This is my review of the ThinkPad X1 Extreme. It is not my machine, it belongs to my partner. This is not a professional review, I am just a ThinkPad fan who likes these machines. I actually use a Macbook Pro 2016 15″ as my main machine and a ThinkPad 13 as secondary machine. I also have a T420 and a X200s as backup machines.

Before I start the review I would like to talk about why my partner is now using a very powerful laptop like the Thinkpad X1 Extreme. She is a professor for paedagogics and is using ThinkPads since about 12 years. She started with a T60p, then used a W701, after that a T540p and actually the X1 Extreme. What she likes about these machines is that they are very tough, reliable and have good business support by Lenovo. She always extended the warranty to four or five years on site and that served her well. Whenever she had problems, Lenovo sent a technician quickly to solve the problem and repair the machine. She also likes the keyboards because she types a lot. But she poured Coca Cola Light two times over her T540p keyboard. The machine is still working fine but it can end its life very quickly and she needs the machine for her work, so we had to act quick.

The machines I listed were very powerful machines at their time. So why does a paedagogics professor need such powerful machines? She is only using Microsoft Office, she is browsing the internet, doing some social media and lots of emailing. So at the time of this review she should easily be able to be very happy with a machine like the T580 or a E580, these are perfect office machines and much cheaper. But her workflow is very different to most people. She is never closing the tabs in her browsers. She is now using four browsers: Opera, Edge, Firefox and Chrome. In every browser she has lots of open tabs which use lots of main memory and CPU power. I sadly was not able to change this behavior, so the only method to cope with that is to use machines with powerful CPUs and 16GB of RAM. The next problem ist that this behaviour extends to her email usage, she has about 90.000 emails in Thunderbird 60 with lots of big attachments and her Thunderbird profile is at about 65GB at the moment, that is crazy. Thunderbird is very solid and can deal with that, I was not successful at forcing her to remove most of this stuff. Email should be a medium to send messages and not big attachments. Next problem is that she collected thousands of personal photos and videos (mainly from her iPhone) which she never deletes, she wants to keep everything. So she needs lots of storage space. Her T540p was equipped with a 256GB ADATA S-ATA SSD and 2TB HDD. Shes currently uses about 1,5 TB of documents, mails, videos, images and music in total.

So after knowing her for so long and having resignated and having accepted that she operates in different ways than me I made a list of what specs her next device after the T540p should have:

it must be a ThinkPad

a quad core or even better a six core CPU

at least 16 GB of RAM

at least 2 TB of storage which should be extendable

she wanted a 15″ display like her T540p, not 13/14/17

the laptop should be lighter than the heavy T540p

the laptop should be slimmer than the very thick T540p

at least 1920×1080 resolution (her T540p had the 2880×1620 resolution display)

a matt display

good battery life (she mostly uses the laptop inhouse, but when she is on the road it should last longer than the mediocre T540p batery life)

a good keyboard

backlighting because she often uses the device in the dark

a good touchpad

a long on site warranty (four or five years) with Accidental Damage Protection

the storage should be easily expandable, so a second M.2 slot should be in the machine

These are the attributes that she did not want or were not very important to her

no touch display

DVD drive is not needed, she has an external one

good sound is not important, she does not care about that, she mostly uses Amazon Video or Netflix or Youtube and is used to the mediocre or bad sound of most ThinkPads

the trackpoint is not important, she never uses it

no discrete gpu, integrated graphics are fine

This list narrowed our acceptable devices down to the E580, L580, T580, P1, P52 and the X1 Extreme. The E580 and L580 were of lesser quality than the X/P/T series so we ignored them. The P52 was too thick and heavy. So only the P1 and the X1 Extreme were left in the decision making. The machines are very similar but the X1 Extreme was much cheaper and we found a good deal for it on http://www.campuspoint,de so we puchased a X1 Extreme for an educational discount there. One day later the machine arrived 🙂

Here are some comparison images of the X1 Extreme in comparison to the T540p and the MacbookPro 2016, please click on the gallery to enlarge the images:

X1 next to MacBookPro 2016

X1 next to MacbookPro 2016

X1 next to MacbookPro 2016

T540p on top, X1 below

T540p left X1 right



Technical details, images and my experience with the X1 Extreme

8th Generation Intel Core i7-8750H 6 Core/12 threads processor (2.20GHz, up to 4.10GHz with Turbo Boost, 9MB Cache)

15.6” FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS anti-glare, 300nits

