Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 Review: Sleek And Premium

This last series of tests we're putting the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 through will focus on its battery life uptime in our traditional cross-platform tests. Then we'll look at its noise output and discuss the system's audio solution a bit as well.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 Battery Life Testing

Here we're running PCMark's built-in battery life test that loops 1080p HD video until laptop batteries are exhausted. In all tests, Windows Quiet Hours / Focus Assist has been enabled and the displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. Wi-Fi is left enabled, which we feel is a common use case. However, enabling airplane more in a travel use case, for example, would provide additional battery life over the results we'll look at next.

Lenovo touts the X1 Carbon as having stellar battery life, and it doesn't disappoint here. In our testing with PCMark 10, the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 comes in second, tied with the older Dell XPS 13 HotHardware tested previously. Lenovo's ThinkPad lasted just over 11.5 hours (695 mins) before shutting down, which should give a user plenty of battery life at least for video streaming and other light duty productivity workloads. We should note, however, that Lenovo's higher resolution and OLED display options for this system will likely not perform as strong as we see here with our 1080p IPS display-equipped model.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 Thermals And Acoustics

The thermal and acoustic measurements shown here were taken while running the 3DMark Night Raid on a continuous loop, until its thermal solution was saturated. This would replicate more of a "worst case" scenario in terms of the system's peak noise and heat output.

The Lenovo X1 Carbon remained fairly cool and quiet during testing. In terms of acoustics, the base decibel level in the room where it was tested was around 34.7. With the fans spinning while under the load of the 3DMark test, the noise level produced by the fans only reached around 47.5dB. If you are working in an office environment, you should not have to worry about this machine getting loud. While using the laptop on a daily basis, the fans rarely needed to ramp up and the noise level coming from this machine was simply unobtrusive.


Looking at skin temp thermals, this Lenovo laptop measured just over 107 degrees Fahrenheit at its warmest. The hottest spot was typically found around the 1 and 2 keys at the top left of the keyboard, with the bottom being warmest in the same location. If you are not maxing out the laptop's performance, the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon should stay plenty cool. But even if you need to push it to the limits, it should remain cool enough to have on your lap and the keyboard will remain cool enough to type on comfortably for extended periods.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10: Our Conclusion

Overall the new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 is a solid option for anyone looking for a quality laptop for business or back-to-school. The build quality here is absolutely premium, and the laptop itself just feels solid and well-built. Lenovo's 1080p touch display option provides rich colors, deep blacks and solid viewing angle performance for a quality viewing experience and professional grade accuracy. The keyboard is extremely comfortable to type on as well, even though it is compact in size.

The machine's battery life lined up with what Lenovo said it should be getting. Further, while some users on the Lenovo website stated they were getting somewhere between 5 to 6 hours of battery life on average, recent updates could have improved that for them. There is also a chance that those users were utilizing more strenuous apps that could have impacted the battery life they were seeing as well. However, the average user should not be disappointed in their experience with this laptop in terms of battery life and untethered uptime.
When it comes to productivity and content creation tasks, this machine's performance results were fairly close to what one should expect from this class of machines. Some of its scores were near top of the pack, while others, especially gaming, were a middling showing. While you can run some lower end games and more casual titles, don't expect this machine to replace your dedicated gaming device. It's primarily a business class ultralight after all.  In terms of thermals, the X1 Carbon stays relatively cool under normal conditions, and is even bearable to have on your lap under a full work load. When under that full load, the laptop is relatively quiet as well, with an unoffensive fan pitch.

In short, you will not be disappointed if you opt for the new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 for your next laptop for business, home or school. Its high quality build should provide for many years of use, and you are getting all this machine's extra features, such its Trackpoint, 1080p webcam, reasonably good port options (sans the missing nano SIM or microSD card slot) and its fantastic keyboard. You can pick up the model as configured and tested here on Amazon currently for about $2090.00. Some may think this particular model is a bit pricey but starting at $1397 for a base config, we'd say you get what you pay for from Lenovo's perennial workhorse.