Lenovo Thinkpad T14s AMD Gen 1

Laptop means business at work and play

Lenovo’s Thinkpad range are workhorse laptops, often found in the bags of office workers. However, they’re just as useful in the home if you want a solid, reliable laptop without frills and frivolities. You won’t find a Thinkpad with a shiny silver case but the practical black magnesium alloy of this model hides a competent computer with an attractive three-year warranty.

You can equip a Thinkpad with a range of alternative components but our review unit came with an octa- core AMD Ryzen Pro 4750U processor, 16GB of memory and a 512GB SSD. This is an impressive configuration, but costly at £1,540. You can reduce the price to £1,260 with a cheaper six-core AMD 4650U chip and reduce the storage to 256GB, or start at £1,050 if you switch to Intel processors.

All the models have plenty of physical connections. On the left edge is a pair of USB-C ports, one USB 3.0 port, a full-size HDMI connector and a 3.5mm headphone jack. On the right edge is another USB 3.0 port. It comes with

802.11ax Wi-fi and Bluetooth 5.

If you’re thinking of using it for video calls, you’ll like the call-specific shortcut keys along the top of the keyboard, in place of the usual media control buttons. There’s also a microphone-mute key and a physical privacy slider for the laptop’s

720p webcam. We found the image from the camera disappointingly soft focus, but the built-in microphone worked well.

The keyboard is a real pleasure to type on, with gently curved keys to cradle your fingertips. Our only complaint is that the Control key isn’t in the corner of the keyboard, which takes some getting used to if you do a lot of cutting and pasting with Ctrl+x and Ctrl+v.

Our review unit had Lenovo’s

‘Low Power’ 1080p resolution screen. We measured its peak brightness at 371cd/ m2 and its contrast ratio at 1,671:1, both of which are impressive, while its SRGB range was a highly respectable 92.6 per cent.

The laptop also more than held its own in our performance tests , being one of the fastest we’ve tested recently. Compared with recent models we’ve tested, this laptop is one of the fastest. In Windows’ benchmarks and Geekbench 5 tests it outperformed everything except the new laptops powered by Apple’s latest M1 processor. It’s not aimed at gamers, though, as there’s no dedicated graphics hardware. In our video-playback test, the battery lasted seven hours.

A reliable workhorse with a great screen and pacy performance