Lenovo's ThinkPad P53 offers incredible GPU horsepower

The Lenovo ThinkPad P53 is a traditional 15.6-inch mobile workstation with a lot of ports, powerful hardware and - compared to many slim & light devices - a fairly chunky chassis. While the chassis looks largely identical to last year's ThinkPad P52, a few things have changed under the hood.

Particularly in the graphics department, a lot has changed and with the Quadro RTX 4000 & RTX 5000, Lenovo now offers significantly faster chips than previously. This level of performance is usually reserved for larger 17-inch workstations. However, as our extensive review has shown, Lenovo uses the weakest version of the RTX 5000, which has a power rating of 80 watts. Considering the form factor, the performance level is still very good, although we would have liked for the manufacturer to specify which variant is installed. Users paying a premium for an optional GPU upgrade should know what kind of performance they can expect.

While the fans themselves do not exhaust their capabilities, the cooling solution as a whole reaches its limits during combined CPU & GPU loads. This should not be an issue for configurations with slower graphics cards, however.

There were changes in terms of the display options as well, allowing users to now choose between the default Full-HD screen (IPS, 300 cd/m²) and a better Full-HD display (IPS, 500 cd/m²), the latter of which achieved good overall results in our tests. Alternatively, there are two 4K options (matte IPS & glossy OLED), the addition of which should allow all buyers to find a suitable display option.

The webcam is poor and the speakers are unlikely to impress anyone, but there are no real weaknesses overall. The ThinkPad P53 continues to be a very good mobile workstation.

• Lenovo ThinkPad P53 review (Core i7, Quadro RTX 5000, FHD 500 cd/m²)

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