Cooling system of the Lenovo ThinkPad E15 is overtaxed with AMD Radeon RX 640
Shortly after receiving the Lenovo ThinkPad E15, we discovered that the affordable Lenovo E15 has a massive problem with heat management. Nearly 70 degrees Celsius at the bottom is a result that we do not want to see, ever. Even though this result comes from an extreme scenario, it is still unsettling. In the less demanding Witcher 3 test, the chassis was not a lot cooler.
In our comprehensive review, we revealed that the high temperatures are are not the only issue of the cooling system. The performance suffers as well, since Lenovo seemingly uses a much too weak cooling system. The combination of the Intel Comet Lake CPU and the AMD Radeon GPU is simply too much for the single fan with its solitary heat-pipe.
This problem already revealed itself in the gaming benchmarks, as the AMD Radeon RX 640 suffers from spontaneous performance drops. When both the CPU and GPU are stressed, both chips have to lower their clock rates, the CPU even to 400 MHz. Immediately after the stress test, the CPU is not running as fast as it normally does.
All of this lets us surmise that we can not recommend the Lenovo ThinkPad E15, at least not when it is configured with an AMD GPU. Without the dedicated GPU, it could be an interesting choice. Another review of this ThinkPad laptop could certainly be of interest, as the difference between the AMD and Intel GPU versions might be huge.
