A practically perfect lightweight workstation

I was picked to write the "20 Most Influential PCs" feature for PCMag's 40th Anniversary coverage because I remember them all—I started on a TRS-80 magazine in 1982 and served as editor of Computer Shopper when it was a 700-page monthly. I was later the editor in chief of Home Office Computing, a magazine that promoted using tech to work from home two decades before a pandemic made it standard practice. Even in semiretirement in Bradenton, Florida, I can't stop playing with toys and telling people what gear to buy.

Its display only covers 90% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, but otherwise it's hard to gripe about the svelte, speedy Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 workstation.

The ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 (starts at $1,676; $3,599 as tested) is the cool kid in Lenovo's lineup of mobile workstations. Carrying an array of independent software vendor (ISV) certifications for specialized design, CGI, and scientific apps, it's the workstation version of the ThinkPad X1 Extreme, just as the Dell Precision 5560 is the drafting and rendering sibling of the XPS 15. That means it's less powerful and expandable but thinner and lighter than Lenovo's flagship ThinkPad P15 Gen 2—a slice of prosciutto under the 4-pound line at 3.99 pounds versus a portly 6.32 pounds. The P1 costs much more than comparable content creator laptops without ISV cred, but its performance and ports edge it past the Precision 5560 as our new Editors' Choice honoree for lightweight mobile workstations.

Formerly a 15.6-inch laptop, the ThinkPad P1 now flaunts a 16-inch screen with a slightly taller 16:10 aspect ratio. For $1,676, the Gen 4 base model features an Intel Core i7-11800H processor, an Nvidia T1200 GPU, 8GB of memory, a 256GB solid-state drive, and a 2,560-by-1,600-pixel display rated at 400 nits of brightness. 

Our review unit (model 20Y3006XUS) ranged from $3,599 at Staples to $3,925 at CDW. It steps up to an eight-core, 2.5GHz (4.8GHz turbo) Core i7-11850H CPU and GeForce RTX 3070 graphics—the RTX 3070 and 3080 accompany Nvidia's RTX A-series professional GPUs on the options list—along with a 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD (the storage ceiling is 4TB) and the max 64GB of RAM. Processor choices climb to the Core i9-11950H and six-core Xeon W-11855M, the latter offered with error-correcting-code (ECC) memory. 

If you want higher resolution, both touch and non-touch 3,840-by-2,400 IPS screens are available, each rated at 600 nits. Our system has the non-touch panel with medium-thin bezels around it; the top border makes room for a face-recognition webcam with sliding privacy shutter, which along with a fingerprint reader in the power button gives you two ways to log in with Windows Hello. The keyboard is flanked by stereo speakers, so there's no room for a numeric keypad. 

Outfitted with an aluminum alloy bottom and carbon fiber weave top, the ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 has passed MIL-STD 810G tests against road hazards like shock, vibration, and hot and cold temperatures. There's almost no flex if you mash the keyboard or grasp the screen corners. The system measures 0.7 by 14.1 by 10 inches (HWD), making it a tad bigger than the Dell 5560 (0.73 by 13.6 by 9.1 inches) and HP ZBook Studio G8 (0.69 by 13.9 by 9.2 inches). The HP weighs the same as the Lenovo; the Dell is a third of a pound heavier. 

While the Precision 5560 offers only three USB-C ports (two with Thunderbolt 4) and a USB Type-A and HDMI dongle, the ThinkPad has a fuller set of interfaces. Two Thunderbolt 4 ports join an HDMI port, an audio jack, and the AC adapter connector on the laptop's left side. The right edge holds two USB 3.2 Type-A ports and an SD card slot plus a security lock slot. Wired networkers will find a USB-C to Ethernet adapter in the box; Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth handle wireless links. 

The workstation's IR webcam is way above average, offering 1080p instead of the usual, minimal 720p resolution and capturing sharp, colorful images with almost no static—you'll look a little dark in a less than brightly lit room, but your colleagues will know if you skipped shaving this morning. 

The upward-firing speakers pump out sound that's loud and clear; there's a surprising amount of bass and it's easy to hear overlapping tracks. Dolby Atmos software provides dynamic, game, movie, and music presets, and an equalizer. Another preinstalled utility, Lenovo Vantage, centralizes system updates and information, Wi-Fi security, and settings ranging from cooling fan speed (and noise level) to keyboard defaults. 

Speaking of the keyboard, it has a bright backlight and Lenovo's trademark first-class typing feel. There are dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, and the top-row Escape and Delete keys aren't too tiny. The F10 and F11 keys place and end calls in Microsoft Teams; the Fn and Control keys are in each other's places at bottom left, but if you can't adjust you can swap them with Lenovo Vantage. Both Lenovo's TrackPoint keyboard pointing stick (with three buttons including the middle one beloved of ISV apps) and a good-sized touchpad are available for cursor control; the pad takes just the right amount of pressure for a quiet click. 

