Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 2 review: a true mobile workstation

We don’t typically review laptops like the ThinkPad P16 Gen 2. It exists in a category solely for creative professionals working at large organizations — a commercial PC designed with performance in mind above all else.

I was curious though: How does this stack up against more mainstream devices? I’ve reviewed a number of laptops over the last few months aimed at balancing efficiency and performance in thin-and-light chassis. A few are legitimate contenders to make our list of the best laptops, but none provide the kind of performance that gamers and creators require.

Are one of those a better option for IT departments than a traditional workstation like the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 2? After all, it’s thick and heavy, but it packs in more powerful components aimed purely at speeding through demanding workflows and with some gaming thrown in. You won’t want to lug it around, and while the ThinkPad P16 delivers its promised performance, it just costs too much for almost everyone.

Specs and configurations

As is often the case with laptops offering a ton of configuration options, it’s not always possible to buy every given combination at a given point in time. As of right now, the $2,619 base model has an Intel Core i7-14700HX CPU, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, an Nvidia RTX 1000 Ada GPU, and a 16.0-inch FHD+ IPS display.

My review unites has the same CPU, RAM, and storage but upgrades to an RTX 4000 Ada GPU and a QHD+ IPS display, and it’s priced at a whopping $5,614. The biggest jump is in the GPU, which by itself adds $1,560 to the price. The most expensive model is a truly stratospheric $10,453 with a Core i9-13980HX, 192GB of RAM, two 4TB SSDs in RAID 1, an RTX 5000 Ada GPU, and a 4K+ OLED display. Again, the GPU upgrade is very expensive at $3,050 over the base model and the RAM adds $1,120.

Those are very expensive prices, no matter how you cut it. You’re getting a laptop that’s designed to meet the very exacting requirements of applications like AutoCAD where rock-solid reliability is vital, and you’re paying a premium for that level of certification. If you don’t care about that, then you can get an equally powerful gaming laptop like the Lenovo Legion 9i Gen 9 for less, or even an Apple MacBook Pro 16 that can get quite expensive, but not this expensive.

Design

I was a little shocked when I pulled the ThinkPad P16 Gen 2 out of the box, because it’s so much larger than any laptop we’ve reviewed in a long time. This is a proper mobile workstation, through and through.

It’s larger even than most gaming laptops, particularly in its 1.2-inch thickness and 6.5 pound weight. The Asus ProArt P16 is another powerful laptop aimed at creators, and it’s considerably smaller even with its own large 16-inch display. Not only is it thinner and shallower but it’s a lot thinner at a maximum of 0.68 inches and lighter at 4.08 pounds. The last gaming laptop we reviewed, the Lenovo Legion 9i Gen 9, is roughly as large in width and depth but thinner at 0.89 inches and lighter at 5.51 pounds.

Those two are also very powerful machines with great performance, so it’s a little harder to justify the ThinkPad P16’s sheer size. My wife uses an Alienware M16 that’s also very powerful, and it feels a lot smaller. But the ThinkPad P16 does offer a great thermal design that moves a lot of air around, and it’s more expandable than many laptops with the ability to equip dual SSDs for faster storage performance. And Lenovo built the laptop to achieve Independent Software Vendor (ISV) certification, which relies on stable performance to ensure reliability for professionals. But is the ThinkPad P16 too big? I think it might be.

It’s also constructed of plastic with glass fiber on the outside, with a magnesium shell internally. It’s quite robust, with no bending, flexing, or twisting in the lid, keyboard deck, or bottom chassis. But it doesn’t feel the same as many other laptops in the same price range. The Apple MacBook Pro 16 is an example of a laptop that exudes a feeling of higher quality, even if it’s no more robust than the Thinkpad P16. Probably, the plastic was used in part because it’s already 6.5 pounds, which is pretty heavy. If the chassis were all-metal, it would only be heavier.

The aesthetic is rather bland. Most laptops have a minimalist design today, with very little if any of the bling of several years ago. But the ThinkPad P16 takes that to an extreme, with almost no character whatsoever. It’s a dull gray with boring lines, and it’s only saved from being downright fugly by a couple of the usual ThinkPad splashes of red. It’s there in the dot on the “i” in the logos on the lid and palm rest and the TrackPoint nubbin embedded in the keyboard.

