4.three pounds). The Lenovo laptop is a tinge heavier and thicker than the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE (12.seven x ix.0 x 0.seven inches, iii.viii pounds). The Alienware m15 (14 x 10.7 ten 0.ix inches) is heavier and thicker than the ThinkPad X1 Extreme.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 durability and security
The ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 comes with a fingerprint scanner for seamless, identity-verifying logins, only it'due south not situated below the keyboard like you'd expect. The biometric authentication is integrated into the power button.
The ThinkPad X1 Farthermost is also rated for military-form durability, passing 12 MIL-STD 810G tests and over 200 quality checks. So should y'all find yourself in a sandstorm in the centre of the Sahara Desert, yous can rest assured that the laptop will endure the extreme conditions without falling apart.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 ports
The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme has a sweet selection of ports, offering a variety of legacy and modern I/O options to run across all your information needs.
On the correct side, you'll find a Kensington lock slot, two USB 3.two Gen one Type-A ports and an SD card reader. On the left, there are two Thunderbolt iv ports, an HDMI two.one port and a headset jack.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 brandish
The ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen iv's xvi-inch, 2560 x 1600-pixel display is taller than your typical laptop with its sixteen:10 aspect ratio, and then you'll get more screen real estate than usual.
I enjoyed watching The Batman trailer on the Lenovo display. I spotted wisps of hair sitting chaotically atop a blonde actor'southward head similar an arachnoid nightmare. I even fabricated out the fingerprint smudges on a rear-facing subway train window. The subtle freckles on Zoe Kravitz's well-sculpted face up stood out to me as she caressed Batman'southward leather mask. The flickering, electric-blue LED lights that wrapped around a corner store could stand to exist more brilliant, but overall, the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen four's brandish was a visual treat.
If you want a bright screen, the ThinkPad X1 Extreme is your guy, offering 426 nits of effulgence, which bests the average premium laptop (392 nits). The Lenovo laptop likewise crush the Dell XPS 15's OLED panel, which just radiates 398 nits of brightness. The ThinkPad X1 Extreme also outperformed the Predator Triton 300 SE (292 nits) and the m15 Ryzen Edition (328 nits).
When we tested the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme's DCI-P3 colour gamut coverage, it neither impressed nor disappointed with a score of 83.5%. It failed to outperform the average premium laptop by a tiny margin (83.9%). It managed to beat the Predator Triton 300 SE (lxxx.half-dozen%), but non the XPS 15 (85%) nor the m15 Ryzen Edition (87.3%).
The Lenovo laptop could utilise some tweaking in regards to its color accuracy. Its Delta-E results were the worst, serving upwardly a score of 0.31 (the closer to zero, the better). This falls short of the average premium laptop (0.25), the XPS 15 (0.21), the Predator Triton 300 SE (0.22) and the m15 Ryzen Edition (0.29).
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 sound
Music professionals will appreciate the ThinkPad X1 Extreme's dual, pinnacle-firing Dolby Atmos speakers. I fired upwards Spotify and cranked up "Moth to a Flame," past Swedish Business firm Mafia and The Weeknd, to max volume. Abel's signature moody tone took over my medium-sized room and soothed my ears with a crisp, clear sound — the acme-firing speakers are absolutely fantastic.
The audio perfectly captured Abel's melancholic, heart-searching vocals while as well emanating loud, well-amplified, snappy sounds when the beat dropped with livelier instruments.
The speakers sound excellent out of the box, but if it tickles your fancy, you can tweak it to your liking using the Dolby Access app. There are several profiles yous can choose from: Dynamic, Game, Moving-picture show, Music and Voice. I tested them all and I preferred the Dynamic setting, which identifies your sound content and employs elevation-notch automated adjustments to evangelize the all-time possible sound.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 keyboard
Adjusting to the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4's island-style keyboard took some time. The 1.5mm key travel is a bit also much for my tastes; besides, the actuation force is likewise high. I've grown accustomed to my Acer Swift 3'south relatively short central travel, and so it wasn't piece of cake to dive into my usual typing menstruum on the ThinkPad X1 Farthermost four. Nonetheless, after a few hours of typing on it, I eventually got over the awkward phase and got used to the keys. Of course, others may capeesh the keyboard's generous travel — it'southward all a matter of personal preference.
