Lenovo's ThinkPad T16g Gen 3 comes with Thunderbolt 5 & a Tandem OLED screen, but only a slow version of the RTX 5080
Lenovo updated its large mobile workstation comprehensively this year and now offers two different version. The ThinkPad P16 Gen 3 is equipped with professional RTX PRO GPUs from Nvidia, while the almost identical twin ThinkPad T16g Gen 3 is equipped with consumer GeForce GPUs. We recently reviewed the new ThinkPad T16g Gen 3 with the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, the mobile GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop and the matte tandem OLED touchscreen, but our impressions are mixed.
The new model is marginally slimmer than before, but the manufacturer managed to decrease the weight by almost 500 grams. Combined with the more compact 180W power adapter, the travel weight is now noticeably lower than before. The mobile workstation also offers all the features you could wish for, including optional 5G connectivity. You also get two Thunderbolt 5 ports as well as excellent maintenance options (4x SO-DIMM, 3x SSD). The matte OLED touchscreen with 120 Hz offers very good image quality, even though the image appears slightly grainy.
In terms of performance, the large workstation is a bit disappointing, which is a result of the overall cooling concept and the limitations due to the power adapter. Lenovo decided to ditch the familiar SlimTip charging port and completely switch to USB-C. However, the power input is limited to just 180 Watts, which obviously affects the power limits of the components as well.
The pure CU performance is good in short load scenarios, because the processor can consume up to 160 Watts, but it drops to ~110 Watts after 30 seconds and to just 65-90 Watts after additional 50 seconds. This means the CPU performance is anything but stable. The GPU is the powerful RTX 5080, but the maximum TGP is limited to just 105 Watts, so it is the slowest version we have tested so far. Even the RTX 4000 (which was based on the 4080) of the old ThinkPad P16 Gen 2 running at 130 Watts pretty much offered the same performance.
If you stress both components at the same time, the GPU will stay at 105 Watts, while the processor drops to just 25 Watts. The overall consumption of the system is still at around 170 Watts, so this is an artificial limitation. You might think that the fans are pretty quiet due to the comparatively low performance, but you would be wrong. Quite the contrary actually, at up to 57 dB(A), the ThinkPad t16g Gen 3 is by far the noisiest device within our comparison group. It seems the weight reduction primarily affected the cooling unit.
All in all, we have mixed feelings about the new ThinkPad T16g Gen 3 and its sibling ThinkPad P16 Gen 3, which shares the same limitations. The mobile workstations offer plenty of features, but if you need reliable and high performance, you are probably going to be disappointed. Please see our comprehensive review for more information about the new ThinkPad T16g Gen 3.
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