Lenovo ThinkPad W540 Evaluation

Choosing the right notebook for a business is a rather troublesome thing, and a slight carelessness means that all staff have to endure the agony of a bad notebook. You have to choose a computer that has the best screen, the strongest computing power, and the longest battery use time without breaking the budget. With few notebooks to meet these requirements, Lenovo's ThinkPad W540 Mobile workstation is barely one of them.

Exterior design

W540 's design has nothing to pay attention to, its shape is the original ThinkPad notebook version. After closing it, there are no more decorations on the gray rectangular shell than some of the more obvious edges of the surface.

W540 's carbon fiber reinforced plastic material and magnesium roll-proof frame make up for the deficiency of its appearance in some extent. The addition of these durability features will make it less damaging than regular notebooks in the fall.

Despite these strong protections, the ThinkPad W540 still has some "soft spots": the right side of the palmrest will deform under the pressure of the hand, and the laptop's screen hinges will also appear distorted as the laptop border is pressed. Of course, these places are only minor flaws, and if they are not actively looking for them, they will not be found. But then again, as a flagship durable notebook, under the pressure of the hand on the deformation, how many or some people disappointed.

The top cover of the W540 may be another place that will make you unhappy. Its top cover uses a skin-like surface that is easily stained with dust and easily scratched, making it less attractive after a few months. At the same time, its internal use of rough hard plastic material, perhaps the material here and the top cover interchangeable, it looks better. The top cover is made of fiberglass and inner lining, so Lenovo chooses the skin as the surface coating.

The ThinkPad W540 weighs as much as 5.57 lbs (about 2.52 kg), and its measurements is 14.8 x 9.8 x 1.1 inches because the CD-ROM is added. At the same time, the Retina screen MacBook Pro 15 with no optical drive has a weight of 4.46 lbs (about 2.02 kg) and measurements is 4.13 x 9.73 x 0.71 inches. HP's 14-inch mobile workstation is the lightest and thinnest of the three, weighing just 3.57 pounds (about 1.62 pounds) and measurements for 13.35 x 9.33 x 0.83 inches.

Hardware configuration

This ThinkPad W540 is configured as follows:

Processor: Intel Core I7-4800MQ (frequency 2.7Ghz, quad core, 6MB cache, support core-frequency acceleration to 3.7Ghz)

Graphics card: Nvidia Quadro k2100m (2GB DDR5 video memory) and Intel HD Graphics 4600 dual graphics cards

Memory: 8GB (2x 4gb,1600 MHz)

Screen: 15.6-inch, 3K high-score IPs screen (resolution 2880 x 1620 pixels)

Hard drive: 256GB Solid State Hard Drive

Optical drive: 8X DVD+/-R/RW double burner

Interface: VGA, 2 USB 3.0, 2 USB 2.0, Express card, four All-in-one reader, AC interface, Thunderbolt, mini DisplayPort

Connection: 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0

Camera: Front 720P camera

The above configured version price is 2573 U.S. dollars (about 15800 yuan), so if you use it to equip a business, it will require a considerable amount of expenditure. This notebook, as a flagship workstation, has been able to solve all the problems in the work. If your company's business does not need to revolve around a graphics business that requires a lot of computing, it might be wiser to opt for a less expensive, less functional notebook.

HP, as mentioned earlier, is a more expensive option, with a price of $3087 trillion (about 18950 yuan). Although the price is higher, the performance of Zbook 14 is less than W540: it supports only 1080P screens, and the processor uses the Intel Core I7-4600U,AMD FirePro with only 2.1GHz, which is also a bit weak. However, Zbook's memory is as high as 16GB, twice times that of W540.

The latest generation of MacBook Pro 15 is also a W540 competitor. The resolution of this notebook is 2880 x 1800, priced at $1899 (11657 RMB). It is equipped with a 2.5Ghz Core i7 processor, graphics card for GeForce 750M. Although its configuration is also less than W540, but its modelling is more beautiful, more frivolous, the memory is W540 twice times, the battery lasts longer, the price also more reasonable.

By contrast, Dell Precision M4800 may be a better workstation. This notebook configuration is almost identical to the W540, the screen resolution is higher (3200 x 1800 pixels), but the price is only 2238 U.S. dollars (about 13738 yuan). Lower prices allow users to upgrade to an additional configuration such as solid-state hard drives or memory.

Performance

W540 is so powerful that it can run any application smoothly. Whether browsing the web, editing pictures or 3D design in AutoCAD, users will not feel cotton.

The ThinkPad is equipped with a high-end core I7-4800MQ processor, which has a high score of 654 points in the Cinebench test. To get a more intuitive feel for this score, we can compare this Alienware 18, the strongest game we've ever tested, with a 2.9Ghz i7-4910mq on the laptop, which scored 722. The i7-4600u of HP Zbook 14 scored only 295 in the test.

The NVIDIA Quadro k2100m graphics card also allows W540 to achieve a 1710 high score in the 3DMark graphics card test, while HP Zbook 14 scored only 1208 points, while the latter's video card is AMD FirePro M4100, and memory is 1GB GDDR5.

Since the latest MacBook Pro 15 is running OS X, we have "Batman: Forrest Gump" as a Test standard. The MacBook Pro 15 can run to 39 frames per second with an integrated Intel video card, with a game screen of 1080P. The main reason for W540 's poor performance in this test is that developers typically do not specifically optimize for workstation-level graphics cards.

Gorgeous 3K resolution screen

The best part of W540 is the gorgeous 3K resolution screen, which is quite rare in a 15.6-inch notebook with a 2800 x 1620 pixel screen. More importantly, the screen's color restore is very accurate, users can also be in the color Calibrator function with more detailed adjustment.

In addition to the image color display precision, high resolution also makes the text look more clear. And now we can finally enjoy some of the high quality 4K clips on YouTube.

Battery Endurance

However, this high split screen has an impact on the W540 's endurance. In the PCMark 8 battery test, it only supports 3 hours and 7 minutes of usage time. In normal use, we open more than 10 pages, edit some pictures on Lightroom, watch some 4K videos on YouTube, and use them for only 4 hours and 9 minutes. Even if the power-saving mode is activated, its usage time is only increased to 5 hours and 17 minutes.

Application

Although the price of W540 is so high and is positioned on a workstation, it does not have any Office applications preinstalled. So you can't use it to work with spreadsheets, Word documents, and pictures until the company's IT department installs apps for it.

Apple released its killer last year-dropping all its iwork and ilife kits to free and free for OS X Mavericks and the coming Yosemite. So for some small and medium-sized enterprises, Apple may be a better, more affordable choice.

Summarize

If you decide to equip your company with a ThinkPad W540, it's obviously not going to disappoint you, and powerful performance makes it easy to handle all the day-to-day tasks. But if we want to equip all staff with one, the high price may be hard for the enterprise to bear. Therefore, it may be a better choice to equip W540 for the graphics processing team in the enterprise.