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Hot laptop model runs too hot: ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD too powerful for its own good

Hot laptop model runs too hot: ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD too powerful for its own good (image source: Benjamin Herzig)
Hot laptop model runs too hot: ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD too powerful for its own good (image source: Benjamin Herzig)
The Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD is one of the more popular ThinkPad laptops, as it marries the traditional T series with AMD's Ryzen platform. With the latest generation, Lenovo restores upgradeability and the device also offers a great performance. Unfortunately, it can get pretty toasty.

Balancing performance and efficiency is the key to a great laptop user experience. A laptop manufacturer can keep performance low, which keeps the fan quiet, laptop cool and prolongs the battery life, but may have a negative impact on the user experience by making the system slow. The other extreme would be driving up the performance to the max, which certainly has advantages for many tasks, but also makes a laptop hot, loud and cuts into battery life. Ideally, a balance between the extremes needs to be found, which is made easier when you have efficient components powering your system.

An example for what happens when this balance is not found would be the Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD (available from Amazon), the latest model in a very long line of work-focused business laptops from Lenovo. While the ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 does offer a great performance for a rather compact PC in our comprehensive review, it fails in other regards. The fan gets rather loud under maximum load with 47 dB(a) and even that is not enough to keep the temperatures in line - we measure a maximum of more than 60 degrees Celsius / 140 F. That is kinda toasty, even if it is only in the simulated stress test.

Lenovo has pushed the almost two-year-old Zen 4 architecture of the AMD Ryzen 8040U generation to the max, using a high power limit of 28 W under sustained load. This is too much for such a small system with only a single cooling fan, and the reason for the issues we saw in our review.

Lenovo should have been more conservative in this regard. While a good performance is always appreciated, it is not worth it if it comes at the cost of the overall user experience - a laptop that feels hot while using it is not very nice to use.

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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > News > News Archive > Newsarchive 2024 12 > Hot laptop model runs too hot: ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD too powerful for its own good
Benjamin Herzig, 2024-12-30 (Update: 2024-12-28)