Gadgetory

hey guys and welcome back to hardware I'm box today we'll be taking a look at this excellent laptop here the Lenovo ThinkPad x1 carbon this is their flagship ultra portable from their business line of laptops so there's no fancy features here but you do get solid functionality and hardware across the board as well as excellent engineering that make this a laptop that I can highly recommend before I talk about the features of the sub top I will go through the hardware it's in my review net here this is an Intel Core i5 7200 u processor with 8 gigabytes of RAM a 256 gigabyte SSD and a 1080p display so this is the entry-level model there are a number of configuration options available that can take you up to a core i7 CPUs as a 1440p display option one terabyte SSDs and up to 16 gigabytes of memory but of course that costs you a bit more money there's a lot to like about the design of the ThinkPad x1 carbon normally I'm a fan of the all-metal bodies that you see from things like the Apple MacBook or the HP Spectre x-360 but lenovo has used soft touch plastic around the entirety of this body that looks really decent it's minimalist and it feels great to hold it also has the advantage of reducing the overall weight of this laptop it's a 14 inch laptop but it weighs just 1.13 kilograms which is well below the average that we see even for 13-inch laptops at the moment this laptop won't be turning any heads thanks to its business oriented design but I appreciate some of the features included here like the 180 degree hinge which gives you the most flexibility in display positioning and some of the subtle angles and curves around the edges help hide some of the thickness of this laptop though it's not a particularly thick laptop in general anyway the x1 carbon users perhaps the best range of ports i've seen on a laptop recently on the left hand side you get to sundar bolt free ports both of those are of course USBC and either of them can be used for charging there's also a full size USB 3.0 port full size HDMI and a proprietary connector that is used with the included Ethernet dongle of course Ethernet ports are simply too large to include on ultra portables like this these days though has compromised here by using a special full bandwidth port on this device specifically for Ethernet and I've included the dongle in the box which is a great inclusion to see here there's also an additional full size USB 3.0 port on the right hand side as well as the 3.5 mm audio jack and quite a significant vent for the cooling solution hidden away on the back edge of the laptop is a micro SD and SIM card slot it's really nice to see both of these features included here you can quite easily expand the storage of this laptop without having dongles or external devices hanging off all over the place and LTE connectivity can be very handy although this does cost extra in some regions and models of the x1 carbon there is a fingerprint sensor included below the keyboard on the x1 carbon and I really appreciate how a number of laptop manufacturers are including the security feature on the ultra portable of these days the one of the excellent carbon is it's very responsive and it works extremely well to secure your device it's much easier than entering a pin or password every time and I wish more laptops had this sort of feature in it this wouldn't be a ThinkPad laptop without the signature keyboard that has been used for generations it's quite good on the x1 carbon the travel distance from each key is fantastic for an ultra portable and this leads to great tactile feedback across the board most of the keys are very adequately sized such as the modifier keys the function keys leaving the arrow keys and this helps make the laptop keyboard quite easy to get used to and use on a daily basis that said the worst feature of this entire laptop is included in the keyboard on every keyboard ever made except for the Lenovo ThinkPad keyboard the control key is in the bottom left hand corner of the keyboard yet on this device you'll find the function key in the bottom left hand corner and this makes it really hard to simply pick up this laptop and hit things like ctrl-c and ctrl-v to copy and paste without having to rewire your brain it takes a long time getting used to this key position and I simply wish that Lenovo would keep a traditional keyboard layout here and swap around the function and control keys to make it easier to use moving on to the performance here and for the most part across these benchmarks I'll be comparing the Lenovo ThinkPad x1 carbon to the Razer Blade stealth this gives us a good comparison between the core i5 7200 you and the core i7 7,500 u that's found in the blade stealth for the most part the i7 is a faster processor and this gives you a good idea of whether you should spend a bit more money on the i7 option that you'll find for the ThinkPad x1 car but whether it's worth spending that extra money of course you can see some other results in the charts as well to see how it performs against some other laptops on the market today we'll start off here with the PC mark workloads and looking at the home tests we'll see that the core i5 CPU actually performs quite well here compared to the blade stealth outperforming it by 9% but as we move on to the creative workload you'll see that it falls behind by 23% and that's due to of course the higher clock speed provided by the core i7 CPU and also a higher clock on the GPU as well surprisingly in the werk test both the x1 carbon and the blade stealth performed similarly the blade stealth is a few percent faster but for the most part both devices give you a fantastic work experience and things like Excel spreadsheets and powerpoint things like that and that's the main use case for the x1 carbon here in Cinebench are eleven point five which is one of our encoding tests the Lenovo ThinkPad x1 carbon is around five percent slower than the razor blades Dell can both be multi thread and single threaded tests this is pretty typical thanks to the extra clock speed get from the core i5 7500 u you'll see similar results in an x264 encoding benchmark in part 1 of this video rendering test the core i5 CPU is around 11% slower than the i7 7500 you but this margin is reduced to 4% in pass-through the benchmark which is a pretty decent result here in the winrar compression benchmark in our multi-threaded test here you will see that the cry 5 cpu is actually 12% faster which is a bit of a surprise here been a single-threaded workload it is 2% slower so a bit of an interesting result here but a good result for you think about x1 carbon nonetheless if you're wanting to run some simulations on your laptop we can see here that in MATLAB 2016 the Core i5 CPU is 7.5 percent slower than the core i7 CPU this is a heavily single through workload so the difference in clock speeds here is quite telling although surprisingly in the graphing benchmark this core i5 CPU is 19.7% faster which surprised me a little bit but again a strong result for the x1 carbon nonetheless they think that x1 carbon is definitely not a gaming device by any means and you'll definitely struggle to run popular tiles at any sort of reasonable frame rates