Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 shows off the potential of Intel Tiger Lake-H35 CPUs

When Intel released the Tiger Lake chips in the fall of 2020, the classical U series was scrapped for a reason. The new processors do not have a fixed 15-watt TDP. Instead, Intel provided UP3 series chips with a TDP range of 12 to 28 watts.

However, this does not mean that manufacturers cannot set an even higher TDP. Lenovo’s ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 is a good example of that. We found in our extensive review of the E14 Gen 2 that Lenovo set the TDP to 35 watts.

The ThinkPad E14 cannot maintain this TDP over a prolonged period of time, though. Nevertheless, the sustained TDP of 29 watts is still very high, and it shows. Even though the Intel Core i7-1165G7 has only four cores, it is able to comfortably beat the hexa-core AMD Ryzen 5 4500U in the identically built ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 (AMD) in the multi-core benchmarks. The Ryzen 7 4700U is still more capable, but only in thread-bound workloads.

The Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 can serve as a preview of the level of performance that Tiger Lake-H35 CPUs can provide—with a higher power draw Intel is able to squeeze more performance out of four Golden Cove cores than older Core CPUs.