ThinkPad is a brand full of stories and legends. Although some people say that after IBM, there is no ThinkPad, in fact, Lenovo will make ThinkPad better; Some people also say that after X300, ThinkPad can no longer make a thin and light book with taste, but in fact, X1 has already inherited the essence of ThinkPad in thin and light technology, and X1 Carbon is the classic of the classics in the entire X1 series. In 2024, X1 Carbon has been updated for 12 generations, and after counting carefully, I actually played with the generation of X1 Carbon in my hands, if you want to say that there is no emotion, it must be fake. Therefore, the X1 Carbon Gen 12 is also the first model to embed AI, and I will take you to take a closer look. let`s begin……Wrong, do it again, let s fly.
It's time for a change
The last time I reviewed the ThinkPad X1 Carbon was Gen 10, to be honest, I was a little disappointed when I was a product known as "10 years of sharpening a sword", I thought it was a facelift, but neither the design nor the performance met expectations. However, the 2024 Gen 12 and X1 Carbon have also changed to a new mold with the rhythm of AI PC, which is still very exciting to think about, so I was also a little impulsive and bought this product for the first time.
The Gen 10 and Gen 11 generations are basically unchanged, and the so-called moving up the camera and effectively increasing the screen-to-body ratio are just Lenovo's overall family design. However, in Gen 12, the carbon brazing texture of the original semi-transparent check pattern is gone, and the new machine has reverted to the immersive black paint of the skin-like material. Many young people don't understand why the ThinkPad X1 Carbon can be priced at "15,000", that is because they don't have the experience of middle-aged people "details decide everything", and the new surface treatment of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon AI 2024 has a sense of luxury, I think it is not an exaggeration to describe it as "the charm of a BMW carved car, and the texture of a jade pot". Of course, some old users say that Carbon's transparent packaging is actually quite good, but have you noticed that the mainstream commercial laptops and mobile workstations next door also use similar coatings, and the original texture of Carbon is also easy to associate with the suspicion of "tool books", when the novelty passes, do you think the traditional users of X1 Carbon, those bigwigs and CEOs can bear it? It's fair to say that Gen 12's ThinkPad X1 Carbon has come at the right time.
Since the previous generation, the X1 Carbon has added a "forehead", the area is not large, but it integrates infrared cameras, infrared sensors, FHD IR cameras and communication antennas and other components, and still retains the physical mask (black valve), to put it bluntly, this design is to achieve the extreme narrow bezel (narrowed on all sides). So we see that the screen-to-body ratio of the machine has increased from 8623% increased to 89%,You know,This is a 14-inch thin and light model,And it's also a commercial laptop known for its sturdiness,There are many designs that can't be shrunk,Close to 90%The screen-to-body ratio is already the limit of the industry level。
In addition, I don't think it's necessary to overemphasize the ThinkPad X1 Carbon's aviation-grade carbon brazing material, MIL-STD-810H military specifications and other sturdy configurations, and the CFRO carbon fiber composite material body that incorporates magnesium-aluminum alloy (more magnesium metal can improve the hardness of the material, but it is difficult to form) The fuselage is impeccable in terms of compression resistance on the A-side and torsion of the fuselage. It is worth emphasizing that the smaller screen-to-body ratio also means that the size of the body is reduced, which means that the projection area of the notebook is more compact, and the length of the Y-direction is reduced from 316mm to 3156mm, don't let me see, these micro gaps, Lenovo engineers are on the basis of performance release and improvement, it is extremely difficult. In addition, the weight of the machine (11kg) with thickness (149mm) is basically the same as its predecessor. There is also a detail, that is, the fuselage logo has been changed from a bright surface to a recessed print, and the X1 logo has been cut, and my personal feeling is that it looks more simple and advanced.