16 GB DDR4 2666MHz

Intel UHD 630 integrated graphics

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050Ti Max-Q 4GB

2TB Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 SSD

720p HD Camera with Windows Hello face recognition

Backlit Keyboard

Fingerprint Reader

4 cell Li-Polymer 80Wh battery

a 135W AC Adapter

Windows 10 Professional

1,7 kg weight

Please click on the gellary to enlarge the images:

X2 Extreme packaging

X1 from top

X1 from the front

So how does the machine look and feel? To put it simply: the build quality is very good! The laptop feels very solid and sturdy. It feels like a very solid block of tech, very reliable and durable. The hinges are, as always in ThinkPads, very sturdy and robust. The keyboard is good and thankfully it does not have a full num pad! The display is ok and has very slim bezels. The whole machine is very slim and light and is much more portable than her T540p.

The Samsung 970 EVO is crazy fast in the benchmarks, even with BitLoker enabled. The ThinkPad feels very snappy running on Windows 10 1809. Everything starts very quickly, no wait times, an absolutely joy to use, So the quick CPU and the SSD help a lot.

As a ThinkPad fan I am thinking if I switch back to something like a future X1 Extreme in one or two years from my MacBook Pro 2016 or if I should stay Mac. At the moment I would say no to a X1 Extreme and I will tell you why more in detail in this review.

The CPU and GPU

This is a very fast CPU! It is a 45W 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8750H 6 Core/12 threads processor (2.20GHz, up to 4.10GHz with Turbo Boost, 9MB Cache). It has integrated Intel UHD 630 graphics and a discrete Geforce GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q GPU with 4 GB of RAM. The memory consists of 16 GB of DDR4 2666 MHz RAM.

It is a very very fast CPU, this is the fastest CPU I ever experienced in a laptop! I tried different benchmarks, worked with complex documents in Word, ran multiple complicated webpages in Edge and Chrome, did some Java development in Spring and IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3, compressed and uncompressed big archives with WinRAR 5, the speed is excellent. If you need a lot of power, this machine is for you. YouTube in Edge scrolls buttery smooth in very long pages with lots of video thumbnails. Chrome runs well, too, but the scrolling is still not as smooth as in Edge, but this is a general problem of Chrome on Windows. I edited this blog entry on the X1 Extreme in Chrome in WordPress. The WordPress editor is annoyingly slow on most laptops, sometimes my typing lagged behind in the editor. On the X1 Extreme everything runs perfectly fine, great! I did my last blog entry on my ThinkPad 13 with heavy lagging in WordPress and that difference is very noticeable.

For the benchmarks I ran Windows 10 in “best performance mode” and thermal settings optimized for maximal performance in the UEFI settings. With these settings the fans turned quite loud when doing the benchmarks, this is similar to my MacBook Pro 2016. The ThinkPad tries to stay silent as long as possible and then ramps up the fans. But it never got annoying. This is a very slim machine and the 6 cores in combination with the dedicated NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q GPU have to be cooled somehow! The machine never got very hot on the bottom so Lenovo has again implemented a good cooling solution which was to be expected.

For normal usage I switched to “better performance mode” in Windows 10 and in the UEFI settings I set the thermal management to balanced. This made the machine silent for most of my applications. When the fan had to spin up, it kept very quiet, so no complaints there. My partner has no need for the dedicated GPU. Sadly there is no setting in UEFI to disable the discrete graphics. So I went into the NVIDIA driver settings and set the driver to switch to the integrated graphics. The integrated Intel UHD 630 is powerful enough for anything that my partner does with her laptop. I think the NVIDIA GPU will now only kick in when she connects the laptop to a monitor which she never does.

Here are some benchmarks:

GeekBench 4

– single core

– multi core

– OpenCL Intel UHD 630

– OpenCL Geforce GTX 1050 Ti Q-Max Cinebench R15

– single core

– multi core

– OpenGL PCMark 10

– essentials

– productivity

– digital content creation Unigine Heaven

– DirectX11, high settings, 1920×1080 Unigine Valley

– DirectX11, high settings, 1920×1080 Unigine Superposition

– 1080p medium preset, DirectX 3DMark Time Spy

– graphics score

– – graphics test 1

– – graphics test 2

– cpu score

– – cpu test

4950

19174

32677

82895

172 cb

1093 cb

107 fps 4783

8740

6932

4904 fps: 69.3

score: 1745 fps: 74.7

score: 3127 38 fps in average

5083 total 2407

2198

14.5 fps

12.4 fps

5365

18 fps

Please click on an image to enlarge it.







