P14s Gen 5 intel: first impressions

[mikemex]

Hi folks!

The whole tale:

I sincerely thought that 32GB would be enough for anything... until AI stuff popped up. Sure, there is a lot of marketing BS associated to it but truth is, AI as a whole is indeed a quasi-miracle (exactly the thing the industry was looking for to boost sales...) and they certainly caught my attention this year. I'm doing a lot of coding lately and one of the main reasons for it is AI. I can just prompt it to do a task and it saves me the hassle of deciding the details. The result can never be trusted but I find it immensely easier to just prototype my stuff that way and just refine the code by hand, than to write everything from scratch. It literately takes it seconds to write complex code and I can do it as often as I want since the AI doesn't mentally tire like me. Code itself is not bad at all. And of course, it's super handy for small queries on things. It's almost like having a sidekick with you all the time.

Thing is, I began running AI models locally out of privacy concerns and there is a huge difference in performance. None of my existing machines can run AI at decent speeds; at least a model that works decently well. There are small models that probably work OK for simple tasks, but nothing with the capacity you can get with the online models.

Long tale short, I already had my eye on the P14s G5 after reading that Lenovo had just began selling upgradeable machines / with physical memory slots. But I couldn't really wrap my mind around the idea of getting yet another machine at such expensive prices. I bought an X1 Yoga G8 last year (my main machine) and it was quite an expense ($900). Certainly lower than retail pricing but a lot of money still.

Like usual, my answer was on eBay: I found a super deal: 155H / 4GB RTX 500 Ada / 14.5" WUXGA (IR Camera) / 75Wh battery/ 16GB / 512GB for just under $800. I had never seen one that low, so obviously I took the chance and got it. It's basically new, the battery had a couple of cycles to it. I sincerely would have preferred to get the the WQXGA (2560x1600) version but beggers don't get to be choosers so I had to settle with the WUXGA variant.

So here are my first impressions:

** QUALITY **

Top quality. I'm a bit disappointed to find that the machine is this heavy (almost twice the weight of my X1C9) and doesn't have the metal chassis as I expected (the frame holding the keyboard is plastic while the bottom and top are aluminum). But I must admit, it's really well made / really solid. We tend to idealize the older Thinkpads around here but I can honestly say, this thing is better built than my old W530 ever was.

** SPEED **

I've not used the machine much as I just received it. But it feels quite snappy right out of the box.

What I've already done is to open it up and I can confirm that it has a really beefy cooling system. It has three heatpipes: two big that run from one side to the laptop to the other from the center, with a fan on each side. And a very small transversal one, probably to keep the temperature of the GPU in check. The iGPU has a simpler cooling solution but it's still quite good. I have much more confidence about this machine being capable to run heavy software than anything I had seen before (I've never one of the truly expensive Thinkpads, like the P1 series).

For those who doesn't know, the P14s Gen 5 is really the T14p sold in China. It comes with an RTX 4050 in there.

** INPUT DEVICES / KEYBOARD / TRACKPOINT / TOUCHPAD **

I don't use the touchpad ever, I have it disabled on all my machines. The keyboard is surprisingly good. I mean, too good considering it only has 1.5mm of travel. I still look at my older X301 with some envy (and the X301 isn't the best Thinkpad keyboard, to being with) but after some years of using mostly chiclet keyboards, I'm used to it. The keyboard is certainly better that the one on my X1s and more like the one they put on recent T14s (G3/G4).

Trackpoint (my main reason to buy Thinkpads this days; if Lenovo every stops putting Trackpoints on their Thinkpads I will switch brand for good) works OK but again, nothing like older models. Just my P14s G1, like most not-so-old models, had the trackpoint buttons recessed / at an angle, which makes them very comfortable to use. Newer models still have physical buttons, but they are completely flat, with a border from the chassis above. There is a big difference in ergonomics but duh, it is what it is...

It has a Copilot key. I'm not sure what it does as I'm yet to press it. I wonder where the fingerprint scanner is. I hope it's on the power button and not on that key like other models I've seen...

THEY SWITCHED THE FN / CTRL KEYS! Well, at least they are the same size and you can swap them on the BIOS. But mother of God, they are indeed trying to destroy everything that makes a Thinkpad what is is...