On the 10FastFingers.com typing examination, I accomplished a score of 63 words per infinitesimal, a major drop from my usual 87-wpm average.
Under the spacebar lies a spacious 4.five x 2.6-inch touchpad with a polish-every bit-silk surface. It executed Windows 10 gestures with ease, including the pinch-to-zoom feature and iii-finger swipes to swap windows.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Farthermost Gen 4 performance
The Lenovo ThinkPad X1, packed with an 11th Gen Intel Cadre i7-11800H CPU and 16GB RAM didn't come to play — it came to slay! I tried to push it to its limit by swamping the laptop with 45 Google Chrome tabs, simply the laptop scoffed and said, "That'southward all y'all got?!" It showed no signs of lag nor slowdowns.
Though the ThinkPad X1 Extreme passed my multitasking challenge with flying colors, information technology's upwards against some formidable competitors — can it outperform them?
On the Geekbench 5.four overall performance test, the Lenovo laptop served upward a score of seven,244. This beats the average premium laptop past miles (four,467). Even so, the XPS 15 is a tough rival. The Dell has the same RAM and CPU as its Lenovo opponent, but managed to narrowly beat it with a score of vii,477. The ThinkPad X1 Extreme also got crushed by the m15 Ryzen Edition (seven,288, AMD Ryzen R7 5800H). The simply rival the Lenovo laptop surpassed is the Predator Triton 300 SE (v,234), which sports an Intel Core i7-11375H CPU and 16GB of RAM.
OK, so the ThinkPad didn't practise so hot on the overall functioning exam, but watch it cause full devastation on the file-transfer examination. The X1 Extreme took only 21 seconds to indistinguishable 25GB of multimedia files, which translates to a charge per unit of ane,308.58 megabits per second. This is about double what the boilerplate premium laptop tin can do (702.ane MBps). It likewise flew past the XPS 15 (825.6 MBps), the Predator Triton 300 SE (993 MBps) and the m15 Ryzen Edition (874.i).
The Lenovo laptop besides did pretty damn spectacular on the HandBrake video transcoding test. It took just 7 minutes and 36 seconds to convert a 4K video to 1080p. This is zippier than the average premium laptop (14:08) and whizzes past the XPS 15 (8:10) and the Predator Triton 300 SE (11:36). The but laptop it couldn't beat was the m15 Ryzen Edition R5, which took only 7 minutes and 5 seconds to complete the task.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen iv graphics
The ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 is accoutered with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU with 6GB of VRAM. This laptop was designed for professionals seeking a beastly organization that tin can endure all of their graphics-intensive tasks — and it's certainly living upwards to its name.
The Lenovo laptop, which shares the aforementioned GPU as its competitors (save for the XPS fifteen, which sports an RTX 3050 Ti GPU), damn-about decimated the competition on the 3DMark Burn Strike benchmark (tests DirectX 11 performance). With a score of sixteen,739, it crushed the boilerplate premium laptop (half-dozen,105) and sailed by the XPS 15 (8,433). Information technology also pummeled the Predator Triton 300 SE (14,919). The merely laptop it could not defeat was the m15 Ryzen Edition (18,687).
The ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen iv returned for a second butt whooping on the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark (tests Direct X 12 performance). With a stellar score of vii,001, it wiped out the category boilerplate (two,607), the XPS 15 (3,766), the Predator Triton 300 SE (6,457) and the m15 Ryzen Edition (4,001).
