There are lots of good laptops, but it's rare to find one repeatedly described as the best laptop you can buy. The eighth generation of Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon (starts at $1,331; $1,888 as tested) carries that history, having racked up more rave reviews and awards than any notebook we can think of except possibly the Dell XPS 13. This 14-inch business system combines an unbeatable screen and keyboard with MIL-STD 810G toughness to pass torture tests involving shock, vibration, and environmental extremes, yet it weighs just 2.4 pounds, less than the XPS 13 and many other ultraportables. With stacks of as-you-like-it configuration options, it picks up PCMag Editors' Choices as regularly as punching a time clock. This year is no exception, though we're sad Lenovo keeps sending us relatively modest Core i5 models. Maybe year we'll get to review a fancy loaded version.
Don't Mess With a Classic Design
Today's test unit features a 1.7GHz Core i5-10310U processor, 8GB of memory, a 256GB NVMe solid-state drive, and a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) non-touch IPS display. Our Lenovo rep says it's $1,888 from CDW, which seems a tad steep compared to Lenovo.com's base model at $1,331 (a few dollars cheaper with Linux). The extra $557 buys you a trivially faster Core i5 with Intel's vPro remote IT management, Windows 10 Pro instead of Home, and LTE mobile broadband. If you don't need the LTE, you would see little difference with the starter machine.
Lenovo offers four other screen options: a 1080p touch screen, a 1080p touch screen with a privacy filter, a higher-resolution 2,560-by-1,440-pixel panel, and a 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) Dolby Vision HDR 400 display. The memory and storage ceilings are 16GB and 1TB respectively; Lenovo.com's price for a maxed-out Core i7-10610U system with the 4K screen is $2,378.
Though the lightest of Lenovo's three 14-inch business notebooks (under the 2.8-pound ThinkPad T14s and 3.2-pound ThinkPad T14), the Carbon isn't the lightest on the market; the Asus ExpertBook B9450 is just 1.91 pounds. Still, at 0.59 by 12.7 by 8.5 inches the Lenovo is impressively compact (the Acer TravelMate P6 measures 0.65 by 12.8 by 9.1 inches). It's a breeze to stash in any briefcase.
Unlike some other ultralights, the magnesium-reinforced-with-carbon-fiber ThinkPad doesn't feel flimsy; there's no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck. An X1 insignia below the lid's diagonal ThinkPad logo is the only change in the familiar matte-black design. The screen bezels are thin, with a webcam with sliding shutter above the display; the face-recognition camera and a small fingerprint reader beside the touchpad give you two ways to skip passwords with Windows Hello.
On the laptop's left side are two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a connector for a $35 Ethernet dongle, a USB 3.2 Type-A port, an HDMI video output, and a headphone/microphone jack. Another, always-on USB-A 3.2 port is at the right, along with the power button and a Kensington cable-lockdown slot. A bent paper clip removes a tiny tray at the rear that holds the optional SIM card.
Rewarding in Every Detail
The 720p webcam captures good color and is free of digital noise, but the picture is soft-focus, bordering on blotchy. Two upward-firing tweeters and two downward-firing woofers pump out above-average sound, with plenty of volume and a modest amount of bass; highs and midtones are clear and it's easy to distinguish overlapping tracks. Supplied Dolby software lets you switch among music, movie, dynamic, game, and voice presets or play with an equalizer.
The 14-inch display is nice and sunny as long as you stick to the top couple of brightness settings, with good contrast and satisfactory if not dazzling white backgrounds. Fine details are as sharp as the 1080p resolution permits and viewing angles are broad. Colors don't quite pop but are rich and well saturated.
Except for the Fn and Control keys being in each other's place at bottom left (you can swap them with the provided Lenovo Vantage software, which combines a handful of utilities with system updates and Wi-Fi security), the backlit keyboard is faultless. The top row combines function keys for volume and brightness with shortcuts for answering and hanging up on calls in Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams, as well as dedicated Home and End keys (Page Up and Page Down are next to the cursor arrows).
Typing feel is swift and snappy, a bit shallow but with good tactile feedback. Cursor jockeys can as usual choose between the buttonless, slightly small touchpad and three-button TrackPoint embedded mini joystick, both of which are perky and precise.
Testing the X1 Carbon: The Executive Elite
For our benchmark comparisons, I matched the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 against four other 14-inch business laptops ranging from Lenovo's own ThinkPad T14s (whose eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 Pro processor makes it the favorite in our CPU tests) to the Dell Latitude 7410 and abovementioned Acer TravelMate P6 and Asus ExpertBook B9450. 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, spreadsheeting, 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.)
While it couldn't keep up with the hot-rod T14s, the Carbon aced our most important test, exceeding the 4,000 points that indicate outstanding productivity in PCMark 10. All five systems' SSD's flew through the PCMark 8 storage exercise.
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 eight-core AMD CPU of the ThinkPad T14s dominated these events, but even as a Core i5 going up against Core i7's, the X1 Carbon did very well. It's not a 3D rendering or huge-dataset-gobbling workstation, but it'll rip through your most complex spreadsheets without breaking a sweat.
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.
An impressively strong showing by the Dell, but a solid, middle-of-the-pack finish for the ThinkPad X1 Carbon here.
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 and its Radeon Graphics integrated silicon led the way in this contest, but even it is blown away by almost any gaming laptop with a discrete GPU. Business notebooks, especially ultraportables, simply aren't built to play games or shine in gaming simulations like 3DMark.
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.
Gamers in recent years have been shunning passable 30fps systems for rigs capable of 60fps or more, so you can imagine their likelihood of settling for 4fps. It's conceivable that a Carbon owner might spend an hour or two with a casual or browser-based game, but it's far from a priority.
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 Asus ExpertBook holds the PC Labs record with a phenomenal 29 hours of battery life, but the Carbon's time is more than acceptable for an ultraportable. Long workdays, transcontinental flights, and catch-up evenings in business hotels will be no problem.
A Verdict Cast in Carbon
Its slightly larger screen, slightly preferable keyboard, and HDMI port put us on Team X1 Carbon instead of Team XPS 13, but you can't go wrong with either. For the record, we're giving the Carbon Gen 8 only four and a half stars instead of a perfect five, because it's not perfect—it has no microSD card slot. Nor is it cheap, though it's not outrageously overpriced; a couple of hundred bucks over the ultraportable going rate seems a fair amount to pay for one of the finest, if not the finest, laptop experiences on the planet. You only live once.
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