With Strix Point pushing, there seems to be some serious inventory clearout of earlier generations happening at Lenovo. And I'm not sure this machine will be available much longer.
Strix point promises to deliver both very excellent battery life and almost enough power to casually game on the machine. I struggle to believe the latter, because my RTX 4090 16-core workstations also struggle with the games I like to play, albeit at 4k in that case.
Not sure I really needed much more than 10 hours of light disconnected work, and very sure that my RTX 4090 was going to serve me better for neural networks than 50 TOPS in a laptop, I instead aimed for a generation older to see how that would do.
So I first got a Thinkpad X13 G4 with the next generation Phoenix APU, which felt like a steal at €850 with 32GB of RAM, the bigger battery and the 400nit display.
Then I saw this for €750 including all taxes, as is obligatory in Europe and I just couldn't resist at least giving it a try. The Thinkpad is for mobile work, I tried to justify the LOQ by thinking it could act as a home µ-server (because it's so upgradable) and a portable gaming rig for visiting kids... if an RTX 4060 would actually be powerful enough.
I was going to use the mandatory EU 14 day free return window to make sure it would be and am happy to report it is.
So I evaluated both at the same time, which was a pretty unique opportunity to evaluate the spectrum of mobile APUs.
I'd have thought I'd never go with a Rambrand-R without an iGPU, because that's somehow a broken chip, yet really the iGPU is mostly a complication when there is an RTX... And the result is a lot easier in terms of driver management and compatibility, both on Windows and Linux.
The main benefit of the additional iGPU would be power saving mobile operation and that's not really a use case with the LOQ, because it's quite a hefty piece of kit, especially compared to the X13.
Both promised a pre-installed DOS, but actually there was no OS whatsoever... saved me deleting it first, because I don't use pre-installed Lenovo images on principle: I'd recommend nobody did. Did clean installs of 23H2 (24H2 wasn't out yet) and mostly straight AMD and Nvidia drivers. I did download the whole suite of drivers from Lenovo, but apart from BIOS and firmware updates nothing seemed really critical.
I completely agree with the physical quality: for a device that very nearly gives you an RTX 4060 for free, the build quality seems excellent outside and inside, the plastic very sturdy and actually "well polished" even if I'm sure that that isn't how it's done. It's all common parts and I'm quite sure that even the high-end uses the same innards and physical components.
It's the removable add-on cards where Lenovo has cheaped out for many years and to a degree that is quite atrocious: I remember them using the cheapest Intel 433 Mbit adapters even on €1000 laptops, but thankfully that's easy and cheap to fix for around €20.
The X13 has a Qualcomm WIFI soldered in which is good for 180MByte/s in my WIFI-6 home network, but the "WIFI-6E" in the LOQ wouldn't do better than 40MByte/s. So it obviously had to go. I tried replacing it with a BX200 Killer variant (€2 extra), but that actually wouldn't boot. No idea why, but an AX200 did, which immediately bumped the transfer rates from 40MByte/s to the expected 180MByte/s when copying VM images.
I roll my eyes at Gbit LAN when Realtek offers 2.5 and 5Gbit for a few extra Euros and there the lack of Thunderbold meant the LOQ can't use my Acquantia 10Gbit TB3 adapters I use normally on NUCs and mobiles when docked. But a €25 USB adapter will always deliver closer to 300MBytes/s when copying those big VMs... if storage can keep up.
My LOQ came with a 2240 QLC 1TB part, the X13 had a 2280 500GB QLC, both DRAM-less host buffer devices which delivered PCI v3 speeds at peak, but could drop down to HDD speeds: quite pitiful, but as long as your uplink is slower, you might never notice.
I replaced with a 2TB Samsung 990 Pro on the X13 to keep energy use low and a 4TB WD850X on the LOQ, easily paid by the money saving on the purchases.
I just wish there was a way to avoid the e-waste they build in by default into every slot.
Yeah, I also swapped the RAM on the LOQ for 64GB of DDR5-5600 so it can run VMs, while 32GB on the X13 was €50 extra during configuration (hear that Apple!).
