When we reviewed it in 2019, the performance of the Lenovo ThinkPad P52 was so impressive for the mobile workstation — at least until the MSI WS75 toppled it because the system’s Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 is the first example where we’ve seen the GPU manufacturer’s brilliant “Turing” professional graphics.
What did Lenovo do to make its 15.6-inch workstation better ? It just went ahead and jammed in an even more power hungry Quadro RTX 5000 into the ThinkPad P53 , which starts at $1,259 , and yes $5,000-ish is the number you’ll see in this test. The P53 is kinda pricey , but the results are strong enough, like really strong , to take back the crown in this category.
Configuration feels overkill
The $1,259 base setup barely squeaks into “mobile workstation” territory , with an Intel Core i5 CPU , Quadro T1000 graphics, 8GB memory , a 256GB SSD , and a 300-nit, 1,920-by-1,080 pixel display. Meanwhile , my test unit goes well beyond that with a six-core 2.8GHz (4.7GHz turbo) Xeon E-2276M processor, 16GB of Quadro RTX 5000, 64GB of system RAM , and a 1TB NVMe SSD. The IPS screen keeps the base model’s 1080p resolution but turns up the brightness to 500 nits, plus it adds Dolby Vision HDR support.
Memory is low as 128GB standard or for Xeon models, ECC DRAM. Memory can be expanded to 6TB, and the top display choice is a 4K (3,840 x 2,160) touch panel with OLED technology for more even blacks and more vibrant colors. Thread-addict can opt for the eight-core Core i9-9880H instead of the Xeon.
Without the “lightweight” of 5.5 pounds, the P53 ends up around 1.2 x 14.9 x 9.9 inches. It kind of sounds smaller than the HP ZBook 15 G5’s 5.8 pounds, and it lists 1 x 14.8 x 10.4 inches, but honestly it feels pretty enormous when you compare it with something like the 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro, which sits at 4 pounds, and measures 0.6 x 13.8 x 9.5 inches. Lenovo has passed dozens of MIL-STD tests for durability , so there’s nearly no bending if you press the keyboard a little or hold the corners of the display with thick bezels.
Want more ports? You have them. On the left side of the laptop are two USB 3.1 Type-A ports (one for device charging), an HDMI port, and SD and SmartCard slots. A USB 3.1 Type-C port, an audio jack, and a SIM tray for optional mobile broadband are right.
Hello, Hello
There are two ways to bypass password entry with Windows Hello — the fingerprint reader and the facial recognition webcam. The 720p camera, equipped with a ThinkShutter panel that slides to block Peeping Toms online, is a disappointment, capturing dark, blurry images even in my fairly bright office.
Sound from the P53’s speakers is above average except for the lack of bass, instruments, and clear voice. Increase the volume, and the sound fills the room without buzzing or distortion. Dolby Atmos software provides dynamic, music, movie, game and voice settings, and an equalizer.
The Fn and Ctrl keys are in each other’s positions in the bottom left corner — a supplied Lenovo Vantage utility lets you swap them out if you can’t find out where they are again — but otherwise can’t. Found a bug with the backlit keyboard. Equipped with a numeric keypad and dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, it has the typical typing feel of previous ThinkPad keyboards.
Like other ThinkPads, the P53 has two pointing devices — the nubbin TrackPoint at the intersection of the G, H, and B keys and a trackpad that slides smoothly in the palm rest. Each button has a set of soft, silent buttons above and below the touchpad, respectively, including the center button loved by independent software vendor (ISV) applications for which the workstation is certified.
I’m very disappointed that Lenovo didn’t send out a 4K OLED display (though that would make the price even higher), but my test model’s 1080p non-touchscreen was one of the best. A better picture I’ve seen. Has great brightness and contrast. Vivid colors and sharp details.
Matte black lightning
For our performance benchmarks, I compared the ThinkPad P53 with another 15.6-inch mobile workstation — the Dell Precision 5530 — and three 17.3-inch entries rank among the fastest we’ve seen. I tested HP ZBook 17 G5 and Lenovo ThinkPad P72 as well as the MSI WS75.
Except for a slower-than-expected result in a ray-tracing test, the P53 burned through our benchmarks with ferocious heat. You shouldn’t expect long battery life, but you can count on crushing tough design or scientific work, though the Core i9 might be a better choice than my Xeon for tackling the effects of CPU-intensive service.