But it doesn’t follow either the old-school black-on-black ThinkPad aesthetic or their newer, more modern look. And then there’s a red strip along the lower edge of the back chassis. Gaming laptops and the MacBook Pro 16 are either more exciting or more elegant.

Keyboard and touchpad

The ThinkPad P16 Gen 2 has Lenovo’s non-ThinkPad keyboard, oddly enough, which is shallower than the ThinkPad version but has the same large sculpted keycaps and lots of key spacing. The switches are light and snappy, although the bottoming action isn’t quite smooth enough to rank as one of my favorite keyboards. As usual, Apple’s Magic Keyboard remains at the top of my list.

The touchpad is a mechanical version that’s OK. There’s the TrackPoint nubbin embedded in the keyboard as a nod to ThinkPad fans, but its two buttons take up space from the touchpad. That makes the swiping surface even smaller.

Connectivity and webcam

As is usual with large laptops like this, there’s plenty of connectivity. There’s a mix of modern Thunderbolt 4 ports and legacy connections, along the side and the back of the chassis. The power connector is proprietary. Wireless connectivity is one generation behind.

The webcam is a 1080p version, so it meets the new standard. It’s fine. There’s no neural processing unit (NPU) on board, so the ThinkPad 16 can’t take advantage of today’s AI with a fast but efficient chip. The GPU can be used, though, and it will provide very fast AI processing at the cost of more power usage.

Performance

The ThinkPad P16 Gen 2 uses Intel Raptor Lake CPUs in the 13th or 14th generations. That iteration has had some issues with instability that Intel has been working on, specifically those rated with a TDP of 64 watts or higher. That’s something to keep in mind. My review unit used the Core i7-14700HX, a 55-watt part with 20 cores (eight performance and 12 Efficient) and 28 threads, running at up to 5.5GHz Max Turbo frequency. It’s a fast and power-hungry chipset that provides very good performance for demanding creative and, e.g., engineering applications.

It also uses the Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada GPU, which is aimed at those professional applications and, as mentioned above, is ISV-certified and so it provides some assurance that its performance will be reliable. This part is the main difference that comes with a workstation product like this — you can’t find it on consumer mainstream laptops. The RTX 4000 Ada uses the latest CUDA, RT, and Tensor cores for fast performance and houses 20GB of GPU memory with advanced AV1 encoders. It’s not optimized for gaming, but it performs a lot like the GeForce RTX 4070 and in some cases like a 4080.

The ThinkPad P16 does very well against a variety of other machines Core Ultra Series 1 chipsets and the RTX 4070. It also kept up with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. It’s particularly fast in single-core tasks, and the RTX 4000 Ada churns through Cinebench R24.

Most telling among our benchmarks is the laptop’s performance in the Pugetbench Premiere Pro benchmark that runs in a live version of Adobe’s Premiere Pro and can utilize the GPU for faster performance. It’s one of the fastest laptops we’ve tested, coming in behind the MacBook Pro 16 with various CPU optimizations that help out but GPU cores that aren’t quite as fast. Note that I included results from the MacBook Pro 16 with the previous-gen M3 Max; the M4 Max was recently released and is likely to be even faster.

Simply put, the ThinkPad P16 is a very fast laptop for professionals, and it can be even faster with a Core i9 CPU and an RTX 5000 Ada GPU that rivals the GeForce RTX 4090. Whether it’s fast enough given the high price comes down more to whether you need an ISV-certified laptop because your livelihood depends on rock-solid reliability.

When you have a laptop with these kinds of components, you’ll naturally want to consider playing some games. The RTX 4000 Ada isn’t aimed at gaming and it doesn’t use the standard Nvidia gaming-oriented drivers. But even so, it’s a capable gaming GPU.

To begin with, it scores 15,993 in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, which is faster than the usual RTX 4070 score of around 11,000. In fact, the Alienware M16 with an RTX 4080 scored 17,659 in this benchmark while the Legion 9i Gen 9 with the RTX 4090 score 20,293. That places the ThinkPad P16 closer to the RTX 4080 — at least, in this synthetic benchmark.

