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ToolsDon’t Mess With a Classic Design
today ‘s test unit features a 1.7GHz Core i5-10310U processor, 8GB of memory, a 256GB NVMe solid-state campaign, and a full HD ( 1,920-by-1,080-pixel ) non-touch IPS display. Our Lenovo rep says it ‘s $ 1,888 from CDW, which seems a tad steep compared to Lenovo.com ‘s root model at $ 1,331 ( a few dollars cheaper with Linux ). The supernumerary $ 557 buy you a trivially faster Core i5 with Intel ‘s vPro remote IT management, Windows 10 Pro rather of Home, and LTE mobile broadband. If you do n’t need the LTE, you would see little difference with the newcomer machine.
Lenovo offers four other screen options : a 1080p touch screen door, a 1080p touch shield with a privacy percolate, a higher-resolution 2,560-by-1,440-pixel panel, and a 4K ( 3,840-by-2,160-pixel ) Dolby Vision HDR 400 display. The memory and memory ceilings are 16GB and 1TB respectively ; Lenovo.com ‘s price for a maxed-out Core i7-10610U system with the 4K screen is $ 2,378. Though the lightest of Lenovo ‘s three 14-inch business notebooks ( under the 2.8-pound ThinkPad T14s and 3.2-pound ThinkPad T14 ), the Carbon is n’t the lightest on the market ; the Asus ExpertBook B9450 is good 1.91 pounds. still, at 0.59 by 12.7 by 8.5 inches the Lenovo is impressively compact ( the Acer TravelMate P6 measures 0.65 by 12.8 by 9.1 inches ). It ‘s a breeze to stash in any briefcase .
Unlike some other ultralights, the magnesium-reinforced-with-carbon-fiber ThinkPad does n’t feel unconvincing ; there ‘s no bend if you grasp the screen corners or bid the keyboard pack of cards. An X1 insignia below the eyelid ‘s diagonal ThinkPad logo is the only transfer in the familiar matte-black design. The screen bezels are dilute, with a webcam with sliding shutter above the display ; the face-recognition camera and a little fingerprint reviewer beside the touchpad give you two ways to skip passwords with Windows Hello. On the laptop ‘s leftover side are two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a connection for a $ 35 Ethernet dongle, a USB 3.2 Type-A port, an HDMI television output, and a headphone/microphone mariner. Another, always-on USB-A 3.2 port is at the right, along with the power release and a Kensington cable-lockdown slot. A bend composition cartridge holder removes a bantam tray at the rear that holds the optional SIM card .
Rewarding in Every Detail
The 720p webcam captures good coloring material and is dislodge of digital noise, but the picture is soft-focus, bordering on blotchy. Two upward-firing tweeters and two downward-firing woofers pump out above-average sound, with enough of volume and a modest amount of bass ; highs and midtones are clear and it ‘s easy to distinguish overlapping tracks. Supplied Dolby software lets you switch among music, movie, dynamic, game, and voice presets or play with an counterweight. The 14-inch display is nice and cheery a retentive as you stick to the top copulate of luminosity settings, with thoroughly contrast and satisfactory if not dazzling whiten backgrounds. Fine details are deoxyadenosine monophosphate sharp as the 1080p resolution permits and viewing angles are broad. Colors do n’t quite toss off but are rich and well saturated .
Except for the Fn and Control keys being in each other ‘s station at bottom leave ( you can swap them with the leave Lenovo Vantage software, which combines a handful of utilities with system updates and Wi-Fi security ), the backlit keyboard is faultless. The top rowing combines function keys for volume and brightness with shortcuts for answering and hanging up on calls in Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams, a well as dedicated Home and End keys ( Page Up and Page Down are next to the cursor arrows ). Typing feel is swift and crisp, a morsel shallow but with good haptic feedback. Cursor jockey can as usual choose between the buttonless, slightly little touchpad and three-button TrackPoint embedded miniskirt stick, both of which are buoyant and precise .
Testing the X1 Carbon: The Executive Elite
For our benchmark comparisons, I matched the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 against four other 14-inch business laptops ranging from Lenovo ‘s own ThinkPad T14s ( whose eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 Pro central processing unit makes it the favorite in our CPU tests ) to the Dell Latitude 7410 and abovementioned Acer TravelMate P6 and Asus ExpertBook B9450. You can see their basic specification in the table below .
Productivity and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the personal computer benchmark specialists at UL ( once Futuremark ). The PCMark 10 test we run simulate different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system operation for office-centric tasks such as give voice work, spreadsheeting, web browse, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the rush of the system ‘s boot drive. Both yield a proprietary numeric seduce ; higher numbers are good. ( See more about how we test laptops. )
While it could n’t keep up with the hot rod T14s, the Carbon aced our most crucial test, exceeding the 4,000 points that indicate outstanding productivity in PCMark 10. All five systems ‘ SSD ‘s fly through the PCMark 8 storage use. future is Maxon ‘s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is in full threaded to make consumption of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietorship score indicating a personal computer ‘s suitability for processor-intensive workloads .
Cinebench is often a beneficial predictor of our Handbrake television editing benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution depressed to 1080p. It, besides, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs ; lower times are well .
The eight-core AMD CPU of the ThinkPad T14s dominated these events, but even as a Core i5 going up against Core i7 ‘s, the X1 Carbon did very well. It ‘s not a 3D rendering or huge-dataset-gobbling workstation, but it ‘ll rip through your most complex spreadsheets without breaking a fret. We besides run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 secrete of the Creative Cloud adaptation of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the sum ( lower times are better ). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, repositing subsystem, and RAM, but it can besides take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the procedure of applying filters .
An impressively potent read by the Dell, but a solid, middle-of-the-pack end for the ThinkPad X1 Carbon here .
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscleman by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two unlike 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more befit to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demand and lets high-end PCs and gaming rigs strut their stuff .
The T14s and its Radeon Graphics integrated silicon led the way in this contest, but evening it is blown away by about any bet on laptop with a discrete GPU. Business notebook, specially ultraportables, simply are n’t built to play games or radiance in gaming simulations like 3DMark. next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detail 3D fit, this one rendered in the eponymous Unigine locomotive for a moment public opinion on the machine ‘s graphic art .
Gamers in holocene years have been shunning adequate 30fps systems for rigs capable of 60fps or more, so you can imagine their likelihood of settling for 4fps. It ‘s conceivable that a Carbon owner might spend an hour or two with a casual or browser-based game, but it ‘s far from a precedence.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode ( as opposed to balanced or high-performance modality ) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in readiness for our unplug video summation quiz. ( We besides turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode. ) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel Tears of Steel —with screen luminosity set at 50 percentage and book at 100 percentage until the system quits .
The Asus ExpertBook holds the personal computer Labs record with a phenomenal 29 hours of battery life, but the Carbon ‘s time is more than acceptable for an ultraportable. Long workdays, transcontinental flights, and catch-up evenings in business hotels will be no trouble .
A Verdict Cast in Carbon
Its slenderly larger screen, slenderly preferable keyboard, and HDMI larboard put us on Team X1 Carbon rather of Team XPS 13, but you ca n’t go wrong with either. For the record, we ‘re giving the Carbon Gen 8 only four and a half stars rather of a perfect five, because it ‘s not perfect—it has no microSD card slot. Nor is it bum, though it ‘s not outrageously overpriced ; a copulate of hundred bucks over the ultraportable going rate seems a carnival sum to pay for one of the finest, if not the finest, laptop experiences on the planet. You only live once .
