Me - Diary - Projects - Resume

The ThinkPad T15g is my Most Powerful Workstation Yet

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/DpXyCN1AYw8/hq720.jpg

Intro

OK, so a T-series is a workstation now? Well... kind of. It isn't always what it appears to be. Technically speaking, there's nothing about this machine that doesn't shout "workstation". We'll talk about it soon.

The Reason to Pursue

For starters, you might have noticed this isn't the T15 we're talking about. We're talking about the T15g. Lenovo has always had these variants of regular machines, and while some are pretty obvious in terms of purpose and target audience, others are confusing and end up being way different than the regular models. The most popular ones we know are the "s" models that are slimmer and a little more premium than their regular counterparts, the "p" models that are equipped with a dedicated graphics processor, and the "t" models that used to be the tablet variants. Lenovo has a few more now, one of which is the "v", which I guess stands for "value", and then there's the "g" in the T15, and you can take it as the "gaming" or "graphics-intensive" variant, which unfortunately isn't entirely true here.

Now the regular T15 is well… a standard 15" T-series notebook. But then Lenovo has a "p" variant, which is as you might have guessed a more graphically capable T15. But then there's the T15g where things get really serious, and this isn't even remotely similar to the other two, but as Lenovo describes it, it's "a mobile workstation without a Quadro GPU". The ThinkPad T15g is basically the mobile workstation P15 but with a consumer-grade RTX graphics chip. It also has four RAM slots just like workstation notebooks. This reminds me of how the X1 series was the non-workstation sister of the P1 series. Furthermore, the T15g also has a replaceable GPU. Now tell me how many other ThinkPads offer that!

This device we have here is the Gen 2, and has been equipped with a monstrous RTX 3080.

Initial Impressions

I wouldn't say this machine is any different than your regular ThinkPad at first glance. And in my case, no matter how many tens of ThinkPads I've experienced in the last couple of years, I'd still compare this particular machine with my X1 Extreme Gen 3, which it was supposed to replace. Having said that, there's nothing special going on here. The exteriors aren't exciting, the hinges aren't hidden away from the eyes, and there's a lot of thickness all around, which is something I actually like. The screen bezels are thick, but design elements like the tapering towards the front make it look "kind of" modern. The keyboard is super-nice, but the trackpad isn't something you'd even want to touch and thankfully we have the TrackPoint, so I'm glad this wasn't my entry to ThinkPads otherwise that could have given me a really bad impression of these amazing machines.

Review

  1. Now in terms of how this machine fares as compared to the other workstation notebooks I've known and used, the amount of expandability is definitely reduced as compare to the older predecessors like the W530. But then I do not know how Lenovo would have modernized their workstation notebooks otherwise.
  2. Though there were better screen options, I didn't have a choice as I bought this from a third-party reseller. So the screen is one of the worse screens I've had in a notebook computer.
  3. The RTX 3080 makes it a beast, and though I decided not to go with an Nvidia GPU ever again after facing issues on my X1 Extreme, I couldn't find a ThinkPad as capable as this that came with an AMD GPU.
  4. I love how some of the ports have been moved to the back, and speaking of ports, we have everything you need including a full-sized ethernet port, an HDMI port, a full-sized SD card reader, an audio port, a SIM card slot, and multiple of both, the USB-A and USB-C ports.
  5. The only negative for a notebook like this would be the power adapter, which is even heavier than the one for the X1 Extreme and weighs almost a kilogram.

Carry-Bag

Now would I be able to carry something like this? I do not know, as it doesn't fit in any of the notebook bags I have. Should I be carrying something like this? Probably not. I'd rather carry my X1 Nano as there's an endless list of reasons I'd prefer that over this.

Conclusion

So, the T15g Gen 2 isn't the most exciting ThinkPad ever, but overall, I'm pretty happy with my decision to replace my X1 Extreme with this beast. I convinced myself by believing that I split the X1 Extreme into two machines: a way more premium X1 Nano and a way more powerful T15g, both of which the X1 Extreme attempted to be, but ironically, wasn't really as extreme as these two.

Outro

That's all that I have for this video. Thanks for watching it till the end, may the maker watch over you, see you in the next video! And yes, "Free Palestine!".