Lenovo ThinkPad P17 Gen 2 Review

We've referred to 15.6-inch flagship mobile workstations like the HP ZBook Fury 15 G8 and Dell Precision 7560 as heavyweights, but they're actually not at the top of the food chain—there are 17.3-inch laptops in this segment, too. The Lenovo ThinkPad P17 Gen 2 (starts at $1,739; $5,596 as tested) is a whopping 8.1 pounds of power for computer-aided design (CAD), CGI rendering, and crunching mammoth datasets. It flaunts a jumbo screen with 4K resolution for a vast view of visual apps, too. The P17 Gen 2 doesn't replace the ZBook Fury 15 as our Editors' Choice honoree among no-holds-barred mobile workstations because it's just too ponderous, but it's a formidable weapon—make that a whole arsenal—for getting demanding jobs done.

Big as All Outdoors 

The ThinkPad P17 is the only Lenovo laptop that could overshadow the 15.6-inch, 6.3-pound ThinkPad P15 Gen 2. As 1.2 by 16.3 by 11 inches (HWD) of matte black fiber-reinforced plastic over a magnesium frame, it won't fit in many briefcases and will snap an airline tray table like a twig. It holds up to 128GB of RAM, with error-correcting-code (ECC) memory available for Intel Xeon configurations, and three 2TB solid-state drives.

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(Photo: Molly Flores)

The $1,739 base model has a six-core Intel Core i5 processor and a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) non-touch display backed by Nvidia's T1200 professional GPU. Options range up to the eight-core Xeon W-11955M or Core i9-11950H. 

Our test unit ($5,596 at Insight or $5,825 at CDW) isn't that extreme, with a six-core, 3.2GHz Xeon W-11855M, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB NVMe SSD, but maxed out on visuals with a 16GB Nvidia RTX A5000 and a 3,840-by-2,160-pixel IPS screen with factory color calibration and a rated 500 nits of brightness. The two mentioned are the only displays available; no touch screen or OLED panel is offered.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Its bulk means the P17 Gen 2 has room for all modern conveniences, ranging from a numeric keypad beside the keyboard to a fingerprint reader and face recognition webcam with sliding privacy shutter. Like all ThinkPads, it's passed MIL-STD 810G torture tests for road hazards like shock, vibration, and temperature extremes. There's no flex if you grasp the screen corners—the bezels around the display are huge, by the way—or press the keyboard deck.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Ports are plentiful. The laptop's left edge holds an HDMI video output, always-on USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, SIM slot for optional 4G LTE mobile broadband, and an audio jack.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

On the right, you'll find SmartCard and SD card slots, another USB-A port, and a Kensington lock slot. Two Thunderbolt 4 ports join Ethernet and USB-C ports and the connector for the hefty AC adapter around back. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth are standard.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Calibrated Color 

The 4K display doesn't quite match the gorgeous hues of our favorite mobile workstation screens, HP's DreamColor panels, but is beautiful just the same, with rich, vivid colors, ample brightness, and crisp contrast. Fine details are crystal-clear and viewing angles are wide. An X-Rite Color Assistant utility in the taskbar tray lets you switch among default, sRGB online, Adobe RGB photo and illustration, DCI-P3 cinema, Rec. 709 HDTV, and DICOM medical imaging color profiles. You can also restore factory profiles from the cloud. 

The webcam has the usual lackluster 720p resolution, so its images are soft-focus at best, but they're impressively well-lit and colorful even in not-very-bright environments, with minimal static. Sound from the speaker grille above the keyboard is rather hollow and not particularly loud even at top volume. You can make out overlapping tracks, but bass is minimal. Dolby Access software offers an equalizer with Music, Movie, Game, Voice, and Dynamic presets, some of which sound harsh or tinny.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

As a Xeon model, our P17 Gen 2 comes with Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. There's no bloatware—about the only bonus app is Glance by Mirametrix, which uses the webcam to track your gaze for switching window focus when using an external monitor. Lenovo Quick Clean temporarily disables the keyboard and touchpad while you wipe down the system, while the familiar Lenovo Vantage (dubbed Commercial Vantage on ThinkPads) centralizes system updates, Wi-Fi security, and battery, audio, microphone, and keyboard settings. 

The only keyboard setting we'd consider is using Vantage to swap the Fn and Control keys, which are in each other's place at bottom left. Otherwise, the backlit keyboard delivers the expected ThinkPad excellence, with plenty of travel, a snappy typing feel, and an admirable layout.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The Escape and Delete keys aren't too tiny and the F10 and F11 keys place and end calls in Microsoft Teams. The buttons below the spacebar, including the middle button popular with CAD apps, technically belong to the TrackPoint pointing stick instead of the touchpad. But you can use them with either; the pad is a bit smaller than we expected for such a big laptop but glides and taps silkily.

Performance Testing: All-Out Workstations Go Head to Head 

For our benchmark charts, I compared the ThinkPad P17 Gen 2 to four 15.6-inch premium mobile workstations—the abovementioned champions from Lenovo, HP, and Dell plus the MSI WS66. You can see their basic specs in the table below.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of 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 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). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, 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.

All these workstations pulverized the 4,000 points that indicate excellent productivity in PCMark 10; using them for Word or PowerPoint is a waste. The ZBook Fury 15 won our HandBrake video editing exercise while all five systems shone in Photoshop; the P17 Gen 2's six-core processor predictably trailed the eight-core chips in our CPU tests, but showed more than ample power for challenging tasks. 

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). 

We also run two tests from 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.

We've seen a wide range of results from similar GPUs in Nvidia's RTX 30 series, and that held true here, but the ThinkPad P17 came out ahead in most of these game simulations. It carries independent software vendor (ISV) certifications for specialized professional programs, not games, but can certainly satisfy your itch for a little after-hours fragging, racing, or world-building. 

Workstation-Specific Tests 

We run three additional programs to simulate workstation applications. The first is PugetBench for Adobe Premiere Pro, a counterpart to our Photoshop benchmark that focuses on video rather than image editing. Since we don't have results for every system, I swapped in our Editors' Choice among lightweight workstations, Lenovo's 16-inch ThinkPad P1 Gen 4, and two content creation desktop replacements, the MSI Creator 17 and the 15.6-inch HP ZBook Studio Gen 8. 

The second benchmark is 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 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. The more frames per second, the better.

The ThinkPad P17 Gen 2 is the second- or third-fastest mobile workstation we've tested, more than able to make mincemeat of formidable visual rendering or number-crunching tasks. It's a bruiser, but its raw power and handsome display make it a mighty partner when you're tackling tough jobs. 

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) 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. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows 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 P17 posted the shortest battery life in the group, but laptop workstations are almost always plugged in for long workloads of 3D rendering or data analysis and a 17.3-inch workstation is even less likely to be unplugged than a 15.6-inch one, so we won't complain. Its splendid screen brightness and color depth was rivaled only by the Fury's DreamColor display.

ISV Apps Meet Mechagodzilla 

The only thing that keeps the Lenovo ThinkPad P17 Gen 2 from claiming an Editors' Choice award is its colossal bulk; unless you truly want a plus-size screen, there's no need to punish yourself by carrying this beefy workstation when equal or nearly equal power is available in lighter packages. (The ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 is literally less than half the weight.)

(Photo: Molly Flores)

But the P17's performance is faultless and its display tops the charts for quality as well as surface area. Got unlimited work to do? Get an unlimited laptop.