Porsche, Bentley, and Lamborghini make large SUVs now.
Lenovo, HP, and Dell may not share the same luxe aura, but they make the laptop equivalent: 17.3-inch mobile workstations.
The Lenovo ThinkPad P72 (starts at $1,531; $5,382 as tested) not only comes backed with the usual independent software vendor (ISV) certifications for specialized apps, but it also carries a VR-ready tag for developing virtual worlds, thanks to the Max-Q version of Nvidia's flagship Quadro P5200 GPU with a whopping 16GB of display memory.
Plus, it wears MIL-SPEC 810G credentials on its virtual chest against shock, vibration, and other hazards.
The P72 platform carries up to 128GB of RAM and 6TB of storage, and the kitted-out one we tested outperforms every other laptop workstation we've pushed to date.
It misses our Editors' Choice because you can get nearly as much power in the more portable 15.6-inch ThinkPad P52 ($1,739.00 at Amazon) , but it's a formidable choice for serious 3D rendering, scientific, and design work on a large screen.
Very Large and Most Definitely in Charge
The $1,531 base model of the ThinkPad P72 combines an Intel Core i7-8750H processor with 8GB of memory, a 256GB solid-state drive, the 4GB Quadro P600, and a 1080p display.
My test unit—model 20MB002JUS, $5,382 at CDW—was loaded for bear with a six-core, 2.9GHz (4.8GHz turbo) Xeon E-2186M chip, 16GB of memory, a 512GB NVMe SSD plus a 1TB hard drive, and a 4K (3,840 by 2,160) non-touch screen.
Backing up that top-notch lineup of core parts is the equally elite Quadro P5200, plus Windows 10 Pro for Workstations.
The memory ceiling is 128GB of regular or 64GB of error-correcting (ECC) DDR4.
Dressed in familiar ThinkPad matte black, the P72 combines a glass-fiber-reinforced polymer lid with a magnesium-aluminum alloy bottom cover.
There's virtually no flex when you grasp the screen corners and none when you pound on the keyboard deck.
Like other ThinkPads, it's not a Panasonic Toughbook-style rugged or droppable system, but it has survived everything from mechanical shocks to temperature and humidity extremes, as well as my favorite from Lenovo's MIL-SPEC flyer, "28 days with common fungus sources."
It's a substantial slab, at 1.15 by 16.4 by 11.1 inches (compare the Dell Precision 7730 at 1.18 by 16.3 by 10.8 inches), and it tips the scales at 7.5 pounds.
Some 17.3-inch gaming rigs are heftier still, but the Lenovo looks the part of an imposing business machine by any measure.
There's a USB 3.1 Type-A port on the left side, along with space for an optional SmartCard reader not included on my machine.
Two more USB Type-A ports join an Ethernet port, a mini-DisplayPort video output, an audio jack, and an SD card slot on the right edge.
At the rear, you'll find two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a fourth USB Type-A port, an HDMI port, and the connector for the jumbo 230-watt AC adapter.
Ready to Tackle Tough Jobs
You can use either the fingerprint reader on the palm rest or the face-recognition webcam centered above the screen to skip typing passwords via Windows Hello.
The 720p camera's images looked sharp, with accurate colors, but at times a bit dark and noisy to my eyes.
Lenovo says the 4K screen offers 10-bit color depth.
Technically, it's an 8-bit panel with a 2-bit dither applied by the GPU so what the user sees is 10-bit, but it's undeniably attractive, with ample brightness and high contrast.
Black text and white backgrounds are polar opposites.
Colors are rich and well saturated (100 percent of the Adobe gamut, according to Lenovo), and viewing angles are wide.
Fine details are crystal clear.
Everything from YouTube videos to wireframe diagrams in the SPECviewperf benchmark looked great.
Those YouTube videos sounded pretty good too, as the ThinkPad's speakers easily fill a room with audio that's free of fuzziness or distortion even at max volume.
There's not a ton of bass, but voices are clear and instruments sound accurate.
Supplied Dolby Atmos software enhances the experience if you're wearing headphones.
The backlit, numeric-keypad-equipped keyboard is exemplary, as almost all ThinkPad keyboards are.
You'll find Home and End keys on the top row and Page Up and Page Down keys by the cursor arrows, which are arranged in the proper inverted-T rather than an HP- or Apple-style row.
There's adequate travel and a snappy typing feel, with solid feedback as the keys hit home.
The only possible gripes are that the Fn and Ctrl keys are in each other's places at bottom left, though the preinstalled Lenovo Vantage utility lets you swap them, and that the right Ctrl and Alt keys are slightly small.
As usual, cursor jockeys can choose between a comfortable touchpad and the TrackPoint controller embedded at the intersection of the G, H, and B keys.
