With great power comes a massive price tag
OUR VERDICT
This is one expensive laptop, but many might willingly pay the price for this beautifully engineered and designed machine. If you want desktop-level power with portability in a robust package, the X1 Extreme is built for exactly that.
FOR
- So much power
- Glorious 4K screen
- Great user experience
AGAINST
- Heavy
- Expensive
- Battery life could be better
When laptop makers put ‘Extreme’ in the name of a product, it’s a strong indicator that this design will be spectacular in at least one or more aspects.
But the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme pushes the performance boat out on almost every front, combining an 8th-generation Intel Core i7 CPU with an Nvidia Max-Q GPU and wrapping up the gift in a carbon-fiber and aluminum case.
On paper this is the laptop that performance users dream of, but does it live up to the hype and the price?
The X1 Extreme is available in most regions, although the specific models may vary. An entry-level notebook costs $1,673 (£1,619.99), and has a Core i5 CPU, no discrete GPU, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of NVMe storage and a 1080p non-touch display.
Lenovo offers an ‘Awesome’ edition which includes the Intel Core i7-8850H six-core processor with vPro (2.60GHz, up to 4.30GHz with Turbo, 9MB Cache) priced at ₦680,000 on ritelink.com.ng.
In short, this isn’t a machine that will be bought by those who are price-sensitive, but there is a substantial amount of high-quality technology crammed into this laptop.
Design
The traditional ThinkPad philosophy is never to offer anything too radical, as the corporate market just doesn’t care for much in the way of style or imagination.
Therefore, the outside of this laptop is remarkably like those that came before, with the same ThinkPad branding and black color scheme.
What we have with the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme is a design that has been honed, like the evolution of the shark, to a point where most changes are internal rather than major external divergence.
That said, Lenovo must be complimented on the engineering of this notebook’s body, which combines a four-layer carbon-fiber upper surface with an aluminum alloy lower chassis to provide a highly durable shell.
When you consider the abuse that a machine like this might encounter in a working environment, and the high cost of replacing it, being able to take a few knocks is an absolute necessity.
But it also needs to be very practical. And, not unexpectedly in its ThinkPad series, Lenovo nails that part of the equation in the ThinkPad X1 Extreme.
There isn’t any part of this portable which will mystify the average user on the day that they get it.
All the connectors are arranged along the sides, buttons and ports are all clearly labelled, plus the keyboard and touchpad are large and responsive. It’s all good, all tuned for rapid user acceptance, and ready for business.
There are lots of lovely touches and refinements, but for us, the standout visual feature is the wonderful 15.6-inch screen. It’s exceptionally bright, very colorful, and remarkably crisp.
Our only complaint about the display, and it’s an easily addressable point, is that at this native resolution and brightness, it is very easy to lose track of the mouse pointer at a normal scale.
The only significant downside of this overall design is how heavy it is. At more than 4lbs (1.84kg) this isn’t a system that you’ll want to carry for long, and it isn’t a computer that you can easily pick up with one hand.
That said, even at this weight, this isn’t the heaviest ThinkPad that Lenovo makes, being a few grams less than the T580.
For those who have never owned a ThinkPad, the only warning we give is that against conventional keyboard logic, the Function key is on the far-left of the bottom row, rather than CTRL.
That’s not a huge problem for most users, but it might take some acclimatization for those who use a desktop computer with a conventionally laid out keyboard alongside this notebook.
With a laptop this powerful, the fan can kick in when you start pushing the system, and with the X1 Extreme, this is clearly audible. However, to get the fan spinning at maximum speed requires the GPU to be fully occupied, and the majority of the time this won’t be the case.
The port allocation is excellent with two full Thunderbolt 3 connectors, and the only disappointment is the use of a proprietary power supply port, rather than a Type-C. At least the power connector is a robust effort, and not one of the horrible needle variety that can fall out so easily. Note that the X1 charges from flat in about 2.5 hours.
