Lenovo ThinkPad P40 Gaming Benchmarks
Gaming is a past time that’s best left to desktops, and laptops, that are more suited to it. Though sometimes a quick jaunt through your favorite title can be a much needed break on the road. The Lenovo ThinkPad P40 does have a dedicated GPU, and it’s certainly theoretically faster than the iGPU included. The problem is that it’s still not meant for gaming, and never was. It’s great at performing the necessary dedicated GPU acceleration that the creators intended for it, but not necessarily for gaming. We’ve got a collection of what we feel are some of the most demanding games and have tested them. These are all at the same settings we would otherwise use for all other systems.
Ashes of the Singularity
Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate
Batman: Arkham Knight
Star Wars Battlefront
DiRT Rally
Fallout 4
Grand Theft Auto V
HITMAN
Rise of the Tomb Raider
You won’t be playing demanding games with this laptop, at least not at high levels of fidelity. But with something more akin to a 4X strategy game, you can enjoy hours of pleasure in your hotel room, or office, or wherever. This wasn’t made as a gaming machine, however, so don’t let the low FPS bother you too terribly much. There’s more utility in here than the ability to play HITMAN at the highest framerates. The Lenovo ThinkPad P40 Yoga is good for light gaming.
Battery Life
Battery life isn’t terribly long, though it’s still enough to last most of a workday on a lighter workload. These battery tests are derived from PCMark 8 so that they can be replicated with ease. We calibrate to 200 nits of brightness as well. The Surface Book has a massive battery inside that allows for insane run times. The ThinkPad P40 has a 53Wh, 3-cell battery that isn’t quite up to the task of keeping things running for a terribly long time. To me it’s more than adequate, however. We really just need new battery technology. Like yesterday. The battery is below average, though still quite good considering the power underneath.
Temperature
To test entire system temperature in a realistic scenario, and to have those temperatures go as high as we could think in a real scenario, we ran Ashes of the Singularity at the test prescribed above and recorded the temperatures during that run. Temperatures in a small space can sometimes be quite concerning, but here we have an efficiently made chassis that can expel heat far away from you. The problem is that it’s capable of putting out some heat when you start running your favorite rendering programs, so having it on your lap while you’re working diligently may not be the best solution. It is not hot enough to make you sterile, though. These temperatures are not worrying in and of themselves.
Noise
What about noise? It’s a great machine that can be near silent and complete it’s tasks. This is not quite that machine you’re looking for. The good news is that it’s still quite silent, the fan a nice whir as opposed to anything outright annoying. It does drone if it’s going for more than about 30 minutes, but otherwise it isn’t loud per-se. It isn’t surprising that a U series i7 of the Skylake generation doesn’t necessarily need as much cooling as before, and here it actually excels quite a bit. It’s quiet enough when under load that you won’t be terribly annoyed. One of the mandatory things in computing is that inevitably there’ll be some kind of noise, whether you like it or not.
Conclusion
So is this collection of carbon fiber, metal and silicon worth it? In the past month I’ve found it to be a very good companion, reliable and able to fulfill every need while on the road. The Lenovo ThinkPad P40 Yoga is actually quite the good computing companion. The battery life leaves something to be desired, as does the choice of storage though it all comes together into one nice useful package that’s easily one of the better road laptops I’ve used. It’s not a computing powerhouse in any sense of the word, except that it’s an incredibly useful little machine that’s worthy of praise. It has it’s limitations, but that’s what you get when you go with something small.
I can’t stop talking about the pen, either. That Wacom ActiveES technology is great. I enjoy having a good pen just to jot down notes more than anything, but find it infinitely useful for interacting and doing stuff. It’s juts fun.
So, with that said we’re giving it our Editor’s Choice award for being one of the greater companions you can find to take with you. It can be configured to do a lot, and though it’s not the fastest, it’s also small and light enough to be there. It’s also durable as all get out, which is a great bonus. There are always trade-offs and limitations when moving to a smaller platform like this. The Lenovo ThinkPad P40 Yoga represents a good compromise and a great way to compute. This does compute.
- Form Factor
- Screen
- Pen
- No M.2 SSD
- Bottom Get's a Little Warm