WHY LENOVO? WHY? YOU'VE GOT SO MANY MODELS TO MESS WITH AND STILL CHOOSE TO DESTROY THE BEST TRADITION ELEMENTS OF YOUR MOST PRESTIGIOUS BRAND?

** BATTERY LIFE **

The only thing I've actually tested already. I installed ThrottleStop right away (my main reason to get intel vs AMD is the configurable TDP; I find that feature immensely useful) and set the TDP to 9W PL1 / 15W PL2 and used for a while in bed. Power consumption can get as low as 2.5-3W when truly idling, which is good, but as soon as you do anything with it, it jumps to about 6-7W. So with the 75W battery you can expect like 9-10 hours of real battery life doing light tasks.

I was originally planning to get the iGPU version, thinking that it'd offer a exceptionally good battery life. But I now realize that they have polished nVidia Optimus (still called that way?) quite a bit lately and the dGPU doesn't really pull power when you''re not using it (there is no option in the BIOS to disable the dGPU, which is a bummer). So the battery life difference is probably lower than I'd expect. This is, after all, an H processor, which is like the P series of previous generations. They just consume more power due the difference in P cores (2 in U vs 6 in P/H).

** MISC **

Things I've noted so far:

1.- The laptop uses a 135W proprietary power adapter. It's probably necessary if you're going to squeeze ever last drop of the performance, which is not something I want to do. I learned over the years that laptops aren't desktops and that one should always be extra careful when dealing with heat. So I'll just adjust the TDP to a more sensible value (default power budget is something like 80W) and use my existing 65W charger and ignore the warning message when booting up.

2.- The screen doesn't go very low in brightness, about one or two notches above my X1C9 lowest level. And picture quality isn't really that bad (panel lottery?).

3.- Top and bottom covers are made of aluminum. I dislike aluminum for two reasons: it's soft and they don't protect it (they leave the anodizing as is), unlike magnesium parts, which are usually coated with a rubbery paint. It scratches super easily and then it looks like crap. Probably not a big issue for a machine that will spend most of its life on a desk (made a nice adjustable wood stand for it)...

4.- Upgradeability again. Not a big issue but WIFI card is soldered and it's "only" WIFI 6, when there is WIFI 7 already. *Sigh*

5.- It's got a wired Ethernet port, which is something I was missing. It's hinged and it retracts when not in use (and replaceable from what I've seen: it's mounted on a daughter card).

6.- It's weird but even when the P16s Gen 3 and the P14s Gen 5 share the same motherboard, WWAN isn't available on the P14s.

7.- I head rumors about the second M.2 not being available (not soldered) But I'm glad to report that there is a slot available on mine. Since I can't put WWAN on this I'm going to use it to put a secondary SSD (I have a small 512GB 42mm SSD somewhere). Well, at least that's the plan (let's see if Lenovo implemented a lock on that slot...).

8.- Cover screws aren't captive for some reason (they came loose, maybe someone lost them...) and the cover itself dents and scratches super easily. It has a lot of clips all around, so be careful.

I think that's it for now. I plan to upgrade it before replacing the Yoga as my main machine but I'll have to decide what parts to get because large SSDs and DIMMs are still very expensive.

[TPFanatic]

thanks for braving the horror of contemporary Think products!

14" is much too small for me now. i'd be trying to get a P16 if I had my employer's credit card on tap. good to know about the Fn and Ctrl. if only our friends at Lenovo should stop listening to the loudmouths on youtube who are already prejudiced against the PC industry, especially Lenovo... i mean, it hardly matters, most of their money comes from B2B anyway, right, and what do they care where a key is next to another?

guess deviancy is only alright when apple does it.

[mikemex]

thanks for braving the horror of contemporary Think products!

Come on, it's not really that bad. They returned the memory slots, which is a big gain from years of having only soldered RAM. And like I said in my post: you still have that tiny M.2 slot to putting extra stuff in. Consumer level devices don't have that because they don't offer WWAN at all.

Battery is still replaceable. It's not in a cartridge because... well, no modern laptop uses round cells. It's just an industry trend, not specific to Thinkpads.

They still have the battery thresholds. They still publish service manuals. You can still use the Vantage app to install drivers and updates. They still honor international warranty (they replaced the mobo on my P14s G1 right before it expired).

