Lenovo ThinkPad T14 with Intel CPU runs very hot in the test

That Intel has problems is truly no longer a secret. The current Comet Lake and Ice Lake Intel CPUs are no longer on par with the AMD Ryzen 4000 chips. Comet Lake in particular hardly provides any arguments for an upgrade compared to older Intel chips.

A nice example for this is our review of the Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 1. Lenovo is using Comet Lake processors in all its ThinkPad laptops with Intel CPUs this year, since the 10 nm Ice Lake chips from Intel were only developed for the consumer market. The Comet Lake CPUs are still manufactured in the outdated 14 nm process and are based on the same architecture as last year's Whiskey Lake chips; consequently, they are just a small update. Although Comet Lake offers optional hexa-core CPUs, these are hardly only available in very small quantities. Basically, little will change for Intel CPUs this year.

This was already the case with the 2019 CPUs, but Lenovo renewed the design of many models last year. This year, the design remains the same, and only the name changes. All in all, there isn't much new in the ThinkPad T14.

The problem with this model: In comparison to its predecessor, the ThinkPad T490, the T14 runs much warmer. At over 65°C (~149 °F) on the bottom, you should avoid prolonged skin contact with the laptop under load. As this is the model with an integrated GPU, this result gives a bad idea of what the ThinkPad laptop with an Nvidia graphics chip could be like.

Overall, we would rather advise against the ThinkPad T14 with Intel CPUs. It's still a very good business laptop, but the upcoming AMD model seems much more attractive to us. We will naturally review it as soon as possible too.