Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Ultrabook Review


Battery Life Testing

If you're shopping an Ultrabook, you're likely less concerned with gaming performance and more interested in what kind of battery life you can squeeze out of these featherweight systems. This is perhaps one of the most important metrics for many of you.  What we have below is an example of a worst case scenario and close to the best case performance under light duty web browsing workloads.

Battery Life Test
Heavy and Light Workloads


With the brightness set at 50 percent, we fired up BatteryEater Pro and let this brutal benchmark do its thing.  With the dual-core Intel processor working up a sweat, along with system memory and disk access, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon couldn't quite squeeze out 2 hours of untethered performance.  Remember, the carbon also has a slightly larger display than most 13 and 12-inch Ultrabooks out there.  Conversely, turn down the workload and kick back with a little bit of easy-going web browsing and things improved dramatically.  The ThinkPad X1 Carbon managed just under 6 hours (5.9 to be exact) of active use on a full charge, which is pretty darn solid considering Lenovo claims 6.3 hours max.

A Note on System Acoustics -

We'd like to highlight the fact that the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is one of the quietest ultralight machines we've ever tested.  Though this Ultrabook is just a mere .71 inches thick at its thickest point, .31 inches thin at its thinnest dimension and just 3lbs, we never experienced the all too common audible whine that is exhibited in this type of machine.  Lenovo figured out a way to keep the ThinkPad X1 Carbon not only cool but also calm and quiet under pressure.  Once again, high marks scored with Lenovo's first ThinkPad they've labled an Ultrabook.


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