The world keeps turning, you know. Modularity is no longer a selling point in a world that expects devices to be super thin and integrated. And above all, in a world where everybody uses broadband connection for everything. I'm astonished to find that people rarely back up their stuff themselves this days; they rely entirely on cloud services. No optical drives. No USB pen drives. What would realistically want all those ports for?

People don't upgrade their laptops as often because anything that is not ancient now has 8-16GB minimum and very fast SSDs of decent size.

They don't offer docking stations because signals have become so fast trace length has become an issue. LPCAMM, for instance, was introduced to compensate for the fact that typical DIMM slots are just too far from the processor now, to support the data rates modern memory works at. Same goes for ultra high speed Thunderbolt ports.

14" is much too small for me now. i'd be trying to get a P16 if I had my employer's credit card on tap.

My original plan was to get a P16s, which has the plus of being WWAN upgradable (an important consideration for me now). But I got what was available, not what I wanted.

good to know about the Fn and Ctrl. if only our friends at Lenovo should stop listening to the loudmouths on youtube who are already prejudiced against the PC industry, especially Lenovo... i mean, it hardly matters, most of their money comes from B2B anyway, right, and what do they care where a key is next to another?

guess deviancy is only alright when apple does it.

Sad as it is, we're a minority now. The delete key in the upper right corner is standard, regardless whether we like it or not. An so is the ctrl key in the opposite corner. We all around here know that engineers at IBM had good reasons to keep the fn key there instead, but Lenovo cares more to please the general crowd. And people prefer huge touchpads. It may be the lack of familiarity with Trackpoints, but that's how it is. And to make room for that they had to shrink the keyboard layout. And now they are after the trackpoint buttons...

We all know how this is going to end. But it makes sense, after all. That's what makes them money and money is their goal as a company.

P. S. We should be working on a plan B: convince a different company to make us a custom laptop frame with a 7 row keyboard and trackpoint only...

[TPFanatic]

Entrepreneurs like xytech (rip), cnmod / lcdfans, TP Art… with full access to the manufacturing prowess of China and the passion for the product, are doing incredible things now with custom boards, adapters, combining modern tech with classic hardware design.

Theres still no shortage of original thinkpads either. Theyre still all over ebay. This is like the crown vic/town car population. They built too many and they built them too well. Im not sure by when they’ll be gone for good but it’s clearly no time soon

[Ibthink]

The P14s G5 is an interesting case. As you noted, it is based on the T14p, but why?

Lenovo stopped making T series ThinkPads with dedicated GPUs. Which means that the P14s G5 couldn't be based on the T14 G5, they had to use a different design.

Unfortunately, this machine is made by Lenovo China, which is why it lacks ThinkPad hallmarks like the captive screws or magnesium frames. The keyboard is also riveted in instead of screwed, same as the E series. Essentially it is a more premium, powerful version of the E series.

[axur-delmeria]

Having replaced a laptop's riveted keyboard before, I abhor them. There's no proper way to install the new keyboard, so it's less secure and feels worse than the original,

[mikemex]

The P14s G5 is an interesting case. As you noted, it is based on the T14p, but why?

Lenovo stopped making T series ThinkPads with dedicated GPUs. Which means that the P14s G5 couldn't be based on the T14 G5, they had to use a different design.

Unfortunately, this machine is made by Lenovo China, which is why it lacks ThinkPad hallmarks like the captive screws or magnesium frames. The keyboard is also riveted in instead of screwed, same as the E series. Essentially it is a more premium, powerful version of the E series.

Yeah, it's an excellent way to put this: this is a "premium" E series-turned-P-series. I think the thing that gives it away is the lack of WWAN. It's a standard feature on the higher end lines (T/P/X, etc., my P14s G1 AMD came with antennas and SIM slot) but it's often missing in the lower E/L lines. And guess what? The P14sG5 doesn't have it...

The question is: why Lenovo stopped making discrete GPU T series? Well, because they never worked that well. I avoided getting discrete GPUs on all my laptops myself (and this goes as far as the T60x series: my mom still has my older T61 I configured with SXGA+, T8300 / integrated graphics) because I knew (from my experience with my old T41p) they would overheat at full demand and have a [censored] battery life. I had a couple of W530s for a while and I had the GPU disabled in the BIOS on both of them. I did the same with my T420s, which was the worst offender in that sense. Truth is. it wasn't all happiness with the older models...

