ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 - Better than the Dell XPS 15?

 

ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 - Better than the Dell XPS 15?

so this is lenovo thinkpad x1 extreme gen 4 and when i saw the announcement for this i was really excited 16 by 10 display something i've always wanted on the extreme edition and you can spec it all the way up to an rtx 3080

but here's the thing i started running performance tests on this and this is a public service announcement because this is very important okay and everything was going okay cinebench was running fine the multi-core score performance was better than what the xps 15 could do

i started doing a mozilla compile test it did very well it beat out the xps 15 by one minute which is really impressive but as soon as i started running Puget bench tests specifically the premiere pro one that's where things took a turn the score i got from this was so bad that it was worse than the gen 3 from last year and it shouldn't be not only is the processor inside of here significantly better it also has a way more powerful gpu

i decided to do a bit of gaming and things seemed to be okay with most games i played overwatch metro exodus the list goes on but warzone for some reason ran horribly I could only get up to like 55 frames per second they would drop the game was really laggy it was pretty much unplayable i'm like this is not right this isn't consistent what is going on so i opened up the laptop i looked inside and lo and behold there was only one stick of ram it was single channel and usually single channel ram does offer a slight performance drop in most tests but not to this degree

so for the fun of it i got rid of that 116 gigabyte dim and put in two eights reran the puget bench premier protest and saw a huge difference in performance it almost doubled same with warzone i re-ran warzone I played it again frame rates went up to 80 frames per second and there was no drop frames and it was totally smooth so what i want to say is if you're buying a laptop okay make sure on the website it says dual channel ram two sticks okay if you want to buy one stick that's fine but make sure you upgrade it the moment you get a laptop because in some instances you will see a big difference in performance

now besides that the laptop is still the same it's still the same old thinkpad the big difference this year it's a little bit deeper i have the actual gen 3 right here to give you guys an idea of what the form factor looks like the gen 3 being a bit wider because it has that more horizontal 16 by 9 aspect ratio but the gen 4 is a bit deeper because the display is now actually taller now out of all the black laptops i've reviewed in my lifetime the thinkpad lineup with its carbon fiber kind of like rubberized texture is still the one that gets the most fingerprints like the moment you take it out of the box okay you're getting fingerprints like i've rubbed this thing down so many times and there's still fingerprints on top so just know that this thing is going to get dirty it's one of the lighter ultra performance books like around 3.99 to 4 pounds which is incredible considering the xps 15 is heavier i feel like the xps 15 felt a bit more solid but because this is using like a carbon fiber deck this is a lot more durable just like the xps 15 you can open it up with one hand there's very little screen wobble like this hinge is super solid very impressed with the build quality you have two upward firing speakers that sound fantastic not as good as the xps 15 it has four but really good for two the keyboard

i still love it this is still one of my favorite keyboards out there the typing experience is superb it has nice travel distance it feels very tactile it just can't be beat

if you love the nipple it's still there you can touch it you can feel it it's there for you but i still use the touchpad over the trackpoint look this touchpad is pretty accurate i just find it to be a bit too deep so it's not as smooth as the touchpad on the surface laptop but it's still a pretty good touchpad to use now this review unit doesn't come with windows hello facial recognition but you do have windows hello fingerprint and it works very well it's combined with your power button but the star of the show to me is the display like i've always wanted the 16 by 10 aspect ratio on an x1 extreme they did it this is the 2560 by 1600 panel it's 60 hertz it's not oled but it's matte you don't get those crazy crazy reflections you'd get with a glass glossy panel the color accuracy is fantastic so if you're doing design work or anything where colors need to be accurate you're going to love this thing and the brightness is really good too the other thing is the camera this is a 1080p camera and it looks fantastic it's much better than the typical 720p we're used to seeing the ports on this are very diverse and there's tons to choose from like the back one here is your power connector and depending if you go with the rtx 3050 ti or 3060 or 3080 depends on how big your brick is because i got the rtx 3060 the power brick is in the middle so it's a bit smaller than the more expensive 3080. you have two thunderbolt 4 ports you cannot charge the laptop using usb type-c you have to use the power brick that came in the box you have a full-size hdmi a headphone jack and then on the other side you have your kensington lock two usb ports and an sd card slot now my rev unit comes with an rtx 3060 it's 100 watts but can boost up to 115 paired with an i7 11 800 h and a 512 gigabyte nvme ssd i've already touched on performance and the result i've given you is it's inconsistent especially if you only have one stick if you have two sticks it's a bit more consistent but the thing that's giving me uh an issue is it's heat management like i don't know if you saw this but in that warzone clip i played earlier the gpu was hitting 86 degrees celsius i'm okay with the cpu hitting 90 that doesn't bother me it's the gpu getting too hot when the gpu gets that hot it starts to cause performance issues and I  fully believe the rtx 3060 inside of here especially with 100 watts should be performing a bit better and it needs to run cooler because there's some aspects where the user who buys this laptop is going to be using programs like premiere pro or some sort of after effects to do some sort of 3d work and they're going to be using the cpu and gpu at the same time and when they start going and they're working at the same time there's going to be performance issues because it's going to get too hot just like dell

i think lenovo's being a bit too conservative with fan noise i understand this is a business laptop and you want to keep it quiet but if you want to keep this thing cool especially with the fact that you have a vapor chamber inside of here you need to crank up the fans now since we're on the topic of fan noise if you're running this on a full load it does get up to about 50 decibels if you put it down to better performance it hovers just a little bit over 40 and if you want anything quieter than that then you got to put it on the the battery life profile now internally you have the

big vapor chamber cooler to help keep the cpu and gpu cool with nice big fans on the left and right you have two slots for your ram i have two sticks inside of here upgradeable the 64 gigabytes now you can't upgrade the wi-fi card that is soldered onto the motherboard and you do have an 88 watt hour battery

 i only got about four hours and 48 minutes before I needed to charge this is a bit lower than what i got on the dell xps 15. honestly this is so heartbreaking because i've always been a big fan of the thinkpad x1 extreme and there's so many things i love about this laptop but

the performance and heat inconsistencies are kind of a concern i think lenovo's intentions were in the right place they wanted to offer the user a business-like experience with as much performance as possible offering an rtx 3080 but it's hard to do that in a chassis this thin like you're offering 100 watt 30 60 paired with a power hungry 11th gen intel cpu that requires a considerable amount more of cooling and fan noise to compensate for that i think no one should buy the 3080

i don't think you're going to see the true performance with that and honestly i think if you're looking at this you should probably stick with a 3050 ti just because the wattage on that is a lot lower and you'll probably get significantly better performance for that specific part I think in the meantime what lenovo needs to do is allow the user to let the fans go crazy let them go super loud because a lot of people are buying this to push this to its full potential and if it's not giving it to them they're going to feel kind of disappointed especially when they run into situations where the performance just drops when you compare it to the competing products out there on top of that don't buy a laptop with single channel memory unless you're planning on upgrading it the moment you get it into your house

i hope that's it if you haveany questions let me know in the comment

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Thank you