Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 (2024) Review and Sales price

Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 (2024) Review and Sales price

What does Lenovo do for an encore after winning our Editors’ Choice award for mobile workstations with the ThinkPad P15? The ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 (starting at $1,709) offers refreshments in the form of Intel’s 11th Generation CPUs, Nvidia’s professional graphics in the “Ampere” class, and faster PCI Express Gen 4 storage. It’s heavy and expensive—our test unit cost $5,382 without one of the available 4K displays—but it’s an excellent choice for crunching massive datasets or tackling difficult 3D rendering and design tasks.

While the base model has a six-core Core i5 processor and an Nvidia T1200 GPU, our P15 Gen 2 has an eight-core, 2.6GHz (5.0GHz turbo) Core i9-11950H processor and 16GB Nvidia RTX A5000 Max-Q graphics, as well as 32GB of memory and a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive. (The RTX A-series graphics are the successor to Nvidia’s well-known Quadro line.)

Graphics Tests -Thinkpad p15 gen 2

We put Windows PC graphics to the test using two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Night Raid (which is more modest and appropriate for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

We also perform two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which puts a premium on low-level operations like texturing as well as high-level, game-like visual rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase experiments, generated offscreen to suit differing display resolutions, put graphics and compute shaders to the test, respectively, utilizing the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation. The higher the frame rate (fps), the better.

Thinkpad p15 gen 2 -Battery

We evaluate the battery life of laptops by playing a locally saved 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with the display brightness set to 50% and the audio volume set to 100%. Before the test, we ensure that the battery is fully charged and that Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting are switched off.

We also utilize a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and accompanying Windows software to determine a laptop screen’s color saturation—the percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes that the display can display—as well as its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The battery-life findings were close, with all five devices demonstrating adequate endurance for powerful desktop replacements. It should be easy to go through a whole workday. All of the displays exhibited excellent color fidelity, albeit the Dell’s OLED panel outperformed the others, and they were all quite bright, with the P15 Gen 2’s being marginally brighter.

The Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 ably replaces its predecessor as the heavyweight champion of the company’s mobile workstation series; with the Core i9 and RTX A5000, it’s strong enough to sprint through tasks that would make most laptops moan and grimace. You won’t find a better keyboard or port choices anywhere else, and if you need more than 128GB of RAM and 6TB of storage, a desktop workstation, not a notebook, is required.

We’re not awarding the Gen 2 the Editors’ Choice award that the first P15 received, primarily because we get a nosebleed at prices above $5,000—our Gen 1 test unit was $500 cheaper and featured a 4K display—and we haven’t yet tested its top-tier rivals, the Dell Precision 7560 and HP ZBook Fury 15 G8. But make no mistake: If you’re looking for the Mechagodzilla of business laptops, the P15 Gen 2 delivers the best and WINS.

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Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2

Base Configuration Price $1,709.00

Pros

• Ferocious CPU and GPU performance
• World’s best laptop keyboard
• Plenty of ports Ample room for expansion

Cons

• Extremely expensive but cheaper if you buy from us
• Bulky and heavy 1080p screen is bright but not ultra-colorful

The Bottom Line

If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it, but Lenovo’s ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 smashes into the front rank of mobile workstations with blazing performance.

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