Lenovo ThinkPad T14s (AMD) – Review 2020

The ThinkPad T series has been Lenovo’s quintessential bread-and-butter business laptop for years, offered in both Intel and AMD flavors in models landing both above and below the three-pound mark. At 2.8 pounds, the new ThinkPad T14s (starts at $917; $1,695.99 as tested) is one of the lightweight variants, splitting the difference between the 3.2-pound ThinkPad T14 and 2.4-pound ThinkPad X1 Carbon ultraportable. It lacks the cachet of the Carbon, but the eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 Pro processor of the T14s seen here might make it the best price/performance pick on Lenovo’s 14-inch business menu.

New for 2020: A Simpler ThinkPad Naming Scheme

Unlike last year, when they were designated with different T490s and T495s model numbers, the current Intel and AMD slimlines are both called T14s. The Intel version starts $246 higher and has a Thunderbolt 3 port, whereas today’s T14s tester has only USB-C ports. Intel fans can also opt for a 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) screen, but AMD buyers have just a choice of four full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) panels. These are 250-nit, 400-nit low power, 300-nit touch, and 500-nit touch panels. The last is equipped with Lenovo’s Privacy Guard to frustrate nosy airline seatmates.

The $917 base price of the AMD-powered ThinkPad T14s buys a six-core Ryzen 5 Pro CPU, 8GB of memory, and an inadequate 128GB solid-state drive. My review unit, $1,695.99 from CDW, steps up to the 1.7GHz (4.1GHz turbo) Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U with AMD Radeon integrated graphics, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe SSD, Windows 10 Pro, and the 300-nit touch screen. The memory and storage ceilings are 32GB and 1TB, respectively.

Dressed in familiar ThinkPad matte black, the laptop measures 0.66 by 12.9 by 8.9 inches, compared to 0.7 by 12.7 by 8.2 inches for the Dell Latitude 7410. Like the Latitude, it has passed MIL-STD 810G torture tests for shock, vibration, and environmental extremes, but it is a third of a pound lighter. The screen bezels are medium-thick, defying the skinny-edge current fashion but making room above the screen for a face-recognition webcam with a sliding ThinkShutter. The camera and the fingerprint reader in the palm rest give you two ways to skip passwords with Windows Hello.

Two USB 3.2 Type-C ports, either suitable for the AC adapter, are on the ThinkPad’s left edge, along with a USB 3.2 Type-A port, an HDMI video output, a headphone/microphone jack, and a proprietary connector for a $35 Ethernet dongle. An always-on USB Type-A port joins a SmartCard reader and a Kensington cable-lockdown slot on the right side. The microSD card slot is at the rear and intended for semipermanent residency instead of frequent swapping—it shares a tray with an optional mobile broadband SIM card and requires a bent paper clip to open.

Awesome Input, Spiffy Screen

The 720p webcam captures reasonably bright but noticeably soft-focus (almost smudgy) images; the colors of my shirt were accurate but a painting and futon in the background were blurred. Sound from the bottom-mounted speakers isn’t exceptionally loud, but it’s quite pleasant; overlapping tracks are a bit muddy, but highs and lows are clear. Dolby Audio software lets you choose among movie, music, game, voice, and dynamic presets, or play with an equalizer.

ThinkPad keyboards—arguably led by ThinkPad T series keyboards—are legendarily good, and the one on the T14s is no exception. You can’t find a better typing feel than that of the backlit keyboard, which features two LED brightness levels. It has ample travel and satisfying tactile feedback, and Lenovo gets the layout just right. Cursor arrows are in the correct inverted T instead of an HP-style row; you get convenient Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys; and the F10 and F11 keys answer and hang up or decline calls in Skype and Microsoft Teams. The Fn and Ctrl keys are in each other’s places at bottom left, but you can swap them with the supplied Lenovo Vantage utility.

Pointing-device buffs can choose between the ample-size, buttonless touchpad and the familiar TrackPoint nubbin embedded in the keyboard. The TrackPoint is equipped with three mousing buttons of its own between the space bar and touchpad. Both the touchpad and the TrackPoint are smooth and precise in action, with the pad taking just the right amount of pressure to click.

I rarely see a 300-nit laptop display that doesn’t make me wish it were a 400-nit display, and this one is no exception. The Lenovo’s contrast is good, and white backgrounds show up nicely white instead of beige, but I confess to tapping F6 a few extra times in hopes of getting a touch more brightness out of it. Otherwise, the IPS screen is admirable, with sharp focus, deep colors, and wide off-axis viewing angles. And the Windows 10 Pro software preload is happily free of bloatware.

Testing the ThinkPad T14s: Ryzen Rampant

I compared the benchmark performance of the ThinkPad T14s to that of four other 14-inch business notebooks, ranging from the Acer TravelMate P6 and Dell Latitude 7410 to the Asus ExpertBook B9450 and 2019’s Intel-based Lenovo ThinkPad T490s. All had quad-core processors (all “Ice Lake” 10th Generation Core chips, apart from the older Core i5 in the T490s), making the eight-core Ryzen 7 Pro a heavy favorite in our CPU tests. You can see their basic specs in the table below.

Productivity and Media Tests

PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run 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, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better. (See more about how we test laptops.)

The competing Dell Latitude approached the 4,000 points that we consider an excellent score in PCMark 10; the ThinkPad T14s burst past it as a productivity powerhouse. All five laptops’ swift SSDs aced PCMark 8’s storage subtest.

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 T14s simply crushed the competition in these events. Getting eight-core, 16-thread horsepower in a lightweight business notebook is still rare enough to be worth celebrating.

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 Dell narrowly won this benchmark, but the T14s was hot on its tail. Except for its slightly awkward microSD card, it’s a fine choice for managing a photo collection.

Graphics Tests

3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and lets high-end PCs and gaming rigs strut their stuff.

The T14s teed off on the systems with Intel integrated graphics, but a gaming laptop with discrete graphics will eat its lunch. These enterprise notebooks are by no means meant for gameplay.

Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene, this one rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine for a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess.

Again, these machines are suited only for casual or browser-based games, not tough 3D titles. Even the winning T14s was miles shy of a playable 30fps at full resolution.

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 Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.

The Acer and especially the remarkable Asus are in a class by themselves, but the other three will easily last through a full workday plus an evening of hotel-room homework or streaming entertainment. No real complaints here.

Ryzen Makes for a World-Class Value

The ThinkPad T14s flirts with a four-and-a-half-star rating and an Editors’ Choice nod, missing those marks mainly due to Lenovo’s wrongheaded decision to deny AMD customers a 4K screen option (and the fact that we like to see a Thunderbolt 3 port in an over-$1,000 notebook). But if you’re content with a 1080p display, the T14s is a sensational business laptop—lighter, faster, and $493 cheaper as tested than the Dell Latitude 7410 (though that comparison is a bit flawed, since the Dell has a gorgeous 4K display), and a genuine, more affordable alternative to the super-stellar ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Its Ryzen 7 Pro CPU is a monster, delivering near-mobile-workstation levels of raw multithreaded performance, and its engineering is faultless.

We don’t need to tell business execs and IT managers that a ThinkPad is worth considering, but we may have to tell a few traditionalists that an AMD processor is. Believe it, and put this T14s on your short list.

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Specs

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