Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 Review

Lenovo's ThinkPad P15 scored highly in our mobile workstation reviews, but in case you haven't heard, 15.6-inch laptops are so last decade. The new ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 (starts at $1,639; an eye-popping $6,521.99 as tested) makes the fashionable move to a slightly larger 16-inch screen with a taller 16:10 aspect ratio, while making room for the latest CPU and GPU silicon as well as top-shelf expandability and connectivity. This is a heavy, and hellishly expensive, laptop, but it's hard to imagine a more powerful professional notebook for 3D design, CGI rendering, data analysis, machine learning, or 4K video editing. The mighty P16 narrowly edges out the MSI CreatorPro X17 as our new Editors' Choice pick among laptop workstations, though MSI's is admittedly a better bargain at $1,600 less (in its tested configuration).

Overkill for Almost Any Application

Loaded with independent software vendor (ISV) certifications for professional programs, the ThinkPad P16 starts at $1,639 on Lenovo.com for a model with a 12th Generation Core i5 processor, a pro-grade 4GB Nvidia RTX A1000 GPU, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, and a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS display. The price streaks upward like a runaway rocket as you add options: Our review unit, model 21D6009LUS, is $6,521.99 at CDW (and anywhere from $5,779 to $8,646 at other resellers).

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

That sizable investment buys you Intel's colossal Core i9-12950HX CPU (eight Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 24 threads, vPro management tech), 64GB of memory, a 2TB SSD, and a 3,840-by-2,400-pixel Dolby Vision IPS non-touch display backed by Nvidia's 16GB RTX A5500. The DisplayHDR 400 screen carries X-Rite Pantone factory color calibration. 

The RAM and storage ceilings are 128GB and 8TB respectively, with error-correcting-code (ECC) memory available with some processors. An in-between (2,560-by-1,600) IPS screen is available, as is a 3,840-by-2,400-pixel OLED touch panel. Wi-Fi 6E and Windows 11 Pro are standard.

A shade lighter than ThinkPads' usual matte black—Lenovo calls it Storm Gray—the P16 Gen 1 combines an aluminum (with a trace of magnesium) top and a plastic-and-glass-fiber bottom. It's a bruiser at 1.2 by 14.3 by 10.5 inches (HWD) and 6.4 pounds. A less expandable rival 16-inch workstation, the HP ZBook Studio G9, is way thinner at 0.76 by 14 by 9.5 inches and 3.8 pounds. The P16's screen bezels are medium-slim—Lenovo cites an 83.4% screen-to-body ratio—with a sliding webcam shutter in the top bezel. The laptop's face recognition webcam, and a fingerprint reader in the power button, give you two ways to skip typing passwords with Windows Hello.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Except for lacking an Ethernet port, this ThinkPad is well connected. The left side holds two USB 3.2 ports—one always-on Type-A, one Type-C—along with an audio jack and a nano SIM slot for optional 4G LTE. SmartCard and SD card slots join another USB-A 3.2 port and a Kensington lock notch at right. Two Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI monitor port, and the connector for the bulky AC adapter are around back.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

ThinkPad Elegance Meets Monster-Truck Muscle 

Any complaints about the backlit keyboard? Well, our test unit's F11 key oddly glows brighter than the others, and the Fn and Control keys are arguably in each other's place at lower left. (You can swap them with the supplied Lenovo Vantage utility.) Otherwise, the P16's keyboard lives up to ThinkPads' stellar reputation, with an exemplary layout and a splendid typing feel. 

A full-size numeric keypad is included, complete with parentheses keys as well as dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys—and shortcuts for placing and ending conference calls. Like most ThinkPads, the P16 has two pointing devices, with a TrackPoint mini joystick with three buttons (many ISV apps take advantage of the middle button) above a midsize touchpad with a comfortable click.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The 1080p webcam is sharp enough to let your colleagues know you're having a bad hair day or skipped shaving; it captures well-lit and colorful images with no static. A Lenovo View utility lets you adjust the video feed to look your best.

Sound from the top-firing speakers is quite loud, even booming if you use the Dolby Access software's dynamic or movie instead of music presets. (You also have an equalizer at your disposal.) These speakers produce a moderate amount of bass, and you can easily make out overlapping tracks. 

X-Rite Color Assistant software lets you set the screen to sRGB, Adobe RGB, Rec. 709, Display P3, or DICOM medical color profiles; the default has the same gamma correction as Adobe RGB but with maximum brightness. This display is wonderfully bright and sharp, with fine details made crystal clear and without any pixelation around the edges of letters.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Contrast is excellent here, and the screen's colors are vivid—maybe just a touch less brilliant than an OLED panel's but rich and well saturated. Viewing angles are wide, and white backgrounds are washday miracles, not dingy or off-white in the slightest. I'm on record as swooning over the DreamColor displays on HP workstations, but the P16's screen is every bit their equal, easily earning an A+.

Testing the ThinkPad P16 Gen 1: At the Top of the Top Rank 

For our benchmark charts, we're pitting the ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 against three other 16-inch workstation and content creation laptops: the abovementioned HP ZBook Studio G9, the 2022 Gigabyte Aero 16, and the latest Apple MacBook Pro 16. The last slot goes to the 17.3-inch, 6.8-pound MSI CreatorPro X17.

Productivity Tests 

Our first benchmark, 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. 

Three benchmarks then 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). 

Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop is our final productivity benchmark, 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.

These results are an embarrassment of riches: each of them pulverizes our general productivity benchmarks, blowing away the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent productivity for everyday use. The MSI is still the biggest overachiever in the CPU tests, but every laptop here is a spectacular performer. 

Graphics Tests 

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). 

To further measure GPU performance, we run 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.

Nvidia's GeForce GPUs are better tuned for game-like graphics than its A-series professional GPUs, but again, all these notebooks pump out neck-snapping speed. Apple's M2 Max chip is particularly impressive, but Lenovo's P16 is still quite competitive in these tasks.

Workstation-Specific Tests 

Similar to its Photoshop counterpart, PugetBench for Adobe Premiere Pro 15 is an automated extension that puts a PC through a full complement of video editing tasks. We also run 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 independent software vendor (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. Results are in frames per second.

Lenovo's ThinkPad P16 and MSI's CreatorPro X17 slug it out for the top spot, with the Lenovo squeaking ahead in SPECviewperf and the MSI an eyelash ahead in Blender (where the MacBook Pro's GPU again excels). At the risk of repeating ourselves, these are just sensational workstations, and the latest ThinkPad is at the top of the heap. 

Battery and Display Tests 

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. 

Additionally, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and 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).

The 16-inch MacBook Pro's battery life is incredible, roughly equal to its four competitors' combined. As for the ThinkPad P16, you'll be able to squeak past a work day on a single charge, but just keep the charge cord (and an outlet) nearby. All five laptops' screens show superlative color coverage, though the Lenovo here shows the worst DCI-P3 coverage comparatively. Finally, the Lenovo edges out the HP as the brightest mobile workstation of the bunch.

Verdict: Two Editors' Choice Champs to Choose From 

It's only a few months since we gave the MSI CreatorPro X17 one of our rare 4.5-star ratings and our top mobile workstation honor, but the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 matches that achievement in a more premium overall build.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Deciding between the two is difficult, mainly because the MSI costs a lot less, but IT departments often acquire ThinkPads in volume deals, and individual price isn't a primary concern when it comes to ultra-elite workstations. Ultimately, its build quality, screen, and keyboard give our latest Editors' Choice nod to the Lenovo—it's enough of a monster on almost all fronts that it simply cannot be ignored.