Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 Review: Sleek And Premium

Before running any of our benchmarks, we apply all of the latest Windows and driver updates to whichever notebook or laptop we are testing. Our particular Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 sample shipped with Windows 11 Pro. Other than applying any available Windows updates (like most consumers would), and any updates available through Lenovo's own utility, we ran all of our tests with out-of-the-box settings. Our goal is to test a system as it ships, but after updating, to accurately reflect what buyers can expect from a retail experience.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO disk benchmark is a quick test that measures sequential read/write bandwidth across a range of different data sizes. While we don't typically compare these results across multiple machines, though it's useful to gauge whether a particular notebook's storage subsystem is up to par.

Fortunately the Lenovo X1 Carbon is equipped with a fairly snappy PCIe 4 SSD, which shows in its peak read and write speeds. The drive topped out with ~6GB/s reads, with maximum writes (around the 2MB mark) north of 4.5GB/s.

BrowserBench Speedometer Web Application Benchmark

We use BrowserBench.org's Speedometer test to gauge mixed internet usage experience, which takes a holistic look at web application performance. This test automatically loads and runs several sample web apps from ToDoMVC.com using the most popular web development frameworks around, including React, Angular, Ember.js, and vanilla JavaScript. This test is a better example of how systems cope with real web applications, as opposed to a pure JavaScript compute test like JetStream.

The Speedometer benchmark showed the benefits of the Lenovo machine's Alder Lake-based 12th Gen CPU, which provides exceptional responsiveness in the web-based, bursty workloads that comprise this test.


The 10th Gen Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon performed well here, putting up the best single and multi-threaded scores of the bunch, besting the Ryzen 7 6800U.

Cinebench R23 Rendering Test

This is the latest 3D rendering benchmark from Maxon, based on the Cinema 4D R23 rendering engine. We tested both single-threaded and multi-threaded tests on all of the notebooks represented here...

Cinebench R23 shows the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 holding its own in terms of overall performance, but faltering somewhat. The system comes up short in terms of single and multi-threaded performance versus the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 which has the same CPU and memory configuration.

PCMark 10 Testing

PCMark 10 uses a mix of real-world applications and simulated workloads to establish how well a given system performs productivity tasks, including image and video editing, web browsing, and OpenOffice document editing. While these scores appear to be all over the place, the systems are sorted by their overall PCMark score, which is the third (gray) bar in each cluster.

Even with its PCIe 4 SSD and DDR5 memory, the Lenovo X1 Carbon falls a bit short in performance here. Despite its similar configuration, the Samsung Galaxy Book 2 finished about 10% ahead of the 10th Gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

3DMark Graphics and GPU Tests

3DMark has several different graphics tests which focus on different types of systems. We start with Night Raid, which is 3DMark's targeted benchmark for laptops with integrated graphics. This test presents a solid challenge for the system's CPU and GPU engines using DirectX 12's API. We'll then move on to the even more taxing 3DMark Fire Strike.

The numbers here once again show the Lenovo X1 Carbon trailing other laptops featuring similar CPUs.

Middle Earth: Shadow Of War And Gear Tactics Game Tests

Middle Earth: Shadow of War is a fun and and beautiful title set in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings universe. To test the game's performance relative to other systems, we set the resolution to 1920x1080 and turned the visuals up to the High preset. The frame rates here are the average reported by the built-in benchmark.
In these light duty game tests, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon seems to hold its own in comparison to other laptops in its class. It matches the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro in terms of frames per second in Middle Earth, while beating it out slightly in Gears Tactics. Although this obviously isn't a gaming machine, you should be able to get some casual gaming in on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

Next we will take a look at how well the X1 Carbon handles heat, how quiet it runs under a full load, and offer up our closing thoughts on this slim and sleek business-class machine...