not just on this laptop but really any odds reportable but we can see here in the 3d mark cloud gate workload that compared to the 7500 you there's not really a massive performance difference and even taking a look at these skydiver tests as well the i5 CPU in this laptop is only 4 percent slower than the i7 laptop in the Razer Blade stealth we will take a look at two games though just in case you're interested having look at Tomb Raider which is an older title these days running it at the lowest possible settings at 720p we do exceed 60 fps which is a decent result but let's be honest I don't think too many people will really want a game at 720p on a laptop that said it is 15% slower than the Razer Blade stealth in this particular benchmark we'll also take a look at a civilization 6 and again this game really isn't playable on the lower settings at 1080p it struggles to hit even just 20 or 25 frames per second average there is one final thing though on to look at in terms of performance and that is SSD performance we're looking at the 256 gigabyte nvm APCR SSD inside of laptop and performance across the board is very solid with read and write sequential speeds well above one gigabyte per second and also looking at the RAM performance 140 megabytes per second random 4k writes and 557 megabytes per second random reads is a very good result from ultra portable miss leads to fantastic uploading copying times and the like on the ThinkPad x1 carbon it's great to see that they're not skimping on any sort of storage inside this device another excellent aspect of the ThinkPad x1 carbon is its battery life there's only a 57 what our cell inside which is not too large by today's standards but it still produces really solid results in our benchmarks taking a look at our video playback test which essentially just loops a video 215 its brightness until a laptop dies the ThinkPad x1 carbon achieved just over nine and a half hours which puts it in the top end bracket of the laptop so we've tested recently the HP spectre x360 does our performance slightly but this isn't too surprising consuming it spectre x360 years a slightly smaller display and a slightly larger battery and looking at our Wi-Fi browsing benchmark which loops through some websites at we certain intervals in the most popular browsers of today which is google chrome at 200 minutes of brightness you can see if you think that x1 carbon actually tops the charts here with just over seven hours of life and this is a fantastic result for an ultra portable and really a testament to Lenovo's quality engineering that they've put into the ThinkPad x1 carbon before I jump into the conclusions worth talking briefly about the display it's a 14 inch 1080p LCD with reasonably slim bezels around the edge that makes it not too large for a 14 inch laptop we'll talk a bit about the color performance here by jumping straight into spectra Cal Cal Man 5 where we do all of our color testing across our grayscale Suites you can see a Delta II average of 3.8 4 which is not a fantastic result but compared to some of the laptops you find on the market today it's not too bad a color temperature average across the board and 200 nits of 7 1 8 1k not again not a fantastic results but some laptops do push that well into the 7000 or even eight thousand K range and color calibration can definitely fix both the Delta e greyscale and color temperature average if you so desire to do that and gamma again be disappointing at one point nine seven seven I'd rather see this at around 2.2 as you'd expect from an sRGB calibrated display but I only think it affects the performance of this device too much in general looking at our saturation sweeps and you can see the average Delta value of 3.8 - again not a fantastic result and this is largely due to incorrect color temperature of the display which you can see as an effect here in the chart on the right-hand side that Center white dot isn't quite in the black center Square and this is dragging most of those other dots away from their respective squares and perhaps the most disappointing result of all within our very intensive colorchecker test where we saw an average delta value of just four point seven five not too accurate here and not great for color accurate work but again most of the time you can just calibrate this display and fix a lot of these performance issues here and again not too bad compared to some of the other laptops that I've tested often which can push above a Delta e of five in some of these tests and just before we move on brightness is something I want to touch on three hundred and ten nits maximum with a contrast ratio of one thousand three hundred and ninety-six so not too bad here in terms of brightness and contrast and that leads to generally quite nice-looking images on this display at the end of the day I really like the Lenovo ThinkPad x1 carpet I wish that wasn't over were giving me more than just a couple of weeks with this laptop it's a fantastic device with solid Hardware across the board I was really impressed with the performance of just the core i5 CPU inside this laptop often matching the core i7 CPU in competing devices at times the design very impressive love this soft touch plastic body it reduces the weight and gives it a minimalist business-oriented look and feel the keyboard generally quite good in terms of its tactile feedback and responsiveness not happy about the decision of that function key but I hope that lenovo it does address that in the future and something I haven't touched on before in this view as well the trackpad is excellent and I love the inclusion of that little red joystick that you can use as an alternative to the trackpad at times the display again very good 14 inches 1080p reasonable not terrible not excellent color performance you can definitely calibrate to achieve better results there and in terms of battery life fantastic results topped the charts in our Wi-Fi browsing test and did very well in video playback as well from just a 57 watt hour battery so really the ThinkPad x1 carbon is almost a complete package you get great performance great battery life a great design very good display decent keyboard and trackpad and that's exactly what you want from a laptop it hits all the nails on the head you do have to pay for quality though this is an expensive top in the United States at 1329 dollars and for just a core i5 CPU a gigabytes of RAM and a 128 gig SSD that's pretty expensive and competing devices from HP and Dell what's you similar hardware for a cheaper price it's actually a bit more affordable in Australia at one thousand eight hundred and ninety nine dollars again for the base model and that comes with a higher capacity SSD at 256 gigabytes so not too bad in Australia a bit too expensive I think in the United States but you definitely get a very high quality laptop and it's been one of my favorite devices to review as far as ultra portables are concerned the past couple of years it's truly an excellent device and that's it for this review of the Lenovo ThinkPad x1 carbon links to buy this laptop are in the description below check out the written review on taxbot comm and we'll catch you in the next one