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Backward roll! Lenovo"s 15-inch workstation was just slightly changed and is now called W541. Besides some small technical developments you also get changed input devices. Lenovo, however, missed the chance to improve other weaknesses. We had a closer look at the result.

Lenovo"s mobile workstation from the W-series got a completely new design in the last model year and there were some changes compared to the predecessor ThinkPad W530. It is no secret anymore that not every change was really user-friendly. Chassis quality, ClickPad, issues with the build quality and the limited upgradeability affected the good reputation of the desired series. Lenovo now tries to fix some of these issues with the new ThinkPad W541.

The ThinkPad W541 basically uses the same chassis, which means Lenovo did not improve the weaknesses of the ThinkPad W540 in the area of the palm rest, above the ExpressCard slot and at the lower display frame. Quite the contrary: We only have to rest our hands on the palm rest to provoke an audible contact between the outer shell and the internal components. It appears that stabilizing elements are just missing, so we do not get the stiffness that we expect from a ThinkPad.

The only obvious change is the touchpad. While the size of the indentation in the palm rest is similar, Lenovo cut off the upper part of the ClickPad and replaced it with three dedicated TrackPoint buttons. The touch sensitive surface is now smaller with around 100 x 56 millimeters.

We can see the reason for the comparatively low chassis stability when we look at the weight. It seems that the goal was a weight reduction: The Lenovo ThinkPad W541 weighs 2,600 grams (with 99-Wh battery), which is very light for a conventional mobile 15-inch workstation. Toshiba"s Tecra W50 weighs 2,710 grams and the very sturdy HP ZBook 15 G2 weighs at least 3 kilograms.

Lenovo faced a lot of criticism for the integration of the so called 5-Button ClickPad and the manufacturer now revises its decision for the ThinkPad W541 and many other ThinkPad models, at least to a certain extent. Users now once again get separate TrackPoint buttons, which will be good news for fans of the TrackPoint since the handling can now almost keep up with old models and you get a much better feedback from the buttons. It seems that the touchpad itself was reworked as well: The integrated touchpad buttons at the front of the ClickPad now also react in the peripheral areas and therefore provide a much better feedback compared to the previous generation. The touchpad also provides good gliding capabilities and executes inputs reliably.

Lenovo still offers the ThinkPad W541 with a Full HD TN display (1920x1080) or a 3K IPS display (2880x1620). Our review unit uses the same 3K IPS panel that we already evaluated in our review of the Lenovo ThinkPad W540. We also suspect that the Full HD panel will be similar to the previously tested model.

Lenovo still offers a large portfolio of processors you can choose from. The spec sheet lists seven different models, starting with the Intel Core i5-4210M all the way up to an Intel Core i7-4940MX. They can be combined with the Nvidia Quadro K1100M or the Nvidia Quadro K2100M as well as numerous storage solutions. Configurations with a quad-core processor support up to 32 GB memory. A detailed list of all the options is available in Lenovo’s PSREF sheet (Product Specifications Reference).

The performance of the Intel Core i7-4910MQ could not convince us in the review of the HP ZBook 15 G2. We were pretty disappointed with a performance advantage of just 2 up to 10% compared to the Intel Core i7-4710MQ quad-core processor. This comparatively low performance is generally no problem for the ThinkPad W541 and we can see much better results in all CPU benchmarks. Cinebench R10, for example, determines 5,576 points (single-core) or 22,085 points (multi-core) for our review system; Cinebench R11.5 64-bit determines 1.72 points (single-core) and 7.99 points (multi-core). The result is an advantage between 10 up to 20% over the Intel Core i7-4710MQ, so it is worth considering.

Lenovo equips the review unit with a Solid State Drive and a generous capacity of 512 GB (gross). Users can use around 411 GB after the initial setup. Bloatware is no problem for this ThinkPad and you can only find the usual Think Tools. The performance results of the Solid State Drive are good with up to 523 MB/s for read operations and 440 MB/s for write operations. The low access times and the silent operation are other advantages.

We already reviewed the Nvidia Quadro K2100M a couple of times in our tests of mobile workstations. The performance in our internal ranking is pretty much in the middle and according to the manufacturer it is the most powerful solution for a 15-inch notebook. Compared to the AMD FirePro M5100 it cannot really convince us, both in respect of the performance as well as the price. However, the alternative from AMD is still not available for the Lenovo ThinkPad W541, which means you will have to choose a Dell Precision M4800 or HP ZBook 15 G2 if you prefer this GPU.

