The Lenovo ThinkPad P70 Review: Mobile Xeon Workstation

Battery Life

If you hear the words “Mobile Workstation” then you know two things. First, it’s going to be pretty powerful. Second, it’s going to be portable. Nowhere in there would you really expect much for battery life, and the portable part would likely mean you can move it around and then plug it in again. The ThinkPad P70, being a large laptop, has plenty of room for batteries, and Lenovo has packed it with pretty much the maximum allowable at 96 Wh.

Luckily even for higher performance notebooks, the improvements to Skylake, along with Optimus which is enabled in the P70, allow for reasonable battery life on even these higher performance notebooks. We test battery life under two scenarios. The light test is light web browsing, and the heavy test is much heavier web browsing, along with a movie playback, and a 1 MB/s file transfer going on to keep the wireless active. All testing is done with Edge as the browser.

Light Battery Life

Despite the performance parts inside, and the high resolution display, the ThinkPad P70 actually does pretty well on our light test, coming in just shy of six hours. Yes, it’s a long way from the Ultrabook class Surface Book, but it’s much better than the dedicated gaming systems, even those with Optimus. The Clevo gets to feel the downside of having a desktop processor in a notebook in this test.

Heavy Battery Life

Once again, the ThinkPad P70 does pretty respectably on this test. Despite the extra workload the laptop has to deal with, battery life still comes in at just about four hours. This is not an all-day mobile office, but it’s actually a lot better than I expected.

Normalized Battery Life

By removing the battery capacity from the battery life scores, we can see just how efficient each system is. The ThinkPad P70 does fall a couple of places here, meaning the battery life scores are propped up by the 96 Wh battery capacity somewhat, but considering the high-performance nature of the components inside, it’s not too bad.

Charge Time

The other half of the equation is the charge time. In order to feed the large power requirements of the ThinkPad P70 when equipped with the largest GPU available, Lenovo supplies it with a 230-Watt power supply.

At 125 minutes, the ThinkPad P70 scores very well here despite the much larger battery to fill. No one would confuse this laptop with an Ultrabook, but it does actually offer some portability with decent battery life, and a very fast charge time. Mind you, if you’re going to be doing CAD modelling, you’d best keep it plugged in, but for basic office tasks on the go, the ThinkPad P70 delivers a decent experience.