The reality is that integrated GPUs have been steadily improving. They now provide the performance of lower end discrete GPUs but they are battery friendly. And do all that on top of using regular RAM instead of GDDR (which I think is produced in less and less quantities nowadays, due to being much more specialized than LPDDR. This is not a minor industrial consideration).

So yeah, if you want a really beefy cooling setting you can't use the T series, because they are designed to the realities of the contemporary world. So either you lower the price on the true P series or you compromise and make a premium one based on E series, which are more focused on a gamer public (more focused on raw power and less focused on mobility/ergonomics/durability). That's what they did and that's what I got.

Am I happy? Well, like most of you, I'd like to get one with a 7 row keyboard with at least 2.5mm of key travel (at this point I don't mind the chiclet style: I've come to accept there is a real tradeoff between key size for accurate striking and tactile feel). Maybe no touchpad at all. But there is not such thing and it seems it will never come back (after repeated requests to the Framework staff, they still refuse to add a trackpoint to it: seems like it's not as popular as we think). It's simply not a priority for Lenovo anymore because, on a device this thick (it's considerably thicker than my old P14s G1 AMD), there is more than enough space for that.

Being realistic, yeah, I think I'm happy because I've decided that I'm not going to turn into an old grumpy guy who is stuck in the past. I still have my beloved Trackpoint (the day Lenovo removes it entirely will be the last day I'll get Thinkpads) and I've got the DIMM slots back, which is one the of my main complaints about the later models. And I'm saying this full of real world experience: I had to fully disassemble several laptops over the years in order to upgrade the RAM (three X1C4, a couple X1C9, one X1C5...). It's not fun.

I got a nice bump on battery capacity (57 -> 75 Wh)... it's the closest thing we've had to an W series on years.

[Ibthink]

Getting rid of the dGPU option was a prerequisite for restoring the dual DIMM on the T series, as not having the dGPU freed up valuable board space. I don't think the dGPU T series were that popular anymore anyway, especially outside of China (the Chinese market apparently really likes dGPUs, hence the T14p exists there).

Interestingly, the P14s Gen 5 AMD is still based on the T14, since the AMD model does not have a dGPU. It also features WWAN, unlike the P14s Gen 5 Intel

As far as the keyboard goes, the problem is that many people prefer shorter travel keyboard nowadays, as they are used to them. The quicker "bottom out" gives them a sharper feeling vs. longer travel ones that can feel more mushy in comparison. This is something that struck me when I tried the ThinkPad 25 compared with the classic keyboard of earlier generations - it had the lower 1.8mm travel keys, and honestly I personally preferred it. Very nice typing experience on that one. Sadly, the keyboard is very prone to wear compared with newer backlit keyboard, which keep better for longer.

There would be enough room on the P14s G5 for a longer key travel, but that would mean that Lenovo would have to produce a special keyboard just for this model, which is probably not worth it. The last time they did that was for the P50/P51 and P70/P71, which kept the 2.1mm key travel for longer than the other ThinkPad lines. But the P series switched to using the common T series keyboard when the P52 rolled around, so Lenovo probably found out that it does not make sense for them economically to do this.

Having replaced a laptop's riveted keyboard before, I abhor them. There's no proper way to install the new keyboard, so it's less secure and feels worse than the original,

Yes. The only way to really replace it is by changing the whole palmrest/keyboard assembly, which is a waste.

[TPFanatic]

let's face it, laptops are consumables now and have been for years. waste is a part of life, everyone poops.
B2B replaces hardware every 1-3 years anyway.
the premium of brand new pays for warranty and support service. this is critical for B2B.

Lenovo must refresh or lose sales to competition.
Lenovo must lower prices or lose sales to competition.
Lenovo must lower costs to keep up with competition.
Lenovo does innovate.

i got a degree from a business school once so "respect my authoritah!"

[axur-delmeria]

Yes. The only way to really replace it is by changing the whole palmrest/keyboard assembly, which is a waste.

There's one method that involves melting the top of the rivets with a soldering iron after installing the new keyboard, fixing it in place. I need a lot of practice before attempting that on a laptop I'm trying to repair.