The feel is still the same, and the layout is upgraded
Fans like ours of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon are basically aiming for its unbeatable control. In terms of parameters, it is still 1Spill-resistant pneumatic keyboard with 5mm key travel, but upgraded to 20,The main change is the keyboard layout,The feel is almost the same as the previous generation,The keycaps are stable all around,Strong sense of percussion,Comfortable rebound,You can understand it as the best feel in the industry under this key travel。
The keycap layout has finally been used for more than 30 years in the lower left corner of the fn and ctrl key positions, in the evaluation of gen 10 I mentioned that every time I get a new machine, the position of the two keys in the system is reversed, and I am laughed at by "old users", in fact, it is completely meaningless to insist on the keycap layout to be different from the whole industry, after all, it is not a closed system like Apple, exclusive hardware. And my first laptop was a ThinkPad given by my boss, probably in '98. In addition, the independent screenshot key has been canceled, integrated into F9, and this button is exchanged with the right Ctrl, which is set as an independent fingerprint recognition key. Many people think that the separation of fingerprint recognition on boot is a regression, but the area of the boot button on the ThinkPad side is really too small, which will affect the fingerprint recognition rate, which is more fatal to commercial laptops. We can also see that some key function keys, such as fn, volume + -, carriage enter, and insert, have added blind typing identifiers to further improve input efficiency.
The trackpad design has been widened to the naked eye, increasing the width to 120mm. I saw an optional forcepad abroad before, but the domestic version is not available for the time being, and it is estimated that new models will be added in the future. Correspondingly, the "Little Red Riding Hood" (pointing stick) has also been upgraded - double-clicking the red dot allows you to open the control center.
The configuration of the interface, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon AI 2024 basically reflects the CEO-level configuration, except for the two USB A is still 3In addition to 2 Gen1, the two C ports are full-featured interfaces that support Thunderbolt 4 and fast charging, and HDMI is also the latest 21 Specification. As a thin and light book,It's very rare to get the interface like this,In addition, it also provides a SIM slot、2-in-1 audio port,The power button is still designed on the side,Just move from the left side to the right,It's more convenient。 The sim slot of the machine is pre-installedLTE 4G traffic card,Gift6Month15G traffic,Since I am the top 1000 buyers of JD.com,In fact, it is a lifetime of 1000G monthly traffic,This is very value。
3A screen small upgrade
It is worth paying attention to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon AI 2024The 8K OLED screen has been upgraded (unlocked) this year with a 120Hz high brush, dragging the window and daily browsing are smoother than the previous generation.
The color is as good as ever, with 100% srgb% dci-p% adobe rgb and an average e-color accuracy of 066, with a maximum brightness of 4275nits, the lowest white point color temperature value is 5700, and the highest is 6700, which basically revolves around the natural light color temperature setting. In addition, the color uniformity and brightness uniformity of the screen are very good, with a deviation value of only 24% and 5%.
It seems that the measured brightness of this screen is not high,But it is very "comfortable" when actually used,The screen has introduced"Three proof"Technology - that is, AG anti-glare AR anti-reflection AS anti-stain,Lenovo also calls it"3A screen",We actually compared the display effect under the same ambient light,It can be clearly seen that the ability of the 3A screen to resist reflection glare is significantly stronger than that of traditional notebooks,For business people who often take out computers,The outdoor visual perception is more friendly。 In order to improve heat dissipation performance, the previous four-speaker configuration was reduced to dual speakers, but the sound quality of the unit has obviously been replaced or optimized, although the number has decreased, but the sound quality is more delicate and dynamic.
The world's first AI smart commercial laptop
As the world's first AI smart commercial laptop, ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2024 can be described as an early set, in fact, it was released at the end of 2023, and it is also the first batch of products equipped with Intel Core Ultra processors, Lenovo named it AI Genesis, it can be said that Lenovo has been brewing for a year in 2023AI PC planning, and it has basically been realized on this product.
In the Procyon Windows ML test, the CPU and GPU scores of 37 and 153 points are slightly lower than expected, and in the OpenVino CPU, GPU and NPU tests, the scores are 278 and 278, respectively, which is basically in line with expectations when optimized.
The X1 Carbon AI 2024 configuration is equipped with the new Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor, using Intel 4 process technology, with an architecture of 6 performance cores + 8 efficiency cores + 2 low-power efficiency cores, which is 2 more performance cores than Ultra 5 125H and 2 more low-power efficiency cores than the previous generation Core i7-13700H.
Looking at the Cinebench R23 score, the CPU's performance score is slightly lower than that of the i7-13700H for single core, which is comparable for single core, but slightly lower for multi-core. Judging from the R23 evaluation performance of the Core Ultra 7 155H on the mainstream laptop, the thin and light commercial laptop of the X1 Carbon AI 2024 level is still stable, which restricts the release of some performance.
