The Lenovo ThinkPad P70 Review: Mobile Xeon Workstation

Final Words

The ThinkPad P70 is certainly not for everyone. With a starting price close to $1900, and add-ons driving the price into the stratosphere, mobile workstations are for those that need powerful systems that can be moved around. You’ll get more bang for the buck with a desktop workstation, but obviously you give up all of the portability. So let’s start with portability.

The ThinkPad P70 isn’t small, and it’s not light, but with the 96 Wh battery capacity, it actually provides pretty decent battery life and office workloads. If you need to leverage the GPU, there’s pretty much no option but to plug it in, but that’s not much of a surprise.

Lenovo offers a full complement of options, starting with the baseline model with the Core i7-6700HQ, and all the way up to the Xeon E3-1575M. Memory options go up to 64 GB of ECC DDR4, and of course you can add your own memory. For those that don’t need much GPU compute, the lowest priced model has the Quadro M600M, and you can go all the way up the steps to the M5000M, giving you just as much GPU as you need. There are plenty of storage options, and it’s fantastic to see Lenovo utilize the SM951 SSD, with 512 GB of MLC NAND available. Too often manufacturers go with the less performant PM951 to check the NVMe feature box, but on a high end workstation, customers should expect higher end components, and Lenovo has delivered.

The design and fit and finish is typical ThinkPad, and that includes the excellent keyboard. The keyboard is certainly a strong point on this notebook, and it also includes the TrackPoint which many (myself included) prefer over trackpads. For those that like the trackpad, the P70 offers a nice smooth surface there too.

The performance is certainly strong, and there’s plenty of cooling available to ensure that everything keeps running at peak performance, but without excessive fan noise. Larger laptops generally have a big advantage with cooling, and the P70 continues that trend.

The 3840x2160 display is excellent, offering sharp images, and very good color accuracy out of the box. It’s great to see these panels finally make their way to the larger notebooks. What also seems like a great idea on paper is the X-Rite Pantone color sensor and software included with the unit, however as seen in the testing, it degrades the experience. It didn’t fix the grayscale, and actually made it worse, and it did nothing for the warm shift on the panel. There’s little excuse for this since I’m sure Lenovo’s engineers have tested it, but in the end it’s a great idea poorly executed. Adding these to professional laptops would give a quick way to calibrate the display at any time, and while it would never be able to replace proper calibration equipment, there’s no reason this can’t be done right.

Certainly there will be those that detract from the P70 due to the price, but that’s to be expected. It’s easy to say that the businesses that need these devices are willing to pay the premium, but it really is the case. The Lenovo ThinkPad P70 performed well in all of our testing, and the Quadro graphics makes such a huge difference in professional workloads, easily outperforming a GTX 980M, despite being down 256 CUDA cores compared to the gaming card. When time costs money, mobile workstations come into their own.