As mentioned, the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen four is designed for professional person workloads, but it has enough horsepower to handle some gaming, likewise. On the Borderlands 3 benchmark (1080p, Very High), the Lenovo laptop reached 60 frames per second, which beats the average premium laptop by a hair (59 fps) also as the Predator Triton 300 SE (57 fps). All the same, the m15 Ryzen Edition edged out the Lenovo with 66 fps.
Every bit for the Dell XPS 15, we only have results from the Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Tempest criterion (1080p) and information technology reached 67 fps, beating the Lenovo laptop (65 fps) and the 35-fps score of the average premium laptop (we don't accept Civilization VI results for the Acer nor the Alienware).
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Farthermost Gen 4 battery life
I don't expect 10-hour bombardment life from the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4. Why? It has powerful, bombardment-draining internals. Despite this, the Lenovo laptop managed to beat its competitors when it comes to battery life.
The ThinkPad X1 Extreme couldn't outlast the boilerplate premium laptop (10:26), simply with a runtime of 7 hours and 50 minutes, the Lenovo beat the XPS fifteen (6:58), the Predator Triton 300 SE (6:41) and the m15 Ryzen Edition (3:29).
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 heat
The ThinkPad X1 Extreme couldn't remain under our 95-degree comfort level on our heat test. Later running a 15-minute HD video, the middle of the keyboard and underside measured 96 and 99 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. The touchpad was the coolest, reaching only 80 degrees.
The hottest location of the ThinkPad is the underside, near the vents, which hovered at around 103 degrees.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 webcam
The laptop market is brimful with 720p webcams, so it was a breath of fresh air to turn on the ThinkPad'due south 1080p camera and not look like a glitchy blob. The webcam renders color impressively well, picking up on different reddish tones — from burgundy to ginger — from my new hairdo. It also perfectly captured my sweater's burnt orange colour every bit well as its fluffy, teddy acquit-esque texture.
I accept no complaints near the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4's crisp and articulate 1080p camera, but if you lot desire to step your webcam game upward a notch, bank check out our all-time external webcams page for more deluxe camera options.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Farthermost Gen 4 software and warranty
Our ThinkPad X1 Extreme review unit runs on Windows 10 Pro and comes with a myriad of Lenovo-branded apps, including Lenovo Quick Clean (locks input so you can clean the laptop) and the Lenovo Commercial Vantage app. The latter offers useful tidbits about your device, including warranty information, your device's serial number, storage and retentivity data, also every bit microphone and camera settings. You can likewise cheque for organisation updates.
I was pleasantly surprised to run into that the ThinkPad X1 Extreme doesn't have a lot of bloatware. Save for Skype, I didn't see whatever superfluous apps like the dreaded Candy Beat Saga and Farm Heroes Saga games.
The ThinkPad X1 Extreme ships with a ane-yr warranty. See how Lenovo fared in our All-time and worst brands and Tech support showdown special reports.
Bottom line
Lenovo says that the target audition for the ThinkPad X1 Farthermost Gen 4 are professionals such as engineers, architects and designers, merely I remember it's all-time to pause downward which niche would benefit the about from this sixteen-inch laptop.
I would dominion out photo editors — merely because there are meliorate options. Compared to its rivals, the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen four'southward display isn't equally colorful. If you're a photo editor, I'd recommend the OLED-packed Dell XPS fifteen or the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio with its clever swivel.
Due to its spectacular file-transfer and video-transcoding test results, I'd recommend this laptop to professionals with a "fourth dimension is money" mentality who often work with a plethora of files and demand an ultra-fast system that tin handle them like a champ.
I'd also recommend the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen four to music professionals, voice actors and podcast producers because the speakers are fantastic.
The ThinkPad X1 Farthermost Gen 4 doesn't have the best battery life, just compared to its rivals with comparable internals, it can last through an eight-hour workday — its competitors tin can't. With a durable chassis, crisp 1080p webcam, great performance and graphics, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Farthermost Gen 4 is 1 of the best business organisation laptops on the marketplace.
Source: https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-extreme-gen-4
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