Both work smoothly and provide the middle button beloved of ISV apps.
It may be the fancy version for Xeon processors, but Windows 10 Pro for Workstations impresses me for a different reason: It's free of the brainless games like Cooking Fever and Candy Crush Soda Saga that infect other editions of the operating system.
Lenovo earns points for keeping bloatware to a minimum, though it loses some for a skimpy one-year depot or carry-in warranty.
(Up to five years of onsite service is available, but you'll pay extra for it.)
Desktop-Level Performance
The Dell Precision 7730 is the only other big workstation to complete our revised benchmark suite, so I also compared the P72's performance to that of two 15.6-inch mobile workstations, the Lenovo ThinkPad P52 and the Dell Precision 5530.
To round out the roster, I threw in a favorite 17.3-inch speedster, the Alienware 17 R5 gaming laptop.
The contenders' basic specs appear in the table below.
Overall, the P72 ripped through the tests like Joey Chestnut at the Nathan's hot-dog-eating contest, putting up some stupefying numbers in both our general productivity and workstation-specific benchmarks.
It was half a step from first place in a couple of events, and its battery life, though best among the 17.3-inch entrants, was unremarkable, but it's clearly a monster.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark).
The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows.
We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing.
The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the laptop's drive subsystem.
The result is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.
All five laptops easily surpassed the 4,000 points that we consider excellent in PCMark 10's office productivity measurement, but the ThinkPad P72's winning score of 5,958 was borderline ridiculous—among notebooks we've tested, second only to the 10.1-pound, twin-AC-adapter MSI GT75 Titan gaming rig, a beast that makes the P72 look like a thin-and-light.
The big Lenovo also edged the Precision 7730 to take the gold medal in storage performance.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads.
Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image.
The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
A score over 1,000 indicates a scary-strong processor, so don't sweat the P72's finishing fourth in this closely packed field.
Whether your thing is 3D rendering or oil-and-gas analysis, it's ready to make short work of your workflow.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark.
Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image.
We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time.
(Lower times are better.) The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
Half a second quicker with each graphic filter or effect, and the P72 would have tied for the win.
It's hard to imagine even the most impatient imaging professional being dissatisfied with that.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting.
We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems.
Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.
The results are proprietary scores.
Workstation GPUs are optimized for different challenges than the game-like graphics of 3DMark, so the ThinkPad P72 and Precision 7730 essentially tied for second place behind the Alienware 17 R5.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp.
Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes.
In this case, it's rendered in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.
We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets.
See above.
The P72's highly respectable results nevertheless trailed those of the Alienware's GeForce GTX 1080.
Workstation-Specific Tests
POV-Ray 3.7 puts systems through an offscreen rendering exercise that taxes GPUs and multiple CPU cores to the limit—and in a mild surprise, taxed the P72 (which finished the job in 120 seconds) more than the Dell 7730 (102 seconds) and ThinkPad P52 (114 seconds).
It's not like the delay would have you gnashing your teeth, but it was the closest thing to a disappointing result I observed.
SPECviewperf 13 is a benchmark that renders and rotates 3D and wireframe models based on popular ISV apps' viewsets; it's the most realistic and challenging workstation test we run.
In the Creo viewset's workload, the ThinkPad P72 managed 220 frames per second (fps), leading the big Dell's 198fps and the ThinkPad P52's 175fps.
With Maya and SolidWorks, the P72 re-imposed its alpha status.
The Precision 7730 was again in second place and the ThinkPad P52 in third.
Last was a quick run through the Cinebench test again, this time making use of its OpenGL trial...
The P72's leading margin was again substantial.
Video Playback Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test.
(We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out.
The 15.6-inch Dell crushed the competition in this event, lasting for a marathon 11 hours and change.
At five-and-a-quarter hours, the P72 showed pretty good stamina for a 17.3-inch workstation, but it won't be spending workdays in the field any more than it'll be spending time on airline tray tables.
A trip to the conference room to show off some new renderings is more likely.
When Only Overkill Is Enough
The ThinkPad P52 recently replaced the Precision 5530 as our Editors' Choice because of its substantially higher performance and VR capability.
The ThinkPad P72 offers still-greater performance, but its bulk and cost are daunting—it's a more specialized platform for professionals who are genuinely seeking the power of a desktop workstation.
That said, there are plenty of workstation shoppers who crave more rendering frames per second at any cost, and probably not a few who just want a larger screen.
For them, the P72 is today's king of the hill.
Cons
The Bottom Line
With six-core Xeon power and Nvidia's top mobile Quadro GPU, the 17.3-inch Lenovo ThinkPad P72 is a serious alternative to a desktop workstation.
