Lenovo ThinkPad W550s Ultrabook Mobile Workstation Review

Name: Lenovo ThinkPad W550s
Brand: Lenovo

by Joshua Gulick — Wednesday, July 15, 2015, 12:05 PM EDT

To measure the Lenovo ThinkPad W550's battery life in a controlled environment with consistent workloads, we turned to Battery Eater Pro. This test is designed to tax a laptop’s resources to give a feel for how long the laptop’s battery will last under heavy use. For the test, we set the laptop's display to 50 percent brightness and enabled WiFi.

Battery Life

Heavy and Light Loads

In our light duty web browsing test, we're refreshing web pages on the ThinkPad W550s with its panel brightness set to 50 percent and WiFi enabled as well. In this case, the CPU's only load is to stream and render a web page every few minutes. GPU, storage subsystem and memory use is limited.

Without a doubt, the Lenovo ThinkPad W550s has killer battery life, thanks to the extended battery pack. You pay for it with added weight and a slightly bulkier notebook than you’d get if you opted for the machine's standard battery. However, given the freedom the extended battery provides, it’s hard to see how you wouldn’t opt for it while configuring your system. In fact, this machine puts a hurtin' on the likes of the Dell Precision M3800 when it comes to battery life.

Tags: Nvidia, Intel, core i7, Lenovo, ThinkPad, Quadro

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.