The display

While configuring the display we had the option for a FHD (1920×1080) IPS display and a glossy 4K display with touch. 4K is too high of a resolution for a 15″ inch laptop, her T540p had 2880×1620 which was a good resolution. The 4K seriously degrades the battery time and the touch display makes the laptop heavier. So we went for the FHD display. It is a matte display, the brightness is not very high, it is perfectly fine for in-house usage but outside with bright sunlight you will have problems. If you need more brightness you sadly have to take the 4K display.

The bezels of the display are very slim which helps to keep the overall size of the device down.

The hinges are as good as you expect from a Thinkpad. They are very robust and sturdy. When you open the laptop (you can open the display lid easily with one hand) the hinges move very easy and the further you open the display the tighter the hinges become. When you rest the display in the open end position it stays tight, there is no wobbling when you type heavily on the keyboard!

So this is not as bad as the horrible TN displays on some ThinkPads but not as good as the WQHD displays or the 4K displays in other ThinkPads. The T540p 3K display is much better in my opinion.

I would only change from my MacBook back to a X1 Extreme when Lenovo gets a display with about the MacbookPro Retina resolution and the great colors of that display!

X1 Extreme left and T540p right

X1 Etreme left MacbookPro 2016 right

X1 hinge

The keyboard

This is where most ThinkPads excelled, the keyboard. My Macbook Pro 2016 disappointed me in this regard, I find the butterfly keyboard horrible. Also the touchbar! So I was curious how the X1 Extreme keyboard would be like.

It is very similar to the T540p keyboard but with lower travel. It is good to type on, it has no flex and sounds and feels very damp, it is ok. It is backlit and you can use two different brightness levels. What I do not like is the slippery surface of the keys. This is a feature that Lenovo introduced with the new island shaped keys since the X230/T430/T530/W530 series. These keyboards were very good. But the versions with backlighting had another surface as the non backlit ones. The non backlit ones had a very grippy surface which I liked a lot. The backlit ones had a slippery surface. It is a good keyboard none of the less.

But I think that the quality of the Lenovo keyboards degraded in the last years. The cursor keys feel bad. They are reduced in height in comparison to the other keys on the keyboard and do not respond as satisfying as the other keys, it is hard to describe. Also on earlier models you had three grooves under the cursor keys which helped finding them without having to look, these are gone, too. I have the impression that Lenovo tries to go the Apple route and cram the up and down keys together which makes them very hard to use. This is something that I hate on the Apple keyboard. For software development you need the up and down keys!

What I like is that Lenovo did not implement an extra numpad and that the keyboard is centered in contrast to the T540p.

So this would be a reason for me to reject bying a X1 Extreme for my personal usage. Below is a gallery of images of the cursor keys on the X200s, T420, T540p and X1 Extreme. You can see very clearly that the handling of the cursor keys degraded over time. Please click on the gallery to enlarge the images.

X200s cursor keys

T420 cursor keys

T540p cursor keys

X1 Extreme cursor keys

Touchpad and TrackPoint

I like using the trackpoint. The trackpoints and the mouse buttons on most ThinkPads were very good in the last years. Sadly on the X1 Extreme this has changed. The TrackPoint on this machine works very well, no complaints here. It is positioned between the G, H and B keys. Because these keys are not very high, I often accidentally hit the TrackPoint when I want to type an G, H or B. I know that this is a result of slimming down the machine but it is very annoying.

The mouse buttons are more difficult to use in combination with the TrackPoint, too, because of the slimming down! The left and right mouse button lost in height and you cannot press them down very deep and feel some resistance. The middle button is even worse. Usually I use it by pressing it down with my right thumb in order to scroll up and down via the TrackPoint. It has lost in height, too and it is harder to find it with the right thumb when not looking at it. On elder machines it was higher than the left and right mouse button and very easy to find without looking at it, this annoys me a lot.

The touchpad is better than all touchpads on ThinkPads that I used before. But it still does not have a glass surface like my MacBook Pro which has the best touchpad of all devices. Instead the touchpads has a rough surface which causes me some discomfort but I am not using it anyway.

