The ThinkPad E480 is a tempting notebook with powerful components for an affordable price. However, one should not be blinded by a data sheet or theory: At the end of the day, performance in practice still counts.

Indeed, the E480 has many values that speak for the affordable ThinkPad. This includes the completely refurbished case, which convinces us with its quality. Also on the positive side are the input devices. In the category in which ThinkPads are traditionally strong, the E480 hardly makes any mistakes. The backlit keyboard is especially good. Just like the TrackPoint. Its touchpad, on the other hand, is not quite perfect, but thanks to the Windows precision drivers, it is still very accurate. As far as the connections are concerned, we really like the fact that Lenovo has finally opted for USB Type-C in the E series, especially since the E480's connection offers all possible features - except for Thunderbolt. The expandability is exemplary, because apart from two Ram slots, the E480 also provides an empty slot for a 2.5-inch hard disk or SSD. Another positive aspect is the display: It is not brilliant, but it is a matte IPS screen with good contrast values and no real weaknesses - except for the color space coverage, which is normal in the price range.

The downsides are mostly related to the inner qualities of the E480, though not exclusively. It is objectionable, for example, that Lenovo is using a MicroSD card slot, despite there being more than enough space for an SD card slot. Worse is the built-in SSD, which is much too slow for a PCIe-NVMe SSD and almost a fraud because it is beaten by SATA-III SSDs. However, the biggest problem with the E480 is the cooling system, which is absolutely overwhelmed by the components. This is not necessarily evident from performance drops in everyday life, but rather in an annoying fan and far too high temperatures on the outside: 71.6 °C (160.9 °F) is a peak value we do not want to measure on any notebook. Compared with this negative low point, which may cause burns to the user, our other negative points - mediocre battery life, reduction of GPU performance in battery operation and the short warranty period - are almost insignificant.

Hands off: If you do not want to burn your lap, avoid the ThinkPad E480 in its configuration with the AMD-GPU.

As good as its price-performance ratio is, the E480 cannot be recommended in this configuration. Of course: The temperatures were measured in the stress test. However, the case should also warm up to a similar degree in games. We advise against using the E480 with AMD graphics because of a potential health risk.

This is a very regrettable verdict because the E480 certainly has potential. It would be particularly interesting to see how the version without AMD-GPU performs - we assume the case will remain much cooler. Thus, the E480 in a configuration with the Intel UHD 620 might be worth a recommendation. A respective test device is already on its way to us. Alternatively, there are options from other manufacturers such as the HP ProBook 440 G5 or Dell Latitude 3490.

Update BIOS 1.14: Lenovo reduced the performance of the Radeon RX 550 massively with the BIOS update. This improves the temperatures, but the resulting graphics performance is almost identical with the supposedly much slower iGPU version with the UHD Graphics 620. It is almost like Lenovo deactivated the dedicated GPU. The cooling solution of the ThinkPad E480 is just not powerful enough for SKUs with the dGPU. We still recommend the ThinkPad E480 without the Radeon GPU.