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This evaluation first appeared in situation 353 of PC Pro.
Regardless of its aggressive worth – the vary begins at £649 inc VAT for a Core i3-1315U/8GB/256GB spec with Windows 11 Residence – the E14 Gen 5 is all the pieces a ThinkPad is anticipated to be. This graphite black laptop has the chrome ThinkPad brand on its aluminum lid, full with the red-lit dotted “i” that offers it a touch of enterprise magnificence.
I examined the model with a polycarbonate/ABS cowl, however you’ll be able to select aluminum. This provides nothing to the worth and solely 20g to the load, and the latter is one in all this laptop computer’s most tasty options: 1.4kg with the 47Wh battery, 1.5kg with the 57Wh choice. Nevertheless, with the larger battery in place, the laptop computer solely survived 7hrs 48mins in our web-surfing check. With this spec, we anticipated one thing over 9 hours.
The facility drain doesn’t come from Lenovo squeezing each final drop out of the equipped Core i7-1355U CPU. Though the E14 Gen 5 by no means missed a beat in my day by day utilization, the benchmarks don’t lie: Lenovo’s personal ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11 scored 8,979 in Geekbench 6.2’s multicore check to the E14’s 8,000. Equally, in our Handbrake check, the E14 took 10mins 57secs to transform our pattern 4K video to 1080p in comparison with 9mins 5secs for the X1.
Each machines have 16GB of RAM and, whereas the X1 has the benefit of LPDDR5 reminiscence, it’s all soldered onto the motherboard. Right here, 8GB is soldered on however there’s an 8GB DIMM that may be changed by a 32GB module. You may also swap out the equipped 512GB SSD, a brief however speedy M.2 2242 unit, or specify a 1TB mannequin for an additional £60 when ordering.
The E14 continues Lenovo’s custom of wonderful keyboards, with snappy, deep-travel, chiclet-style keys, the trademark pink TrackPoint and loads of spacing. I beloved typing on it and managed 91 phrases per minute within the 10FastFingers.com check with 97% accuracy, in comparison with my common of 88wpm with 91% accuracy. A clean and centrally positioned touchpad provides to its sights.
As ever with price range laptops, Lenovo has made a sacrifice with the display. That is no wide-gamut affair, protecting 65% of the sRGB house and 46% of DCI-P3. Nevertheless, it’s sturdy in different areas: peak brightness of 374cd/m2 is definitely 74cd/m2 greater than Lenovo claims, whereas a median Delta E of 0.3 confirms glorious color accuracy. It’s anti-glare, too, so nice for workplace work, whereas a 1,920 x 1,200 decision seems to be sharp over the 14in diagonal.
A webcam perches above the display, and it’s price selecting the 1080p unit in my machine over the 720p choice (at a price of £20). It produced glorious video in good lighting, and even coped in low-light situations. Autofocus and monitoring had been speedy, whereas utilizing Home windows Hey proved a breeze.
The twin mics did a effective job of specializing in my voice whereas maintaining background noise to a minimal, and I used to be equally happy with the audio system.
Music emerged with discernible depth, mid-tones and highs. Take Megan Thee Stallion’s “Her”. The home music bassline hit onerous, with no distortion even on the highest quantity. Regardless of being light-weight and fairly slim – 19mm on the entrance, 22.7mm on the rear – Lenovo features a beneficiant variety of ports. The left facet packs two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a USB-A port, an HDMI out and a combo audio jack. The precise contains a USB-A port, gigabit Ethernet and a nano Kensington lock. The latter provides to a formidable roster of security measures, with a bodily cowl on the webcam, a self-healing BIOS and the choice of a fingerprint reader (£10) constructed into the ability button.
Our worth contains all these choices, together with Home windows 11 Professional, however one of many nice issues about Lenovo’s method is you can customise it. For instance, switching to a Core i5-1335U saves £200. You would possibly choose to spend a few of this to increase the one yr of on-site cowl to 3 years; this has an inventory worth of £210, however Lenovo steadily gives beneficiant reductions.
So whereas battery life disappoints and we’ve got criticisms of the display and its outright pace, the E14 Gen 5 provides as much as a robust selection for businesses on a price range. And even in case you do lower it right down to its most simple specs, it’s going to exude professionalism for years to return.
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