Lenovo Thinkbook 14
Lenovo’s latest business laptop is clearly thinking about the account book.
The ThinkBook 14 range from Lenovo is pitched at small business employees or anyone who is willing to accept a little more bulk in their ultrabook to avoid a flagship’s premium price tag. This doesn’t mean that the ThinkBook 14 isn’t suitably powerful however, in fact, if you’re looking at performance over cost then this unit offers similar performance to a Yoga C940 for around $900 less, which is a pretty compelling reason for the business-minded to take note.
For this price cut you will have to be willing to sacrifice on total battery capacity and the screen on the ThinkBook 14 is one of the dullest we’ve seen in a while, but the 250nit FullHD non-touch display is at least usable if turned to 100%. And while the exterior is aluminium, the keyboard surround is coated in a thin brushed metal veneer to save on both weight and cost.
Aesthetically the keyboard and trackpad are nice enough, but the touchpad isn’t the silkiest and the keyboard is on the shallower side. Considering it’s designed to be a price conscious device these elements are perfectly serviceable and shouldn’t bother too many, but it is nice to see Lenovo has included a fingerprint sensor directly on the physical power button and a super speedy PCIe SSD, which will be appreciated perks for efficient business users.
The SD web camera is placed on the top of the screen making it good for video web conferencing and the dual array mic and Harman Kardon speakers mean the audio is clear for calls and media. While some US models advertise Wi-Fi 6, local units seem to be fitted with a, 802.11ac Realtek 8822CE Wireless network controller without ax capacity, so don’t expect cutting edge wireless connectivity (although there does seem to be Bluetooth 5 included).
You can configure the ThinkBook 14 to have a Core i5-10210U CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB Samsung SSD for just $1,399 from third party sellers locally. The model we tested was a little more powerful containing an Intel Core i7-10510U CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB PCIe SSD which retails for $2,033, but we’ve seen as low as $1,853 from third parties. In the majority of our CPU benchmarks the ThinkBook 14 was within a few percent either way of the Yoga C940-14IIL ($2,899), which uses an Intel Core i7-1065G7. The Yoga C940 chip does have a Intel Iris Plus Graphics GPU, which performed between 19% and 55% better than the discrete AMD Radeon 625 chip in the ThinkBook 14. Weirdly the integrated Intel UHD Graphics performs close to 30% better on Geekbench 4 Open GL compute tests, which makes its inclusion a little baffling.
The CPU on the ThinkBook 14 trades efficiency for power which makes it great value, but the higher 1.8GHz clock rate burns through power a little quicker than flagship ultrabooks. In PCMark 8 the ThinkBook 14 only scored three hours and 38 minutes… which may just scrape in at a full day of light document editing and web browsing. Because of the dull screen the device actually did pretty well in our 1080p media playback test, netting 11 hours and 15 minutes, but since you can barely see the screen at the 50% brightness we tested at, we’d take at least a few hours of this for a comfortable viewing experience.