The Lenovo ThinkPad is basically silent with light workloads and therefore hardly audible at all, the only thing you can hear from time to time is a restrained electronic humming. Medium load results in a noise of 37.2 dB(A) up to 40.5 dB(A) from the fan, which is increased to a maximum value of 42 dB(A) under maximum load. High-pitched sounds or a pulsating fan were no problem during our review.

The temperature development of the Lenovo ThinkPad W541 shows that the cooling concept is already working at its limit in this configuration with an Intel Core i7-4910MQ (TDP of 47 Watts). We were able to measure up to 57.5 °C at the bottom around the fan exhaust after one hour of sustained maximum load. This is much more than we measured last year for the two ThinkPad W540 laptops with 44 °C and 48 °C, respectively. This raises the question of how the Intel Core i7-4940MX behaves in combination with the cooling solution, since this processor does have a Thermal Design Power that is even 10 Watts higher (57 Watts).

As usual, Lenovo does a good job with the power consumption. The minimum consumption of 11.3 Watts is very low, and the value is even reduced to 7.9 Watts when you turn off the display. We were able to measure a peak value of 121.9 Watts for a very short time, which was reduced to 74.5 Watts after around 5 minutes due to the performance throttling. Similar to the fluctuations of the CPU clock, the power consumption fluctuates between 121.9 Watts and 74.5 Watts under sustained load as well. The power adaptor is specified with a nominal output of 170 Watts, which means it has sufficient headroom.

Lenovo announced a strong candidate for the highly competitive workstation segment with the W-series. A very good keyboard, a convenient display, the solid performance with low noise emissions and the convincing price-performance ratio are actually very interesting. The low weight, the large battery and the resulting long runtimes convince on the road. Another positive effect: We cannot find any build quality issues in the keyboard area anymore, and the return of the TrackPoint buttons shows that Lenovo listens to the users.

A nice unique feature is the integrated X-Rite colorimeter. It enables a simple and pretty good calibration of the panel without additional hardware. Besides the better color accuracy it also improves the mobility and the motivation to calibrate the display regularly.

The heavily limited performance on battery power does at least have a positive effect on the battery runtimes and shows Lenovo"s focus on good mobility. Overall, the Lenovo ThinkPad W541 leaves mixed impressions. If you can live with the mentioned drawbacks or partly compensate for them with an alternative configuration, then you get some appreciated unique features for a fair price.

A little while back, I wrote about how Lenovo were sending me some things as part of their Insiders program which meant getting to use a number of machines I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about otherwise. The Yoga 900 in that blog post, for example, is not something I would have normally considered for myself as I like a physically larger, gruntier machine yet it’s turned out to be one of the best laptops I’ve ever owned. You’d normally find me with a machine like a W540 which is the last machine I bought myself about 18 months back and it’s been sensational… until this arrived: There we go - my new new workhorse - a P50! pic.twitter.com/oCzuQELpYE— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) February 26, 2016

In total honesty, had it been my own dollars I wouldn’t have gone out and bought the P50 because the W540 is still such a good machine. I want to be transparent about that because the last thing I want is a perception of my views being skewed by virtue of getting free stuff from Lenovo.

In terms of why they feel compelled to send me things, well, it’s because of stuff like this: I just got a Lenovo P50 because @troyhunt made it sound sooooo cool— MomMeetCoffee (@mommeetcoffee) March 18, 2016

Other than the very slight dip on 2D graphics, the P50 is quicker across the board but it’s the disk that really smashes it. When Lenovo shipped the machine to me, it came with a 256GB NVMe SSD which isn’t quite big enough for a primary drive these days. I went and bought a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro NVMe which appears to be widely accepted as about the faster drive you can get and oh boy – look at the rating on that sucker! That’s compared to the Crucial SSD in the old W540, but I saw similar improvements comparing it against other machines I’d had with older SSDs. (Incidentally, you’re reading this whilst struggling to get a Lenovo P50 or P70 booting from this drive, read this.)

In terms of the other specs, you can read the whole machine configuration in this system overview from PerformanceTest. Lenovo sent it to me with 16GB of DDR4 ECC RAM which I probably would have specced at 32 had I the choice (I’ve already run short whilst running a VM). The machine will actually go up to 64 which is pretty nuts for a laptop but if you’re doing anything memory intensive then that would be neat. I’ll likely just order some more  shortly.

The Lenovo was faster in every area, even with the disk which is an identical drive in each so I can only assume it’s related to bus architecture on the machine or something else specific to the P50’s design. That said, do be conscious that all of these benchmarks can fluctuate between runs, particularly depending on what’s running on the machine at the time and which drivers are installed.

