At the beginning of this review, we asked whether the development of this laptop was going in the right direction again. The new ThinkPad P14s G5 (Intel) has a lot of potential – the decision not to use the thinnest possible case, the ditching of the optional OLED display in favor of a matte IPS display without PWM, as well as the expandable memory are all advantages of a mobile workstation. But these measures are not enough in our opinion. Although the performance of the components is generally good, you just have to wonder why the manufacturer does not offer a faster RTX 1000 Ada card, for example, given the thick body of the laptop – or why even the optional 3K IPS display still lags behind the competition in terms of brightness. In the end, Lenovo managed to use more powerful components and a brighter mini-LED panel in the Yoga Pro 9 14 – all in a thinner package.
The new IPS display itself, with a 3K resolution and P3 coverage, is a very good panel, but Lenovo should give users access to the sRGB profile – plus, you can’t currently lower the refresh rate to 60Hz, which would improve performance. Battery life is a bit more. RTX 500 announcement The RTX 500 Ada’s graphics performance is much better than that of the older RTX A500 laptop and its Meteor Lake processor doesn’t disappoint either, while the laptop’s cooling reached its limits during stress testing. Given the thick base unit, the maximum cooling capacity of 60W (CPU/GPU combined) isn’t very impressive, especially when compared to the power of powerful 14-inch multimedia laptops. As for the keyboard, the new Fn key placement will certainly take some time to adjust to for ThinkPad veterans, but the quality of the keyboard itself is unchanged. So the keyboard is good, but not exceptional. Again, one wonders why a 1.8mm keyboard wasn't fitted into such a thick base unit.
The Intel version of the ThinkPad P14s G5 offers good maintenance options as well as a new 14.5-inch display. It also performs slightly better than its predecessor, but despite its thicker base, the mobile workstation can only be purchased with Nvidia's entry-level GPU, the RTX 500 Ada.
The ThinkPad P14s offers other advantages such as good maintenance options – including two RAM slots with up to 96GB of RAM. There are enough ports and the 5MP webcam does a good job. In terms of performance, it is significantly superior to its direct competitor, the HP ZBook Firefly 14 G11. However, if you don't rely on ISV certifications, you can achieve much higher performance with current multimedia devices, especially when it comes to graphics cards. The huge difference between the Intel and AMD models is also not good news for consumers.
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