Lenovo ThinkPad T495s review: A solid AMD-powered business workhorse Review

Lenovo’s ThinkPad laptops have lengthy been well-known with enterprise consumers, and the enterprise proceeds to expand the variety. A recent addition is the ThinkPad T495s, which is dependent on AMD’s next-technology Ryzen Professional processors. It is really meant to provide a a lot more affordable different to the firm’s current Intel-dependent models.

Lenovo Slim-Pad

You want to preserve a close eye on Lenovo’s design figures, as there are two 14-inch AMD-dependent ThinkPad laptops — the T495s reviewed here, and the very similar T495. The T495s charges about £100/$a hundred a lot more than the T495, but enterprise travellers may perhaps nicely take into account the additional value to be a very worthwhile investment. That ‘s’ flags up the reality that the T495s is slimmer and lighter: it measures sixteen.1mm thick and weighs 1.28kg, when compared to 18mm and 1.54kg for the T495.

That’s a good bodyweight for a 14-inch notebook — it truly is only a several grams heavier than Apple’s thirteen-inch MacBook Air, which weighs 1.25kg — and the ThinkPad’s sleek profile will surely charm to enterprise consumers who desire a more substantial screen for viewing paperwork. 

That stated, it truly is a tiny disappointing that Lenovo has minimal the IPS screen to FHD (1,920 x 1,080) resolution (157.35dpi), simply because a higher resolution solution would make better use of the screen space. Even so, the image top quality is very good: the 400-nits anti-glare screen is just not the brightest we have at any time arrive throughout, but its potent contrast makes a crisp, specific image with a good color equilibrium that will work nicely when viewing video clip. And, of class, the 14-inch screen will operate nicely for enterprise shows, or only quantity-crunching in spreadsheets. For an additional £84 you can specify a variant of the screen with a PrivacyGuard filter.

Style & attributes

The T495 has the basic ThinkPad seem — a matte-black chassis and a crimson trackpoint in the middle of the keyboard, moreover three chunky buttons at the best of the trackpad. Trackpoint equipment are producing anything of a comeback at the second, and they can surely arrive in useful for enterprise travellers who are hoping to operate when sitting in a cramped airline seat.

Whilst this laptop’s style and design is somewhat conservative, we are unable to fault its make top quality. The T495s is very sturdily created, and the skinny screen panel — just 6mm thick — continue to feels organization enough to secure the glass screen from the occasional bump when you might be travelling. According to Lenovo “the T495s is examined from 12 armed forces-quality demands and a lot more than two hundred top quality checks to make sure it runs in severe problems”.

The keyboard will be a delight for speedy typists much too, with a good, organization travelling action on the keys, and a moulded, curved surface area on each individual vital that feels very at ease and can help to manual your fingers toward the centre of the vital.

It is really nicely linked much too, with two USB-C and two USB-A (three.1) ports, HDMI for an exterior display, and a three.5mm microphone/headphone jack. You can find a fingerprint reader for additional safety, and a proprietary Ethernet port for wired networks that will demand an added adapter costing £20/$30. The T495s also contains a three-year components-and-labour warranty, which should really preserve your IT department joyful.

Selling price & selections

Lenovo’s AMD-dependent ThinkPads are noticeably a lot more affordable than their Intel-dependent stablemates, and there is certainly an entry-amount configuration for the T495s running Home windows 10 Dwelling for just £716.sixty six (ex.VAT, £859.ninety nine inc. VAT, or $1,154.30).

We examined the mid-variety design that techniques up to Home windows 10 Professional 64. and charges £1,033.32 (ex. VAT, £1,239.ninety nine inc. VAT). It is really dependent all over a quad-main AMD Ryzen 5 Professional 3500U processor running at 2.1GHz (up to three.7GHz with Max Strengthen) with 16GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and integrated Radeon Vega eight graphics. 

SEE: 20 professional strategies to make Home windows 10 operate the way you want (absolutely free PDF)    

There are also a quantity of customisation selections, such as a best-of-the-variety Ryzen 7 Professional 3700U processor, a 512GB SSD and Vega 10 graphics, which brings the total value to £1,333.32 (ex. VAT, £1,599.ninety nine inc. VAT). The selections on Lenovo’s US internet site are a lot more minimal, though a customised configuration that matches our evaluate device comes in at $1,407.70.

As mentioned, the screen for all configurations is minimal to just 1,920 by 1,080 resolution. If you want a higher-resolution display, you can expect to want to seem elsewhere.

Overall performance

The authentic power of the T495s lies in affordability and portability, somewhat than raw efficiency. Its Ryzen 5 Professional achieves scores of 887 (solitary main) and 2958 (multi-main) when running the Geekbench 5 CPU examination, and 9980 in the Geekbench 5 Compute examination for graphics efficiency. All those are quite modest scores, though the integrated Vega eight graphics provides a lot more respectable scores of 35.4fps in Cinebench R15, and 8fps in the graphically intense Unigine Valley benchmark. The SSD cruises alongside effortlessly much too, with study and write speeds of 3Gbps and 1.6Gbps respectively.

This sort of efficiency will be a lot more than satisfactory for mainstream workloads involving efficiency software this sort of as Microsoft Workplace. You’ll get a great deal of operate performed much too, as the laptop’s battery-conserving manner permitted it to edge just past 9 hours of wi-fi streaming on BBC iPlayer. For the document, Lenovo claims up to 14 hours’ daily life for the 57Wh battery.

Conclusions

The ThinkPad T495s is just not likely to get any awards for raw computing horsepower, but it should really confirm a responsible platform for workplace software, email and web searching when you might be on the highway. With a slender but strong style and design and all-day battery daily life, it also has a a lot more competitive value tag than a lot of of its Intel-dependent rivals.

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