One such example is higher DPI devices and my love of lots more pixels in ever smaller spaces started with the iPhone 4. It was so… dense! So of course I later on had to have the iPad with lots of pixels and they are indeed beautiful devices. More recently, that’s extended to PCs and the Lenovo W540 I purchased about 18 months ago. Lovely machine, heaps of grunt and it’ll happily do 2,880x1620. More recently, I received a Yoga 900 at 3200x1800 and that’s in a smaller screen that the W540 too so it’s dense pixels FTW.

Malware – no, I haven’t found any! I say this simply as I pretty much have a new metric when I tweet anything Lenovo related these days which is TTFS, otherwise known as Time To First Superfish. Lenovo screwed up badly on this front last year and they know it. I usually repave the machine from scratch anyway so anything on the disk is clean (plus it’s a new disk too), so short of funky firmware or BIOS software (and yes, I’m aware of the history there too), it’s all good.

List Price is Lenovo’s estimate of product value based on the industry data, including the prices at which first and third-party retailers and etailers have offered or valued the same or comparable products. Third-party reseller data may not be based on actual sales.

Estimated value is Lenovo’s estimate of product value based on industry data, including the prices at which Lenovo and/or third-party retailers and e-tailers have offered or valued the same or comparable products. Third-party data may not be based on actual sales.

Lenovo and Best Buy have partnered to allow you to pick up Lenovo products at your local Best Buy. Choose a location near you and get it as soon as today!

Lenovo and Best Buy have partnered to allow you to pick up Lenovo products at your local Best Buy. Choose a location near you and get it as soon as today!

We last looked at a mobile computer from Lenovo nearly two years ago, when we did a First Look review of the ThinkPad W530. That system was well received and earned a Highly Recommended rating. Lenovo sent an updated version of that model for this roundup.

Lenovo configured our review system with an Intel Core i7-4800MQ processor (6-MB cache) that has four cores and eight threads (virtual processors) running at a clock rate of 2.7–3.7 GHz. Two of its four 204-pin SODIMM sockets for system memory are filled with 8-GB 1,600-MHz DIMMs (16 GB total). The system supports a maximum of 32 GB of memory. There is a single 256-GB solid-state drive (SATA3) for file storage. An 8X DVD+/-RW DVD optical drive fills the only other drive bay on the ThinkPad W540.

For the graphics subsystem, Lenovo chose the NVIDIA Quadro K2100M mobile graphics card (2-GB GDDR5). This midrange adapter — the top graphics choice available for the W540 — supports as many as four displays and a maximum resolution of 3,840 x 2,160.

To gauge system performance, we used a combination of the Cadalyst c2015 benchmark running AutoCAD 2015, and SPECviewperf 11. Per our standards, we enabled hardware acceleration for AutoCAD, turned off the graphics card"s vertical sync, and set the screen resolution to 1,280 x 1,024 (32-bit color). Lenovo opted for Microsoft"s Windows 7 Professional 64-bit operating system for this review.

The Lenovo ThinkPad W540"s Cadalyst c2015 benchmark scores were as follows: total index = 517, 3D graphics index = 1,123, 2D graphics index = 400, disk index = 292, and CPU index = 253. The test results for the SPECviewperf 11 suite of tests, single sample mode only, were as follows: 49.59 for catia-03, 25.24 for ensight-04, 72.31 for lightwave-01, 59.70 for maya-03, 21.37 for proe-05, 52.55 for sw-02, 42.27 for tcvis-02, and 34.05 for snx-01. This makes the average SPECviewperf score 45, giving the ThinkPad W540 a combined score of 562 — earning a B+ for CAD performance.

The last thing we checked was battery performance while running the 1,000-loop option of our c2015 benchmark. The ThinkPad W540 was armed with Lenovo"s premium battery option, a 9-cell smart lithium-ion battery. This battery is rated at 100WH — the highest for this review — and it scored top honors for this last test, averaging 200 minutes per battery charge.

The Lenovo ThinkPad W540 mobile workstation, as configured for this review, costs $2,215 through cdw.com (including ground shipping). That"s the lowest price for the systems reviewed here; in fact, it"s more than $200 cheaper than the next closest competitor. That price includes Lenovo"s three-year limited warranty. Returns are not allowed. The ThinkPad W540 offers good price-to-performance value. It"s sturdy, but lightweight, and delivers a gorgeous color-corrected display. If you"re on a tight budget, this may be the choice for you.