Lenovo ThinkPad P53 Workstation Laptop (Intel i7-9750H 6-Core, 32GB RAM, 1TB SATA SSD, Quadro T1000, 15.6″ Full HD (1920×1080), Fingerprint, Bluetooth, Webcam, 2xUSB 3.1, 1xHDMI, SD Card, Win 10 Pro): Buy it now
Lenovo ThinkPad P53 Mobile Workstation 20QN001VUS – Intel Six Core i7-9850H, 16GB RAM, 512GB PCIe Nvme SSD, 15.6″ HDR 400 FHD IPS 500Nits Display, NVIDIA Quadro T2000 4GB Graphics, Windows 10 Pro: Buy it now
Test productivity, storage, and media
PCMark 10 and 8 are like overall performance suites created by the PC standards specialists at UL (they used to be Futuremark). The PCMark 10 run we do is basically meant to mirror a mix of real world productivity plus content creation flows. We rely on it so we can gauge the system s total performance, especially for office centered work like word processing, spreadsheets, Web browsing, and video conferencing. The test generates an exclusive score; a higher number is better.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to gauge the speed of the system’s storage subsystem. The result is also an exclusive score; Again, higher numbers are better.
We consider 4,000 points a great PCMark 10 score, so the 15.6-inch ThinkPad’s 6,359 win represents horrendous throughput for Microsoft Office or Google Docs. All five workstation SSDs passed the PCMark 8 storage test.
Next is the test of Cinebench R15, which handles Maxon’s CPU, fully threaded to take advantage of all available cores and threads. Cinebench emphasizes CPU rather than GPU to render a complex image. The result is an exclusive score that shows the PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Six-core Xeons easily break through the 1,000-point high barrier, so video editing or 3D rendering — even creating complex virtual reality (VR) worlds, in the case of the P53 — isn’t worth it fear for them. MSI’s eight-core Core i9 is more powerful.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing standard. Using a version of Photoshop Creative Cloud released in early 2018, we apply a complex series of 10 filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. Finally, we time each activity and add up the total time taken (the lower the time, the better). The Photoshop test emphasizes the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM. Still, it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards can strongly see an increase.
All five systems passed the event, but the P53 and WS75 won. They won’t keep you waiting for the edits.
Graphics test
3DMark measures relative graphics engine by rendering sequences of highly detailed gaming style 3D graphics with an emphasis on particles and light. We ran two separate 3DMark subtests Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are, suitable for different kinds of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks , but Sky Diver works better for mid-range laptops and PCs , while Fire Strike is also more demanding and is made for high-end PCs, to improve their overall quality. The result is an exclusive score.
Two Quadro RTX workstations launched during the event, optimized for gaming GPUs like Nvidia’s GeForce instead of the Quadro series. They’re not designed to play games, but they do fairly well.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and scans a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. This case shows in the company’s Unigine engine of the same name, which offers a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine’s graphics power. We present two Superposition results, running at the Low 720p and High 1080p presets.
These scores show up in frames per second (fps), basically the pace where the graphics hardware pushes out frames back to back, so it kind of tells you how smooth that moving scene feels in real life. Try to stay around 30 fps or higher, that’s a pretty realistic goal for lower end systems, and for stronger computers you should expect at least 60 fps at the test resolution, or pretty close to that.
Same story here, although it’s worth noting that the Quadro RTX 5000 doesn’t significantly outperform the RTX 4000.
Tasks for workstations
We also run several specialized benchmarks designed to simulate the challenges posed by common workstation tasks. Cinebench’s OpenGL benchmark is one of them, which presents an animated scene measured in frames per second. Another is POV-Ray 3.7, which puts systems through an off-screen rendering exercise that, over time, emphasizes multiple CPU threads and GPU compute units to the maximum (the lower the time, the better good).
Likely fueled by its two additional processing cores, MSI ran ahead of the P53 in both events — specifically, as I mentioned earlier, the POV-Ray ray tracing exercise, where the set The RTX 5000 graphics adapter again has no advantage over the RTX 4000.
Finally, there’s SPECviewperf 13, which renders and rotates 3D and wireframe models based on popular ISV application viewports; it was the most realistic and challenging workstation test we ran.
Beating the Creo and Maya records held by its 17.3-inch sibling. Mobile workstation shoppers look for maximum performance, much more than a low initial price, and Lenovo isn’t a divine dread.
Check the battery
Once the laptop was fully charged we just set it up in power-saving mode (not the balanced or high-performance one if that’s an option). Then we did a few other battery-saving tweaks, to kind of standardize everything for our unplugged summary test. (We also turned off Wi-Fi, putting the laptop on airplane mode.) In this test, we looped through a video — a locally stored 720p file of the Foundation Blender’s Tears of Steel short film — with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system is running.
The Precision 5530 was the only machine that made a difference in this event. Mobile workstations are rarely found on airline tray tables or anywhere except maybe a short walk from a desk or rendering station to a conference room, so mediocre results of the other four candidates are not a major drawback.
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Tech Reviewer & Product Analyst
Định Bia has spent over 10 years testing consumer electronics with a focus on smart technology. He work as a product advisor at Biareview where he helped customers find the right devices for their needs. He personally tests every product featured on this site using a consistent evaluation framework covering quality, durability, and value. All reviews are based on experience, not influenced by the manufacturer.