Top 5 reasons to BUY or NOT to buy the Lenovo ThinkPad P15v

Usually, we review fewer workstation laptops as they come out less often than business or gaming ones. Now, our review of the Lenovo ThinkPad P15v was the fourth one in the span of a month, which is borderline crazy, as it has never been the case before. Thankfully, this can serve a purpose, as we were able to put it against some of its competitors, such as the ZBook Fury and Power G8.

Similar to them, the ThinkPad comes with an analogous CPU selection, giving you the option of up to the Core i7-10875H. You can also get a Xeon CPU, which is on a whole other level, being part of the Intel vPro platform and supporting ECC memory – all crucial stuff for a workstation.

Without further ado, today we are presenting you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the Lenovo ThinkPad P15v.

Lenovo ThinkPad P15v: Full Specs / In-depth Review


4 reasons to BUY the Lenovo ThinkPad P15v

1. Design and build quality

Like other ThinkPads, you get a rigid and sturdy laptop with the industrial design that we all know and appreciate. You get rugged edges and a rough finish. While the entire laptop is made using hard plastic, it doesn’t feel cheap at all, even going as far as passing the MIL-SPEC testing. It is also surprisingly hassle-free to carry around for a workstation, weighing only 2.07 kg and having a profile of around 24 mm.

The lid opens easily with a single hand and doing so reveals a matte display with relatively thin bezels, an HD Webcam on top with a ThinkShutter and an optional IR sensor with Windows Hello face recognition. The lid is also quite bendy, which is an unpleasant thing to see from a laptop at this price point.


2. Upgradeability

The laptop offers two SODIMM RAM slots, which support up to 64GB of memory, but that’s not all, since if you pick a Xeon option, you can take advantage of ECC RAM. Storage-wise, there are two M.2 PCIe x4 drives, which come with RAID support.

Here is our teardown video, which shows exactly how to safely access both the SODIMM and SSD slots.


3. Display quality

The laptop comes with two IPS display options, both with a size of 15.6 inches. The first one has a Full HD resolution, while the second one has a 4K resolution. We chose the latter option, and needless to say, we were excited to test it and use it. The panel had excellent viewing angles, a maximum brightness of 545 nits in the middle of the screen, and 575 nits as an average for the entire area of the display, calculating a deviation of 15%, and a pretty high contrast ratio of 1500:1. This notebook uses the X-Rite Color Assistant app, which comes with several presets to pick from.

The display covers 99% of the sRGB color gamut, 98% of the AdobeRGB gamut, and 90% of the DCI-P3 gamut.

The color accuracy isn’t as great as we hoped it would be, as even with our Design and Gaming profile, we couldn’t bring down the dE value to match the standard. Here are the rest results with both the default settings and sRGB profile enabled from the X-Rite Color Assistant (left), and with the “Gaming and Web design” profile (right).


Buy our profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for Lenovo ThinkPad P15v configurations with 15.6″ UHD IPS MNF601EA1-1.

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].

Read more about the profiles HERE.

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

Health-Guard

Health-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

Get all 3 profiles with 33% discount


4. Features

The laptop has many software goodies, but we’ll mainly mention the ThinkShield suite, which brings the security of this laptop to a standard above the rest. ThinkShield has several components, with software being one of them. Lenovo has designed a whole system, with certified supply chains, so that quality hardware isn’t tampered with, security stickers on every batch of products, and good care of devices after their lives have ended.

Hardware-wise, you get a great backlit keyboard with long key travel and clicky feedback. You get a full-sized NumPad and small arrow keys, which are a bit of a letdown. The touchpad is also amazing, coming with the infamous Mylar surface cover, providing smooth gliding and accurate tracking.

The I/O is also quite wide, as it is split between the left and right sides. You get a power plug, a Thunderbolt 3 connector, and a SmartCard reader, all on the left. On the right, you can find a security slot, an RJ-45 connector, two USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) ports, an HDMI 2.0 connector, an SD card reader, and an аudio jack. Also, there is a SIM card tray on the back.


1 reason NOT to buy the Lenovo ThinkPad P15v

1. Cooling

The cooling solution consists of a total of two heat pipes, which doesn’t seem to be enough for a Xeon CPU and a Quadro GPU.


Max CPU load

Intel Core i7-10750H (45W TDP)0:02 – 0:10 sec0:15 – 0:30 sec10:00 – 15:00 min
Lenovo ThinkPad P15v3.88 GHz (B+49%) @ 99°C3.73 GHz (B+43%) @ 99°C3.19 GHz (B+23%) @ 99°C

The CPU reaches 99°C in the first seconds of our stress test, and maintains it throughout the entire test, while the clock speed slowly diminishes, ending the test running at 3.19 GHz.

Max GPU load

NVIDIA Quadro P620 (4GB, GDDR5)GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 2 min)GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 30 min)
Lenovo ThinkPad P15v1455 MHz @ 72°C1455 MHz @ 70°C

The 40W GPU is pretty easy for the cooling to handle even after 30 minutes of testing. The Quadro P620 maintained a steady temperature of 70°C.

Comfort during combined load

Even though the laptop has a single fan, it can become quite noisy once you apply a heavy load to the system. Also, image rendering or gaming will leave the keyboard pretty warm, as we recorded an outside temperature of 46.7°C.


All Lenovo ThinkPad P15v configurations:

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