The Lenovo ThinkPad P70 Review: Mobile Xeon Workstation
by Brett Howse on June 30, 2016 8:00 AM ESTWireless
The ThinkPad P70 features the Intel Dual-Band Wireless AC-8260 wireless card, which has become pretty popular on Skylake equipped laptops.
The new wireless implantation from Intel continues to impress. Only the Dell XPS 15 manages to beat it, and it is a 3x3 implementation, compared to the 2x2:2 offering from the ThinkPad. This is one of the few solutions where I don’t feel like I need to plug it into Ethernet to get any real work done, but of course there is Gigabit Ethernet available on the P70 if you do need it. The previous generation AC-7260 and 7265 would average around 400 Mbps, so Intel has done some great work on the new model to bump it up so significantly.
Thermals and Noise
The ThinkPad P70 is a large, hefty, mobile workstation, and it needs to be able to run without throttling under heavy workloads. To get a true sense of this, we really would have needed the model with the M5000M, since it would have the highest TDP, but we’ll still check out the M4000M model.
With a weight starting at over 7.5 lbs, and a large chassis to work with, the expectation is that heat and noise should not be the issue they are on smaller machines. On the noise front, there is good news. Most of the time when just doing tasks on the desktop, the ThinkPad P70 doesn’t make any noise at all. The noise floor in my office is about 35 dB(A) and the P70 doesn’t even register. Under load, the noise only goes up to 46 dB(A) which is very tolerable. Being a large machine, it has room for larger fans as well which also makes the pitch much lower. Noise on the P70 is not an issue.
A concern with a low noise level workstation might be that thermals are going to be affected. To test the P70 out, it was run with Furmark while GPU-Z was logging the GPU, and the results are below.
The ThinkPad P70 has no issues managing the heat output of the GPU at full load, with no signs of throttling due to power or GPU temperature. The GPU frequency remains locked on during the entire run.
A bigger test would be the M5000M, but judging by the review unit available, the ThinkPad engineers have done enough to have it handle the full GPU load, without having a very loud fan to get rid of the heat.
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rxzlmn - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
That's a really strange outcome with the calibration sensor. Did you review other Lenovo models with a similar sensor before (such as the W540)? Did you contact Lenovo about these results, if yes, did they comment?krumme - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
I flat out dont understand what is happening. Why is there a calibration sensor? - ofcource thats going nowhere and a stock calibration must always be better than what this can do? is it to adapt the display then to surroundings?Secondly. On my thinkpad t460 1080 ips the problem is not so much calibration that seems okey out of the box but far to small a spectrum. Its far to limited. IMO hunting that last accuracy is nonsense. Sold my x-rite a year ago. Most screens today come good enough calibrated, the problem is in spectrum and contrast.
osxandwindows - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
I will install VMware ESXi on this and then run OS X on it.BillyONeal - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
1. That would not be legal.... 2. ESXi doesn't have a console; manageable only remotely. No reason for it to be a laptop at that point.adamto - Friday, July 1, 2016 - link
I did similar and it run very smooth. A free Mac with 32G dual channel memory!http://screencast.com/t/hZCm8YLMF1l9
fanofanand - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
This article appears to contain malware, moatads kept trying to download onto my machine. This isn't the first time either. Ryan please tell me you are not selling your readership out by authorizing tracking software for 3rd parties to be downloaded.bill.rookard - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Hmmm... didn't get anything pulling up for any DbD (drive by downloads) but I am running Ad-Block...extide - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Never had that problem here and I do not block ad's on this site. Perhaps your machine is compromised?skifiddle - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
I've got it too, along with profile.json. Time for the penicillin.wolfemane - Thursday, June 30, 2016 - link
Yeah I can't even view this site anymore on movile. I load an article and a full screen ad comes up. Browser Insta close. If its not full page ads it's the unbearable promoted stories bull crap at the end of the article. Slows the hell out of my browser. Anantech is getting to the point it's unreadable on mobile devices.