Looking at a couple of real-life gaming benchmarks paints a similar picture. The ThinkPad P16 hit 102 frames per second (fps) in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla at 1600p and ultra-high graphics. That’s a bit slower than the 114 fps hit by the Asus ProArt P16 with its RTX 4070. In Cyberpunk 2077, the Thinkpad P16 managed 74 fps at 1600p and ultra graphics with FSR 2.1 enabled, compared to the Legion 9i Gen 9 at 106 fps. So, the RTX 4090 is a lot faster. With ray tracing turned on, the ThinkPad P16 hit 60 fps compared to the Legion 9i Gen 9’s 88 fps.

Ultimately, you’ll be able to run modern titles at 1600p with graphics turned up at least as well as an RTX 4070.

Battery life

There’s a large 94 watt-hour battery packed into the ThinkPad P16, but also some power-hungry components and a large, reasonably high-res display. You don’t expect great battery life from a laptop like this, and you don’t get it.

I saw just 4.25 hours in our web browsing test and around five hours in our video looping test. Those are pretty bad, but then I got just 42 minutes in our Cinebench R24 test that runs the CPU at full speed. That means you’ll need to carry around the very heavy power brick to get any real work done away from your office. That makes for well over 7 pounds to carry around, making this a less-than-portable solution.

Display and audio

Lenovo offers several display options for the ThinkPad P16, all 16.0 inches in the 16:10 aspect ratio. You can get FHD+ (1920 x1200) IPS, QHD+ (2560 x 1800) IPS, 4K+ (3840 x 2400) IPS, and 4K+ OLED. The QHD+ IPS panel, which was on my review unit, runs at up to 165Hz, while the rest are limited to the more pedestrian 60Hz. I think QHD+ is just sharp enough at this display size, although I prefer 4K+ for the sharpest text. Subjectively, the display was good but not great — but I’m very spoiled by reviewing so many excellent OLED and mini-LED displays that are spectacular out of the box.

When I tested the display with my colorimeter, I ran into some issues. Lenovo includes the X-Rite Color Assistant utility to select various factory calibrations, and none of them provided very good results. The best result came from the “Not calibrated” setting, and those weren’t very good at all for a laptop intended for professionals who tend to demand a display with wide and accurate colors. Those results were very poor, at 99% of sRGB, 76% of AdobeRGB, and 77% of DCI-P3, which are just average for IPS displays today. Color accuracy was terrible, at a Delta-E of 7.19, and Gamma was way too bright at 1.7 (2.2 is standard and the vast majority of today’s displays hit that value).

The display was bright at 498 nits and contrast was good at 1,100:1. But no matter which calibration I selected, the colors were just unacceptable. The worst value came with the Rec. 709 setting that’s supposed to be optimized for video work, at a Delta-E of 11.88. That just won’t cut it. That’s bad enough that there may something wrong with my review unit, but that’s the data I collected from my colorimeter.

Lenovo may just need to do some work on those settings or my review unit might just be a dud. But when you spend this kind of money for a laptop, you expect better. I’m sure the 4K+ OLED display is excellent, and that would certainly be my choice if I bought the ThinkPad P16.

Audio is provided by two upward-firing speakers, and there’s plenty of volume with clear mids and highs. But bass is lacking, so you’ll want a pair of headphones or a Bluetooth speaker for anything more than YouTube videos and system sounds.

A laptop that you’ll only want if you really need it

Professional workstations like the ThinkPad P16 Gen 2 are invariably expensive because of the engineering needed to be ISV-certified, and professionals who rely on them to get paid can justify the price to gain the highest possible level of reliability. They’re not always the fastest options unless you’re using an application that takes direct advantage of the capabilities of a specific component.

The ThinkPad P16 is definitely very expensive, and it’s likely very reliable for that select group of buyers. The performance of the commercial GPU is also really impressive. But it’s also almost unreasonably thick and heavy, and it’s not that much faster than less-costly alternatives (or at all). Meanwhile, the display on my review unit was very disappointing. Even those who demand ISV certification can likely find a better alternative.