Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon G11 review - The stagnating, expensive business flagship

Lenovo has adopted the unchanged black case from last year's model. The combination of the lid's carbon fibre, and reinforced plastic as well as the base unit's magnesium aluminum alloy ensures an extremely stable case and the build quality is also impeccable. The smooth surfaces also feel great but have to be cleaned regularly as well-used areas start to look somewhat speckled, after a while - something we also experienced with the predecessor. We also compared the new G11 with our private G7 and the new model is a little thinner due to the 16:10 aspect ratio panel but also somewhat deeper. In terms of the base unit's thickness, there are no changes. At a little under 1.2 kg, the X1 Carbon G11 is still generally mobile and doesn't take up a lot of space in hand luggage.

When it comes to the ports, there is still a good selection including Thunderbolt 4, but, once again, an SD card reader is absent. Our review device is equipped with an LTE module including a Nano SIM slot which can even be optionally upgraded to a 5G module. The Wi-Fi module from Intel (AX211) corresponds to current standards and transfer rates in our Wi-Fi test were very good. 

The webcam records images in Full HD resolution and the quality is decent under good lighting conditions. Additionally, functions such as soft focus, a virtual background or eye tracking are already built-in and can be found in the regular Windows camera app. However, it is questionable whether the 1080p camera and microphone's specs should be inscribed on the front of the lid. 

Once again, Lenovo is offering U and P series processors, However, as we discovered last year, the P series CPUs are not worth it due to poor cooling. The RAM is soldered and cannot be expanded. 

For some time now, Lenovo has linked the additional Vantage software power modes to Windows power settings. For this reason, the following benchmarks and measurements were carried out using the Best Performance mode.

The Raptor Lake generation Intel Core i7-1365U offers two fast performance cores at up to 5.2 GHz and eight efficiency cores with a maximum of 3.9 GHz, whereby the chip can process a maximum of 12 threads simultaneously. At the end of the day, we're dealing with the old Core i7-1265U at a slightly higher clock rate. As a U series chip, the nominal TDP sits at 15 watts, but, for a short time, the i7 inside the X1 Carbon can consume up to 55 watts which the cooling can only deal with for around one second. In every scenario, under continuous load, we observed fluctuating power consumption between 12 to 34 watts meaning the new model is only slightly ahead of its G10 predecessor. AMD processors are hard to come by in high-end business laptops and especially when it comes to multi-core performance, the Ryzen CPUs have a clear advantage. For this reason, it's not worth upgrading from last year's model and also because of the Raptor Lake P chip's poor cooling. In battery mode, the CPU performance is reduced slightly (~8 %) and additional CPU benchmarks can be found here.

The system performance is on a very high level and our subjective performance impressions are very good but that is the case for the SSDs found in practically all modern laptops. We experienced no issues during our testing period.

Lenovo equips the ThinkPad X1 Carbon with PCIe 4.0 SSDs - in our case the 1 TB version of the WD SN810. After the first start-up, the user has 902 GB at their disposal. The transfer rates are good but this high level cannot be maintained under constant load. However, that doesn't matter in everyday office use. Other SSD benchmarks are available here.