Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 review: plenty of power and ports

16 inch X1 Extreme is a fan of ThinkPad MacBook Pro— Big and powerful photo and video editing machine creators desire. It’s not cheap, but as they say, you get what you pay for. As far as X1 Extreme is concerned, you can get value for money.

The biggest change in the fourth edition of this Lenovo notebook is a new 16-inch display with a 16:10 aspect ratio. The previous model had a 16:9 ratio. This may seem small, but in fact, the extra height in the screen space is very good; the perfect aspect ratio for a laptop. Lenovo now also offers a version with a 4K screen resolution, which makes it easier to compare this machine with one of our favorites. Dell XPS 15.

ThinkPad advantages

If you like ThinkPad, it is not comparable to Dell. All the iconic ThinkPad elements are here. The low-key matte black design is only interrupted by the small red X1 label on the lid and the small red block between the G, H, and B keys. The ThinkPad keyboard is not what it used to be-it doesn’t work anymore X220——But still very good. It has 1.8 mm keys, which are as heavy as you can find now.

However, if you are not a fan of ThinkPad, then you might like the fact that Dell offers an OLED display option for the XPS 15. It just makes the screen look better, unfortunately Lenovo cannot provide it here. But the three IPS screens Lenovo owns (one of which is 4K) is close in quality.

There are definitely more ports on laptops than Dell: there are dual Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, and HDMI 2.1 (which can drive 120Hz external monitor), audio jack and AC power port on the left. There are two USB Type-A ports and a full-size SD card slot on the right.

Every photographer says that every laptop should have a full-size SD card slot.I don’t remember the last laptop I tested with a full-size SD card slot, so thank you Lenovo for keeping it alive (and Apple too, Although this is part of the reason why we are in trouble).

RTX power supply

The lack of an OLED panel is disappointing, but the screen I used (2,560 x 1,600 resolution) is great. Color gamut support is good, sRGB coverage is 100%, and DCI-P3 color gamut coverage is 83.5%. The latter is only 0.5% lower than the OLED of the Dell XPS 15. The panel becomes very bright at 400 nits.