My first impression has pretty much stayed the same after the last few weeks of use:
This is one well balanced and well made machine that is pleasing to see and use as a generic desktop replacement and a lot of fun to use as a portable gaming machine.
The RTX4060 DLSS3 does an absolutely astounding job at making tough games like ARK Ascend playable on epic settings at the native resolution. It won't go near 144Hz, but it also won't tear as it might occasionally dip into the 40s. And boy do those dinos and jungles look pretty on that display!
The 144Hz are best noticed via the absolutely smooth scrolling of long web sites, which again are near perfect for my old eyes in terms of pixel density. My main screens are 42" at 4k and probably very similar in terms of density. I got several notebooks with higher density displays including an older one with 4K at 15.6" and that's just a total waste on my eyes.
The newer LOQs have higher resolutions and I'm afraid they'll be overwhelmed for gaming at native resolutions, even with an RTX 4070mobile, because they can't give them significantly more power budget.
The Phoenix of the X13 can beat the Rembrand-R on the LOQ in very short term peak loads, but generally the older Zen 3 CPU stands up very well in any game I tried as well as synthetic workloads: I'm not trying to replace my big workstations with it and CPU power really doesn't seem a major limitation with actual gaming. I made sure in the Nvidia settings that the GPU would never try to exceed the 144Hz the display is capable of, while enabling G-SYNC.
And the RTX 4060m is the true marvel in this machine, which thanks to DLSS and software tuning is doing way better than I ever imagined. The comparison with a Panther Canyon NUC based on a two generation older RTX 2060m and i7-1167/G5 Tiger Lake predecessor shows just how much progress was possible within a very similar power envelope: The newer ARK Ascend (Unreal 5) was quite unplayable on that machine, while it did ok with the older ARK Evolved (early Unreal 4).
The LOQ comes with the ability to choose between three TDP settings using the Windows+Q[iet] buttons: in the lowest settings (blue LED on the power button) the fan will mostly stay off, no matter what you throw at it and it might last quite some time even on battery. In "intelligent" or "balanced" mode (white LED) it attempts to adjust CPU and GPU budgets to the workload and fans will kick on to fight accumulating heat. In the "power" mode, the fans will be running preemptively, which would be annoying during desktop work, but you don't want to game without headphones on this machine, if only because the speakers quite simply suck. This latest mode isn't available on batteries and can deliver some extra FPS when things get tight. But I recommend that only if "Intelligent" didn't do it for you.
All three are somewhat independent from what Windows (kept that at balanced) or Linux will do in terms of their own power management and mostly set TDP limits on the SoC and the GPU. I don't quite remember what they were but HWinfo will tell you.
Since Brandon didn't mention those, I'm afraid he just stayed with the default (white LED), which can cost peak gaming performance and wouldn't offer the best battery life during endurance tests.
BTW: there is clearly enough space for a bigger battery from Lenovos stocks. Anyone who know those parts can probably order a bigger replacement, the chassis seems prepared to take it: common parts everywhere in the huge Lenovo portfolio.
So for the price of a single Strix Point, I now have two laptops, one quite good enough to last me a full working day on battery, in case there really isn't an outlet in reach, another quite a lot better at gaming than any APU currently available. I'm very happy with both machines, and in my life it's not really a disadvantage that it's two (that could be different for some).
The Phoenix in the X13 could probably deliver quite a bit more performance than the Rembrand-R in the LOQ, if it was given the same 55 Watt budget. But it's designed to last a full long day on battery, not for playing games so it's realy quick only for a few seconds.
The newer Phoenix and the even newer Strix Point would certainly be measurably better in both laptops. But these machines are already really, really good at what they are designed for and at these prices, the practical gains for 2-3 times the money were not attracting me: instead of buying a Strix Point Thinkpad at twice the price of a Phoenix variant, I got myself the extra gaming rig for the inability to work another four hours off battery at the end of a full working day.
I think that was a better deal.
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