One oddity is that while the X1 Extreme is thick enough to have a full-sized Ethernet port, instead it has a network extension port and a small adapter to convert to Ethernet.
Our worry would be losing this small adapter, because it isn’t easily replaceable from anywhere else but Lenovo.
The model in stock, Windows Hello is fully supported with an IR camera, along with a Match-on-Chip touch fingerprint reader, and a smart card reader (optional) for those who prefer those security protocols.SPEC SHEET
Here is the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme configuration:
CPU: 8Th Gen Intel Core i7 2.3GHz
Graphics: 4GB Nvidia GTX 1050Ti
RAM: 16GB RAM
Screen: 15.6-inch 4K HDR IPS multi-touch
Storage: 512GB SSD
Ports: 2 x Thunderbolt 3, 2 x USB 3.0 (Type-A), Ethernet extension connector, HDMI 2.0, SD card reader, mic/headphone combo jack
Overall, the features of the X1 Extreme are impressive, but incredibly they’re somewhat overshadowed by the specification of the internal hardware.
Specifications
As configurations go, this one is right up there with the most powerful portable computers you can buy.
While Lenovo didn’t push the boat out completely and use the Core i9-8950HK or Xeon E CPU, the Core i7-8750H is a veritable six-core and twelve-threaded silicon beast.
It only requires a single core to trounce the majority of office computing tasks, and might well have allocated the other five to the task of becoming sentient and taking over the world.
This is the perfect hardware to make the most of the NVMe storage and 2400MHz DDR4 RAM, making for very punchy performance almost irrespective of the challenges put before it.
And in the graphics department, where most laptops reach the limits of their capabilities, the X1 Extreme has the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with Max-Q technology and 4GB of dedicated DDR5 memory to rely on.
Performance
Our initial reaction to the discrete GPU in this design was to wonder why this hardware was in a machine that isn’t promoted as a gaming portable? After a few days with the X1 Extreme, the penny dropped that without the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, this laptop would offer a sluggish experience due to the very high resolution of the screen.
The Intel UHD 630 GPU that resides in the Core i7-8750H just wasn’t built to handle 3,840 x 2,160 pixels, and video playback of 4K streamed content or 3D generated imagery would effectively be reduced to a slideshow.
While the GTX 1050 Ti isn’t quite up to 4K gaming frame-rates, it can achieve most business software requirements at that resolution, and if you drop the output to 1080p, it can drive games at over 100 frames per second.
Those graphical powers deliver the possibility of using this machine for design work, CAD, light 3D modelling and presentation tasks, alongside all the typical uses for an office system.
But even if the problem isn’t one you can crush with a discrete GPU, the speed of the NVMe drive in combination with the processor and chipset is dramatic.
However, the downside of the GPU is power consumption, because the ability to achieve more frames per second comes with a battery life reducing overhead.
The X1 Extreme has a four-cell Li-Polymer 80WHr battery, which is at least 50% bigger than the power-pack in most portable machines. That seems like plenty until you start considering the high demands of the Core i7 CPU, the NVMe storage, 32GB of RAM and the GeForce GPU, all of which add up to give the battery something of a beating.
Don’t expect this machine to have the battery life of an equivalent Dell XPS or Toshiba Portégé laptop, although we suspect that the lower cost model with the 1080p screen (and without the GeForce GPU) would probably have a longer operating window.
BENCHMARKS
Here’s how the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme performed in our suite of benchmark tests:
3DMark: Sky Diver: 19,465; Fire Strike: 6,467; Time Spy: 2,357
Cinebench: OpenGL: 105.28 fps; CPU: 1,004
Geekbench: 5,081 (single-core); 21,142 (multi-core); 37,869 (compute)
PCMark 8 (Home Test): 3,636
CrystalDiskMark: 3,304MBps (read); 2,396MBps (write)
Passmark: 6,036
Passmark CPU: 13,608
CPU-Z: 455 (single-thread); 3,043 (multi-thread)
Novabench: 2,576
Atto: 2,827MBps (read, 256mb); 2,281MBps (write, 256mb)
Sisoft Sandra (KPT): 3.61
Battery life is the trade-off for having the 4K screen and game-level graphics, and that translates into the end result of having a laptop that won’t get you through a whole working day without any mains power.