This is another reason why I would personally not buy a X1 Extreme, the whole keyboard/trackpoint/touchpad device is not good enough for my needs. I get it that the cause for that is most probably the desire to slim down the machine but we are slowly reaching the point where such machines become unusable for professionals as I had to witness with my MacBookPro 2016. I don’t wish to repeat this experience again with my beloved ThinkPad brand.

Please click on the gallery to enlarge the images.

left, middle and right mouse bbutton



Sound

The sound is mediocre as in most ThinkPads I have used. The speakers are located on the bottom of the device. The sound gets quite loud but the bass is very low. The sound quality is clear. I have a Thinkpad 13 which sound quality is better, I think. In comparison to my MacBook Pro 2016 the sound really pales in comparison! It is ok for watching movies or doing presentations but otherwise it is nothing to brag about.

Fingerprint reader and Windows Hello face recognition

The fingerprint reader works fast and is accurate. My fingers are difficult to recognize, even on good devices like iPhones. The X1 Extreme performs well in this area. My Thinkpad 13 does not want to recognize any of my fingers.

fingerprint reader

Logging in by Windows Hello face recognition works like a charm, too. It is very fast. You watch at the screen and are instantaneously logged in, great.

Face camera

This is an area where the X1 Extreme is better than the MacBookPro. The Mac does not have facial recognition. And on the Mac you cannot log in using the fingerprint reader when you booted your machine! At first boot you always have to type your pasword on the Mac which I find very annoying. So the X1 Extreme wins in this area.

Ports

On the left hand side you can find the following ports:

slim tip charging port where you also can connect the Lenovo Thunderbolt 3 Workstation dock

next to that are two USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports which you can also use to charge the computer.

next to that a HDMI 2.0 port

a special port for an adapter for an ethernet cable

a combined headphone/audio jack

On the right hand side you can find the following ports:

a smartcard reader

a 4-in-1 SD card reader. Interesting about this SD card reader is that the SD card sticks flush in, it is not looking half in half out of the laptop

2 USB 3.1 ports (Gen1, one of them is always on)

a kensington lock port

Please click on the gallery to enlarge the images:





Storage

The X1 has two M.2 slots. In the first one we configured a 2 TB Samsung 970 Evo NVMe M.2 SSD. When my partner needs more space we can put another SSD into the second free M.2 slot, very handy 🙂

The Samsung 970 Evo M.2 NVMe SSD with 2TB is big and very fast. I ran AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark without BitLocker and with BitLocker enabled. In AS SSD I noticed a degradation ot the write speed with BitLocker enabled but it is still a very fast drive. My partner uses BitLocker in case she accidentally forgets her laptop somewhere so that her data is safe.

In CrystalDiskMark BitLocker made no difference in the speds:

Without BitLocker

With BitLocker

In AS SSD BitLocker reduced the write speed noticeably:

AS SSD with BitLocker

AS SSD without BitLocker

Power, battery and charging the laptop

The X1 Extreme comes with a surprisingly slim and light 135W charger, this is impressive. You can charge the laptop with the Lenovo charger or via one of the two USB-C ports. I tried charging the device with my 87W MacBook Pro charger. The system warned me that the 87W charger is not strong enough but everything worked fine. I think you only need the 135W charger if you are using CPU and the NVIDIA under full load and have external devices like HDDs or your phone attached.

Please click on the gallery to enlarge the images:





Sadly the USB-C ports are both on the left side. So you only can charge your laptop from the left side. My MacBookPro 2016 has USB-C ports on both sides which allows me to change the charging side depending on where I am at that moment.

Battery life is ok. Lenovo claims ridiculous 15 hours on their website. Realistically I got 6 to 7 hours with light usage. I surfed the web, watched YouTube videos in Chrome and Edge (in VP9 format), edited this blog entry in Chrome, did some Word documents. The battery life is good but far away from 15 hours. For my partner this battery life is completely ok, she seldomly used the laptop for such a long time while travelling.

This is a problem that my MacBook Pro 2016 also has, it has a similar battery life. Earlier MacBookPros had battery life of over 10 hours but they slimmed the machines down more and more and reduced the battery life, very sad.

Final words

So how do I feel about this machine? It is a very expensive laptop. The display is ok, the sound mediocre, the keyboard is still good but with some negative points, the trackpoint/mouse button combination is not working well. For me personally this machine would not convince me to switch from my MacBook Pro 2016 back to a Thinkpad X1 Extreme. Maybe future devices will improve on these points. For my partner the machine is great, she likes it and that is ok for me. I will inform on this blog how her experience with this machine will be in the coming months.