The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Review (2015)
by Brett Howse on May 21, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Lenovo
- ThinkPad
- Ultrabook
- Broadwell-U
Battery Life
With the introduction of Broadwell-U earlier this year, we have seen yet another step up in battery life on notebooks. It does not all come down to the CPU though, although having one that draws plenty of power while doing nothing is certainly not beneficial. Display technology is also a big factor, and we have seen quite strongly that the higher resolution panels can certainly struggle for battery life compared to more average resolution displays. If a device is to have truly great battery life, every single component needs to be sorted out, because any single one drawing extra power can have a significant effect on the overall battery life. The other factor of course is battery size, and the X1 Carbon has a 50 Wh battery.
To test battery life on notebooks, we have two tests. Our light workload consists of browsing four pages every minute with the display set to 200 nits. The heavy test gets a lot of the other components into the mix. The web browsing is increased to about twenty pages per minute, a video is played, and a 1 MB/s download is done to keep the wireless active.
On our light test, the X1 Carbon is well off of the leaders in this test. It does seem odd to say that almost eight hours of battery life is not enough, but the bar has been raised this year. The X1 Carbon does have a slightly smaller battery, but as we will see in a bit that is not the reason for the lower than average result. A lot of this can likely come down to the display. In order to hit 200 nits, the display had to be set at 92% brightness which is quite a bit higher than most devices. Since this test is generally affected more by display power draw than any other, I would tend to think that this display is not the most efficient out there. It is always a bit of a guess though, since we cannot directly measure the power of each component.
In the heavy test, the X1 Carbon falls even farther as the more efficient devices move past it. One thing to highlight from this test is the 2013 X1 Carbon. That was just two years ago, and battery life has skyrocketed since then.
Next we have our normalized graphs which show the amount of battery life divided by the size of the battery in order to judge how efficient each device is.
The light result shows that the X1 Carbon is not that much less efficient than some of the competition, but it also has one of the smallest batteries at 50 Wh despite this being a 14-inch notebook. Dell squeezed a 52 Wh battery into the XPS 13 this year despite the much smaller dimensions facilitated by the small display bezels. The heavy graph has an even worse result. Battery life is not the forte of the X1 Carbon. Even though it is not the battery life winner, taking a look at the Ivy Bridge powered X1 Carbon for 2013’s score really underlines the big gains seen in efficiency. Just two years ago, the X1 Carbon was about mid-pack in efficiency (see our review here) and just two years later the new X1 Carbon is almost 45% more efficient than the 2013 model, and yet it is almost at the bottom of our Ultrabook chart for battery life.
Charge Time
The X1 Carbon sports Lenovo’s Rapid Charge technology which will let you charge 80% of the battery capacity in just 30 minutes. Lenovo says that they use high current rather than high voltage to increase the battery charge rate, which they claim helps battery longevity. Whichever it is, the X1 Carbon does offer some pretty fast charging.
With the included 45 watt adapter, I was unable to reach the 80% in 30 minutes, but with the higher output adapters it could happen. Even with just the 45 watt model 80% happened in just 69 minutes which is very impressive, and a full charge took just over two hours. The battery life may not be at the top of the charts, but luckily if you do drain the battery you can get it back to a reasonable level in not too long.
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Systemsplanet - Wednesday, November 18, 2015 - link
+1 on HP.-2 Dell
I previously bought Dells until two XPS 18's with flaky USB3 drivers that ran at USB2 speeds no matter what perpheral/cable you used. Dell blamed Microsoft. Who knows. Premium Dell price means it should be integrated. With USB2 or wireless backup the machine was worthless to me. Luckily my wife cracked the display while mopping the floor. Never been so happy.
Bought the HP Zbook 17 last December in a minimal config. Installed a Samsung pcie boot disk xp941 which gets 800/700 MB/ss. Pulled out the DVD and it now hosts a total of 4 1TB SSD drives in a laptop form factor. Love the BIOS. Never had such a problem free experience tricking out a new computer.
Reviewed here on amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R20OURYM...
Also, 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 rocks for backup and high resolution display on a single bus.
mooninite - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
Lenovos are a joke. People associate them with "business" and "reliability" and unfortunately put their dollars in an inappropriate place.The ASUS Zenbook line far exceeds what you get from Lenovo. The current Haswell UX301LAA is a marvelous piece of technology. HiDPI screen. i7. Iris graphics. 8GB ram, 512GB SSD. The new Broadwell version is coming out soon and will blow any other laptop - sans discrete cards - out of the water in every category (cpu, graphics, IO, battery life).
It's time for people to wake up and stop drinking the Lenovo / ThinkPad coolaid. They're not the prized, derived from the Gods, piece of hardware any longer.
alexdi - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
This review is missing a conclusion. The basic question is: given everything else out there, would you buy the thing with your own money? If not, what would you buy instead and why? The initial tone of the review is almost an advertisement, but then slides down after the CPU charts. What's your verdict?BGADK - Thursday, May 21, 2015 - link
The X1 was one of the ultrabook PC's for business users I evaluated, but in the end I choose the Fujitsu U904. Lighter, and with better specs, even if it still does not have a Broadwell CPU.I hope Anandtech take a look at the U904, which for me is the best ultrabook in the market.
Laststop311 - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
if this had the i7-5650u with 6000 graphics and double the eu's at 48 I would of probably bought it. Would of preferred the 1920x1080 screen being ips. If you game at 1920x1080 its going to look better on a native 1920x1080 screen. Also less pixels means larger pixels that let more light through increasing battery life as well as less pixels to process. Also wouldn't mind if they made it a little thicker and heavier and bumped the battery up to 75wh 50% more than the 50wh battery.If only I could have that laptop changed to those specs I'd be a buyer 100%
coder111 - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
Are they still shipping their computers with malware/spyware rootkits installed?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish
flabber - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
I have found ThinkPads to be my preferred laptops for two reasons : full maintenance documentation available online, the keyboard/trackpoint.I still have a T41p kicking around, a X61 Tablet and a T61p. Only the T61p had given me a problem with the nVidia graphics adapter. Lenovo had made a recall, but it failed 3 after it had expired.
Great machines - no need to replace my X61 Tablet, so I am sticking with that for now.
Scipio Africanus - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
HP Elitebook/Zbooks will have the same documentation and also has a pretty good keyboard and trackpoint. Their service has been exemplary as well giving me fast turnaround for a simple loose power connector.seanleeforever - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
ScipioI have yet to find a track pointer implementation that's come close to thinkpads. and I have used 4 elitebook/zbooks including the very last generation of them, and number of dell workstations. my work always has HP/Dell but my personal purchase is always thinkpad just for the track pointer. the fact that you even mentioned "trackpoint" in Zbooks means you don't use the track pointer at all.
truth to be told. I desperately want another manufacture to come up with a decent trackpointer so I can dump thinkpad line.
just2btecky - Friday, May 22, 2015 - link
What OS was this laptop tested on, or can The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon miraculously run sans OS? Just curious!