Lenovo ThinkPad P70 Mobile Workstation Review: Xeon And Quadro On The Go
Battery Life and Noise
Battery Life - How We Test:
In the following benchmarks we employ two very different battery life tests: Battery Eater Pro and a custom 1080p HD video loop test, to prove out battery life with our test group of machines and the Lenovo ThinkPad P70. In all tests, Windows 10 Quiet Hours have been enabled and displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to 115 lux. For the average notebook this is somewhere between a 45 - 60% brightness setting. Since notebook displays significantly affect power consumption and battery life, it's important to ensure a level playing field with respect to brightness of the display for battery testing. However, since many notebook displays vary in brightness at each respective brightness setting in Windows, this calibration with the meter is also critical to ensure all displays are set to as near identical brightness as possible before testing.
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Battery Eater Pro wears systems down quickly with a heavy load on all subsystems, including processor, graphics, memory and even storage. This is truly a worst-case test that will give you a sense of how a machine will hold up under heavy strain, when gaming or under heavy-duty continuous content creation workloads, for example.
Our custom HotHardware video loop test takes a 1080p HD video with a 16Kbps bit rate and loops it repeatedly, with 1 minute break intervals in between. A timer log file increments minutes of uptime every minute and a final minutes total recorded before system shutdown is stored in the log. This is a lighter duty test that is still a bit more strenuous than say many office productivity tasks but it's not nearly the strain that Battery Eater puts on a system.
In case you need any proof that 17.3-inch DTR laptops aren't known for being battery friendly, just take a look at measly 90 minutes of run time in Battery Eater Pro. You can forget about all-day battery life when doing intensive tasks, and since the built-in battery isn't removable, you'll want to make sure you're near a power outlet when doing any kind of extended work on the ThinkPad P70.
We saw better results in our home brewed video loop test. While playing back video, the ThinkPad P70 stayed awake for nearly 300 minutes, or just under five hours. Not bad actually, considering its 4K display.
ThinkPad P70 Acoustics
Throughout our benchmarks and testing, the ThinkPad P70 never got loud. There are vents on both sides of the laptop and around back, and if you put your hand in front of one of them, you can feel hot air being expelled during CPU and/or GPU intensive workloads. However, the fans are whisper quiet.
