The Lenovo ThinkPad P70 Review: Mobile Xeon Workstation

Workstation Performance

The ThinkPad P70 is first and foremost a mobile workstation, so that generally means professional graphics workloads. Lenovo offers the entire gamut of mobile Quadro parts, and the P70 we received is the second from the top with the Quadro M4000M. The M5000M should be a significant improvement since it’s based on the GTX 980M, rather than the GTX 970M of the M4000M.

Since we don’t get a lot of mobile workstations in, there’s not a lot of data here to work with, so I’ve broken this testing down into a couple of different segments. First, the GPU will be compared against other devices in some gaming tests, just to give it a baseline in GPU performance and to see where the professional GPU lies in comparison to gaming cards. Next, the system will be compared against the Surface Book and Dell XPS 15 in Kishonti’s Compubench. Finally, the ThinkPad P70 was run on Specviewperf 12.0.2, but there are no other devices to compare this against since this is a professional graphics test only, and it was not run on any of our other systems (which are sent back to the manufacturers after the review in case you were ever curious).

Gaming Performance

You can see clearly how the M4000M is not optimized for gaming. Other than the Fire Strike test, it performs quite a bit under the Razer Blade, which has the GTX 970M. The exception is Ice Storm Unlimited, which ends up being more CPU dependent on these laptops since that’s a mobile benchmark, and the Xeon wins back some of the ground lost. This is not a gaming card, and it’s not tuned for this, but it’s interesting to see where it sits compared to the GeForce lineup.

Compubench

On compute workloads, the M4000M regains its composure here. The performance is quite a bit higher than the admittedly lower tier GTX 960M in the XPS 15.

SPECviewperf 12.0.2

SPEC is the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, and SPECviewperf is their test for measuring graphics performance based on professional applications. This is where the professional graphics can show a big advantage over the gaming cards. SPECviewperf 12.0.2 was run on the ThinkPad P70 with the Quadro M4000M GPU, as well as a system with the GeForce GTX 980M. Despite the GTX 980M being a more powerful card (1280 CUDA cores vs 1536 in the GTX 980M) there are tasks such as these where professional graphics rule the roost.

You can see above that on many of these tests, the performance of the Quadro is significantly faster than even a more capably equipped GeForce. For those that need even more compute, the ThinkPad P70 can also be had with the M5000M with 1536 CUDA cores.