Also noteworthy is this year's new ARC GPU, which is built on the XE LPG architecture and boasts 128EU, which is theoretically at the same level of graphics performance as the ARC A380. In the performance test of 3D Mark (Time Spy display score of 3359), compared to the 96EU core graphics on the i7-13700H, it is not only more than 2 times improved, but also beats the Ryzen 780M core graphics. In addition, the GPU also supports ray tracing and XESS, with a score of 1579 and 53 in 3DMark Port Royal and XESS, respectivelyWith a 5% performance boost, it's perfectly fine for some light games and light clips.
Exceptionally stable heat dissipation
Veteran readers will remember the lament that I reviewed Gen 10 and that its performance was unstable. For thin and light commercial laptops, although there is no need to release high performance, it still needs to have stable performance under heavy loads, after all, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon represents a different meaning.
The 2024 version of the G12 has an improved cooling system on the mold, and from the name it is named X1 Cooling 30, from the core, the original centralized dual fans are changed to a split eagle wing dual fan design, the heat pipe is also changed to a through-type design, and the air inlet duct is improved, which greatly improves the heat dissipation effect. In a compact body, this change also affects the wiring of the memory, and in the case of HDI motherboards, the LPDDR5X memory frequency is only 6400MHz (HDI motherboards can generally go up to 8533MHz). It is this kind of improvement that can be seen that the test performance of the 20-wheel R23 of the machine is quite stable, with only 5% performance jitter in the whole process, which is unimaginable on the previous generation model.
In high-performance mode with a single bake (room temperature 15), the CPU power consumption of the machine is stable at 33W after more than 20 minutes of baking, which is quite a good performance.
At the CPU temperature is slightly more than 100, the maximum temperature of the air outlet is less than 50, and the noise is controlled at 396 decibels, which can be said to be an excellent performance.
The performance of the whole machine has also been improved
We chose Crossmark and PCMark 10 for the whole machine test, and the machine scored a total score of 1560 points in Crossmark, of which the creative performance reached 1800 points, which is the score added by the core display.
In the PCMark 10 modern office mode, the machine scored 7015 points, while the Gen 10 model equipped with i7-1260P only scored about 5200 points, an improvement of about 30%.
In the memory test, the 32GB LPDDR 5X 6400MT memory sequential read and write speeds are about 73GB s and 76GB s, respectively, with a latency of 134ns;
In addition, the hard disk of the machine is given 2TB, and the sequential read and write scores of CrystalDiskMark are 3776MB s and 3471MB s respectively, although it is an entry-level PCIe 40 SSD, but it is perfectly sufficient for the daily application of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
In addition, we also tested indigobench, vray, x264 fhd benchmark, x265 fhd benchmark, 7zip, webxprt4 and other rendering, codec, decompression, web and other application tests, and we can see that the thinkpad x1 carbon 2024 has successfully won the evaluation room with results that exceed the expectations of the previous generation.
Balance off-power performance and battery life
Finally, I think we should talk about the endurance of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2024's off-power performance, after all, although the machine is equipped with 65W Type-C fast charging, it is also the first time to apply an 850 high-density battery, but the 57Wh battery capacity is still a little smaller, can it meet the needs of users for daily business travel? Is it possible to balance off-power performance and battery life?
We compared the charging and ionization performance of Cinebench R20 and R respectively, and we can see that the single-core ionization performance loss is Cinebench 2024, which is 417%, and the largest loss of multi-core ionization performance is R23 at 735%, aside from the test difference, the ionization loss is basically around 5%, which can be said to be a very small ionization loss.
Even so, the machine ran out of 10 hours and 40 minutes of ultra-long battery life in the PCMark 10 modern office battery life test, which is also beyond our expectations, on the one hand, the battery equipped with the ThinkPad is powerful, on the other hand, we have to admire the ultra-high energy efficiency ratio of the Core Ultra.
EF Reviews:
Judging from my testing process, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon AI 2024 is indeed the best generation of high-quality products in recent years, with a new design of mold, design and heat dissipation, and adaptation to Intel's latest Core Ultra processor, bringing a thin and light business laptop experience without shortcomings. It can be said that I have no regrets at all about buying this notebook as the main book, although I am a part-time worker, I can still say that this is the best "CEO book" in my eyes.