Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 5 Review

Except for switching from Intel’s 11th to 12th Generation processors, there’s not much new about the fifth edition of Lenovo’s premium laptop for content creators and office-bound business execs. The ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 5 (starts at $1,649; $3,403 as tested) still has the 16-inch, 16:10 aspect ratio display introduced in last year’s Gen 4. It’s actually a choice of four 16-inch displays, all based on IPS technology instead of the ritzy OLED panels offered by rivals like the Dell XPS 15 and HP Envy 16. There’s nothing wrong with IPS—in fact, the 4K touch screen is gorgeous—but there’s something wrong with Lenovo charging $3,403 when the OLED Envy 16 and Asus Vivobook Pro 16X are under $2,000 each. The X1 Extreme is still a splendid desktop replacement, but it needs a price cut to stay competitive.

Nobody Builds Them Better 

The flagship among non-workstation ThinkPads, the X1 Extreme Gen 5 combines the brand’s matte-black-slab styling with a carbon fiber lid and aluminum bottom. It measures 0.7 by 14.2 by 10 inches (HWD), nearly matching the HP Envy 16 (0.78 by 14.1 by 9.9 inches) but is relatively light at 4.14 pounds—the Envy 16 weighs 5.12 and the 15.6-inch Dell XPS 15 4.31 pounds. The Lenovo has passed MIL-STD 810H torture tests for travel hazards including shock, vibration, and extreme temperatures. There’s almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners, though a little if you mash the keyboard deck.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The $1,649 base model carries a Core i7-12700H processor, a skimpy 8GB of RAM and 256GB solid-state drive, and a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel display backed by Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU. Our $3,403 test unit stepped up to a Core i7-12800H vPro CPU (six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 20 threads), 16GB of memory, a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive, a 3,840-by-2,400-resolution touch screen, and an 8GB GeForce RTX 3070 Ti—as well as Windows 11 Pro.

This 4K display is available in non-touch as well as touch-capable versions, and would-be gamers can opt for an in-between 2,560-by-1,600 panel with 165Hz refresh rate. Power users can outfit a Core i9-12900H configuration with up to 64GB of RAM and 4TB of storage (starting at a gasp-inducing $6,279).

The screen bezels aren’t vanishingly thin but attractively slim, with less of a chin or bottom bezel than we usually see. The webcam has a tiny shutter you slide open and closed with a fingernail. Dolby Atmos-tuned speakers flank the keyboard (there is no numeric keypad), and the power button doubles as a fingerprint reader; both it and the face-recognition camera let you skip passwords with Windows Hello.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

On the laptop’s left side are two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports, along with an HDMI monitor port, an audio jack, and the power connector. Two USB-A 3.2 ports join an SD card slot and a security-cable lock notch at right. There’s no Ethernet port, but Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth are standard, and 5G mobile broadband is optional.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Classy, Calibrated Color 

Color-calibrated at the factory, the 16-inch touch screen rivals HP mobile workstations’ DreamColor panels as one of the best IPS laptop displays we’ve seen. Colors are rich, vivid, and well saturated, with deep blacks and snow-white backgrounds. There’s plenty of brightness; contrast is high, and viewing angles are broad. 

The 3,840-by-2,400-pixel resolution makes fine details razor-sharp, with no pixelation around the edges of letters. Photos and videos snap to life. X-Rite Color Assistant software lets you switch among Adobe RGB, sRGB, DCI-P3, Rec. 709, and DICOM color profiles.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

An included 1080p webcam makes you look almost as good, with well-lit and colorful images in all but the dimmest settings. Focus is crisp, and noise or static is undetectable. Audio is perhaps a bit hollow but loud and clear; there’s a little more bass than usual, and it’s easy to make out overlapping tracks. Dolby Access software provides dynamic, music, movie, game, and voice modes and an equalizer, plus noise suppression for conferences. 

Another software utility, Lenovo Vantage, combines system updates with settings like battery optimization and Wi-Fi security. It lets you assign a favorite program or website to a top-row launch key and swap the Fn and Control keys at bottom left if you can’t get used to their hardware placement. (Control should be on the left, but Lenovo likes messing with us.)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

That gripe aside, the backlit keyboard is practically perfect, with a snappy typing feel; dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys (divided between top and bottom right in the usual ThinkPad arrangement); and shortcut keys to place and end conference calls. You can use the TrackPoint embedded pointing stick, with three buttons below the space bar, or a midsized touchpad that takes a comfortable click but gets smudged by your fingertips.

Testing the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 5: Deluxe Desktop Alternatives Square Off 

Besides comparing the X1 Extreme’s performance with that of the abovementioned HP Envy 16 and Dell XPS 15, we pulled benchmark numbers for two other 16-inch, content-creator-friendly desktop replacements: The Asus ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED and the Gigabyte Aero 16, which is even pricier than the ThinkPad ($4,400 as tested), thanks to its screaming Core i9 CPU and top-of-the-line GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics. You can see their basic loadouts in the table below. (See more about how we test laptops.)

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop’s storage. 

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

We consider 4,000 points in PCMark 10 a sign of excellent productivity for everyday office apps, so all these systems are overqualified. The X1 Extreme was first among equals in our CPU tests and close to the front in Photoshop. It may not quite qualify as a workstation, lacking the independent software vendor (ISV) certifications of Lenovo’s ThinkPad P series, but is more than ready to crunch your most formidable numbers and tackle content creation tasks. 

Graphics Tests 

For more visual-focused benchmarking, we test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The laptops more or less placed in Nvidia part number order, with the RTX 3080 Ti of the Gigabyte blazing ahead but the Lenovo close behind. It’s not really a gaming laptop (at least not without the 165Hz screen option), but certainly capable of playing demanding games after hours.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

For color testing, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Dell and HP lead the way in battery life; the Extreme clears the eight-hour mark but is more likely to stay plugged in at the office than taken on plane trips. Its display shows first-class color coverage, only trailing the OLED panels slightly in the DCI-P3 gamut used for video editing, and is the brightest in the group albeit shy of its rated 600 nits.

Verdict: Not a Bargain, But a Blessing 

Business laptops like ThinkPads cost more than even high-end consumer models, like HP’s Envy line; MIL-STD 810H sturdiness, unbeatable build quality, and extra IT manageability carry a premium. We know that, but we’re still denying the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 5 an Editors’ Choice award because it seems to join the Apple MacBook Pro 16 in the cost-no-object class (at least for independent contractors out there) while a recent crop of affordable OLED laptops are standout values. But if your company offers you an X1 Extreme or allows you to purchase one or more, you’re lucky indeed. Don’t look that gift horse in the mouth.