The benchmarks we recorded with the ThinkPad X1 Extreme are good numbers for any type of PC, but they’re even more amazing for a laptop.
Without the GeForce GPU, all the 3DMark tests would be much lower, and the Cinebench OpenGL performance more than tripled compared to an integrated solution.
For comparison, a typical Time Spy score for the Intel UHD 630 GPU would be around 350, or 15% of what this system can achieve.
The performance of the internal drive is equally impressive, notching up read speeds of over 3,300MBps, and writing at 2,400MBps. The ability to install another NVMe drive and RAID stripe the two could double those numbers, if you want the ultimate in storage speeds.
If there is a weakness, it’s the battery life. Even with 80WHr of battery on hand, this notebook lasted just 4 hours 21 minutes on the PCMark 08 Home test, and that’s with the brightness at 120 nits and the power performance bar set to maximize battery life.
That’s not going to last a working day, then, especially if you use the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti in any meaningful way.
Display
The screen of the X1 Extreme deserves special mention, if not its own review.
There are two aspects of this panel that are noteworthy, the first of those being the 4K resolution. As this is only a 15.6-inch screen, the pixels are microscopic, and therefore by default the system scales the interface to 250% just to make it practical to use.
However, bear in mind that unless you run a 4K video stream or use an application where the working area is rendered at full resolution, it can be difficult to distinguish 4K from 1080p.
When you do get the full effect, it looks stunning – although we’d argue that this is also a result of the excellent color representation on this panel. We rarely see a laptop screen that has both a 100% sRGB and 100% Adobe RGB rated gamut and sports 400 nits backlighting.
We tested the screen using a Datacolor Spyder 5 calibrator, and confirmed most of this spec, even if the brightest reading we achieved was 350 nits.
With the possible exceptions of a slightly odd tonal range and a slight bias in brightness to the top-left zone, the review model had a very good screen, and that’s a feature which designers might find highly desirable.
Upgrades
It might seem silly to talk about upgrading such a high specification machine, but it is a possibility with the X1 Extreme.
The review machine came with 32GB of RAM, but switching the two modules for larger capacity affairs can boost this to 64GB, even if this might marginally reduce battery life.
There is also a second M.2 slot for another NVMe drive, should you wish to add more storage without jumping through the hoops of swapping the system to a new drive.
For those wanting to save some money, buying a system with, say, a 500GB NVMe drive and then switching that for a larger drive is a possibility, as the installation isn’t difficult for those willing to remove the back from the machine.
Samsung has the 8TB NF1 NVMe drive, and using them could boost internal storage to 16TB – if you are willing to spend more than the base cost of the system on two of these modules.
Final verdict
There are very few laptops we’d class as being a joy to review, but the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme was a delightful distraction from typical by-the-Intel-numbers hardware.
It’s got the performance and spec to replace most desktop systems, and probably a few workstation class PCs, too.
When you combine the raw speed with the well-considered nature of the keyboard, screen, ports, and the potential for upgrades, it all spells success to us.
However, it’s hard to ignore the rather steep price of this laptop, which is pitched at a level that all but excludes it as a choice for those who don’t have a company buying it for them.
You can knock the overall cost down if you have a less wonderful touch-less screen, a smaller SSD, less memory and a Core i5 CPU, but doing so demolishes the ‘Extreme’ nature of this package.
The build quality and specification might justify the high cost, but we just wish it was less expensive, so that more people could get to use such an impressive piece of equipment regularly.
In short, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme is a poster-boy for exactly how mission-critical laptops should be.