Unlike the Gen 2 model we reviewed in March 2020, the ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 doesn't offer an OLED display, so it doesn't have incredibly high contrast and utterly black blacks. But the 3,840-by-2,400-pixel screen is almost as good as an IPS panel gets, with remarkable brightness and ultra-fine details; you can't see any pixelation even if you try. 

White backgrounds are as pure as the driven snow, helped by a screen hinge that tilts way back. Colors are deep, rich, and well saturated and viewing angles are broad. An X-Rite Color Assistant utility in the system tray lets you switch among default, sRGB, Adobe RGB, DCI-P3 cinema, Rec. 709 television, and DICOM medical imaging color palettes.

For our benchmark charts, I compared the P1 Gen 4 to four other high-performance desktop replacements whose basic specs appear below. The Dell Precision 5560 is a direct competitor as a lightweight workstation, while the HP ZBook Studio G8 straddles the workstation and content-creator worlds. The Acer ConceptD 5 and Asus ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED belong to the content-creator camp—and cost a lot less than the mobile workstations at about $2,000 and $2,400 respectively.

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage drive.

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Clearly, this is an overachieving group. All five laptops pulverized the 4,000-point score that indicates excellent productivity in PCMark 10 (using them for Word or Excel is a waste). Considering it was going up against a Core i9 and a Ryzen 9 CPU, the Lenovo's Core i7 aced our processor benchmarks, and it's a brilliant Photoshop platform. 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The ThinkPad didn't win any gold medals but it's clearly more than capable of handling medium-high after-hours gaming as well as demanding visual apps, fulfilling the promise of its eye-pleasing screen. 

We run three additional programs to simulate workstation applications. Since we don't have results for them for every notebook in our database, I swapped in three heavier laptop workstations, the MSI WS66, Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2, and HP ZBook Fury 15 G8. All have Core i9 processors and Nvidia's professional pinnacle RTX A5000 GPU. 

The first test is PugetBench for Adobe Premiere Pro, a counterpart to our Photoshop benchmark that focuses on video rather than image editing. The second is Blender, an open-source 3D suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for its built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photo-realistic scenes of BMW cars, one using the system's CPU and one the GPU (lower times are better). BMW artist Mike Pan has said he considers the scenes too fast for rigorous testing, but they're a popular benchmark. 

Perhaps our most important workstation test, SPECviewperf 2020, renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models using viewsets from popular ISV apps. We run the 1080p resolution tests based on PTC's Creo CAD platform; Autodesk's Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games; and Dassault Systemes' SolidWorks 3D rendering package. The more frames per second, the better.

You might want to hold out for a Core i9 chip if you're a full-time 4K video editor, but otherwise the P1 Gen 4 was amazing, coming within an eyelash of matching the much bulkier and heavier ThinkPad P15 and thrashing the Precision 5560 in Blender and two of three SPECviewperf tests. If you need a top-performing mobile workstation that won't bust through the bottom of your briefcase, look no further. 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window) ) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

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

I don't think we've ever seen a finer set of laptop displays in a comparison. The Asus ProArt and HP ZBook Studio boast OLED panels, but all five screens are superb, with the ThinkPad P1 actually looking bad for covering only 90% of the DCI-P3 gamut (used for cinema rather than design programs) and falling 1% shy of its advertised 100% of Adobe RGB. The P1 compensated by delivering the highest brightness you'll find aside from rugged laptops meant to be used in outdoor sunlight.

Its seven-hour battery life is unimpressive but mobile workstations spend most of their time plugged in for lengthy sessions of 3D rendering or dataset crunching, so it's forgivable.

The ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 has the USB-A and HDMI ports that the Dell Precision 5560 restricts to a dongle, and it beats up the Dell and takes its lunch money in most of our performance benchmarks. Unless you crave an OLED rather than IPS display, it's an easy pick as our new Editors' Choice winner among truly portable workstations.

Its display only covers 90% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, but otherwise it's hard to gripe about the svelte, speedy Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 workstation.

Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.

This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.

Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!

I was picked to write the "20 Most Influential PCs" feature for PCMag's 40th Anniversary coverage because I remember them all—I started on a TRS-80 magazine in 1982 and served as editor of Computer Shopper when it was a 700-page monthly. I was later the editor in chief of Home Office Computing, a magazine that promoted using tech to work from home two decades before a pandemic made it standard practice. Even in semiretirement in Bradenton, Florida, I can't stop playing with toys and telling people what gear to buy.

PCMag.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering lab-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services. Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

© 1996-2022 Ziff Davis. PCMag Digital Group

PCMag, PCMag.com and PC Magazine are among the federally registered trademarks of Ziff Davis and may not be used by third parties without explicit permission. The display of third-party trademarks and trade names on this site does not necessarily indicate any affiliation or the endorsement of PCMag. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product or service, we may be paid a fee by that merchant.