It’s not that Lenovo offers more ThinkPads than you can shake a stick at—it’s just that it would take a very long time to shake that stick at them all. The ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 (starts at $896; $1,039 as tested) is a business laptop aimed at small offices, priced below the enterprise ThinkPad T and premium ThinkPad X series (in other words, overlapping the ThinkBook series). It’s a 14-inch slimline with many of the ThinkPad virtues, such as a first-class keyboard and MIL-STD 810H durability. But it’s on the heavy side for a 14-inch laptop; it has only one USB-C and one USB-A port (not counting an outdated USB 2.0 port); and the power adapter steals the USB-C port. Lenovo laptops regularly earn four or four and a half stars in our review ratings, but this one falls a bit short.
The One Constant: The Classic ThinkPad Black
The $896 base model of the ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 combines an Intel Core i5-1135G7 mobile CPU with 8GB of memory and a 256GB NVMe solid-state drive. (There’s another configuration with a Core i3 processor and an insufficient 4GB of RAM, but it actually costs more because of its 1TB SSD.) Our $1,039 test unit teams the Core i5 and 256GB drive with 16GB of memory.
Two IPS screens are available, with and without touch-input support. (Our model is without.) Both offer full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) rather than 4K native resolution. Windows 10 Pro and Wi-Fi 6 are standard. Thin side bezels and thicker top and bottom bezels surround the screen, the top hosting a face-recognition webcam with a sliding privacy shutter. A fingerprint reader is built into the power button.
The anodized aluminum chassis measures 0.7 by 12.8 by 8.7 inches, almost identical to the HP EliteBook 845 G7 (0.7 by 12.7 by 8.5 inches). Its matte-black-slab styling is instantly recognizable as a ThinkPad, and there’s almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck. At 3.51 pounds, however, it’s relatively portly. Our favorite 14-inch business ultraportable, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8, is more than a pound lighter at 2.4 pounds, and the Asus ExpertBook B9450 is half a pound lighter still.
You’ll spot a USB4 port with Thunderbolt 4 capability on the laptop’s left side, though you won’t be able to use USB-C or Thunderbolt peripherals while plugged in, since the power adapter has a USB-C connector. The left side also has an always-on USB 3.2 Type-A port, an HDMI video output, and an audio jack. A retro USB 2.0 port (reserve it for a mouse) joins an Ethernet jack and a security-cable lockdown notch on the right.
Everything You Need to Be Productive
The backlit keyboard is straight out of the ThinkPad parts bin, which means it’s superior. You get dedicated (though smallish) Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys; the cursor arrows are in the correct inverted T; and the typing feel is soft and snappy. Special keys can be used to place and end calls in Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams. The Fn and Control keys are swapped into each other’s place at bottom left, but if you can’t adjust to the placement, you can swap them with the supplied Lenovo Vantage software.
Cursor jockeys can choose between the signature TrackPoint nubbin embedded in the keyboard, with three mouse buttons south of the space bar, and a smooth-gliding touchpad that takes just the right amount of pressure for an almost silent click.
The display is nothing special—middle size (14 inches), middle resolution (1080p), middle peak brightness (300 nits)—but it is perfectly usable for ordinary indoor use. Brightness is nothing to write home about (it almost looks closer to 250 nits), but contrast is good, and white backgrounds are white instead of dingy. Colors don’t pop vividly but are reasonably rich and well saturated. Viewing angles are broad, and fine details look crisp.
The 720p webcam captures reasonably well-lit and colorful, if rather soft-focus, images with just a hint of digital static or noise. Bottom-mounted speakers produce moderately loud sound that’s slightly flat but not tinny or distorted. Bass is minimal, but you can make out overlapping tracks. Dolby Audio software provides music, movie, game, and voice presets and an equalizer. Other preloaded apps include a McAfee trial, Mirametrix Glance (for managing windows on multiple displays), and an AI Meeting Manager that offers cloud-based translation and subtitles (for a fee) for international conference calls.
Performance Testing: A 5-Way Race
For our benchmark comparisons, I compared the ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 with four other 14-inch business notebooks, including the abovementioned Asus ExpertBook B9450 and the Acer TravelMate P6. The HP EliteBook 845 G7 and Lenovo’s own ThinkPad T14s overpower the quad-core Intel systems with eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 Pro processors. You can see the quintet’s basic specs in the table below.
Productivity and Media Tests
PCMark 10 is a holistic performance suite developed by the benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). Its primary test simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that rates the speed of the unit’s boot drive. (See more about how we test laptops.)
The Acer and Asus fell a bit short of the 4,000 points that indicate excellent productivity in PCMark 10, but the others cleared the hurdle effortlessly—they’re ideal Microsoft Office or Google Docs partners. PCMark 8’s storage test, which measures the boot drive’s responsiveness with everyday apps, is no challenge for today’s speedy SSDs, and most systems score within a tight spread on this test.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better.
The 10th Generation Intel processors underwhelmed in these tests, while the eight-core Ryzen 7 Pros raced ahead. The E14 Gen 2’s 11th Gen Core i5 performed capably.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.
The E14 performed better than capably here, winning the race by a substantial margin. This chip does a good job with the “bursty,” start-and-stop nature of the Photoshop test and its short filter-application tasks. Since it’s so good at image editing, it’s a shame it has no SD or microSD card slot for transferring photos.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows systems’ relative graphics muscle with two gaming simulations, 3DMark and Superposition. The first has two DirectX 11 subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, suitable for mainstream PCs with integrated graphics and higher-end gaming rigs respectively. The second uses the Unigine engine to render and pan through a detailed 3D scene at two resolution and image quality settings with results measured in frames per second (fps); 30fps is usually considered a fair target for smooth animation while avid gamers prefer 60fps or higher.
Some fine print in a spec sheet on Lenovo.com says that the E14 Gen 2’s Iris Xe integrated graphics function as Intel’s older UHD Graphics because, with only one SO-DIMM slot, the laptop lacks the advantages of dual-channel memory. Whatever the technicalities, it’s obvious that neither the ThinkPad nor any of its peers is suitable for more than casual or browser-based games; they’re miles behind the performance of gaming laptops with discrete GPUs.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of SteelTears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50% and volume at 100% until the system quits.
The Asus is the current PC Labs record-holder with incredible battery life. The two ThinkPads brought up the rear, but either will get you through a full day of work or school plus an evening of streaming video.
No Serious Flaws, But Nothing Sensational
The ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 is a thoroughly capable and well-made business laptop, but it’s hard to get enthusiastic about it when several competitors offer lighter weight or faster processors—or both. Granted, many competitors cost more (and our beloved ThinkPad X1 Carbon costs a lot more), but another USB-C port would make the E14 Gen 2 more convenient, and better battery life would be nice. It’s still true that you can’t go wrong with a ThinkPad, but this one isn’t the star that some others are.
