New P71 owner mini review and rant

Finally received my heavily delayed ThinkPad P71 mobile workstation. Ordered in early May, delivered mid June after a bunch of broken delivery date promises.

Overall I'm happy with the unit, save one glaring fault that I'll get to in a bit.

Specs:
Xeon 1535m v6
64GB DDR4 2400 RAM
Nvidia Quadro P4000
4k Panasonic IPS LCD
2 x 512GB Samsung 950 Pro NVME in RAID 0 (boot)
2 x 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SATA in RAID 0 (data, software RAID, unit only supports 1 array in UEFI)
Sierra Wireless EM7455 LTE-A WWAN
Intel 8265 WLAN
Pantone Colorimeter

Initial observations:
This is a large, heavy, well-built machine, just as I expected it to be. Though the LCD panel is surprisingly thin, there is little to no flex. Zero body flex and barely any keyboard flex.

My other work laptop is a Dell Precision M5520, so a lot of my observations will be comparing the two.

Great ThinkPad keyboard. I miss the "old" ThinkPad keyboards, especially the one from my W520, but I digress. Loads better than the flat, uninspired chiclets on the 5520.

The trackpad is ok. I am happy to have the physical buttons back, but I had kind of gotten accustomed to the "clicky style" trackpad on the 5520. The P71's trackpad is smaller and not quite as smooth as the 5520. 5520 uses Windows Precision drives whereas the ThinkPad uses the trusty old Synaptics. I don't use the TrackPoint all that much, but I know a lot of people like it.

The display is very nice, plenty bright, plenty sharp with some backlight bleed but nowhere near as bad as the Samsung PLS panel on the Clevo unit I returned after 3 days of use. Matte finish of course.

Speakers are surprisingly good for a mobile workstation. Not gaming laptop good of course, but way better than the down-firing ones on the 5520.

Thermals are not what I would expect from a machine of this caliber. During heavy SQL or GIS load the processor regularly hangs out in the mid 85c range. Fans aren't terribly loud and it honestly sounds like they could go higher to cope with the heat.

CPU...now the rant starts. I am experiencing a good bit of both thermal and current throttling when under heavy load, be it synthetic or real-life (see attached screen captures from XTU). I've seen it throttle all the way down to 2.4Ghz while under load. For testing I applied a stable -150mv undervolt and that took care of the thermal throttling and most but not all of the current limit throttling. I refuse, however, to have to mod a professional workstation of this caliber. I have submitted a ticket to Lenovo Support. I'm sure a repaste with good quality TIM would eliminate the thermal issues. The current limit throttling, no clue.

 

Hi,

I'm glad to see a review of the P71 in this forum. I'm one of the people who has been wanting to buy this laptop because I use the TrackPoint and refuse to buy a laptop without trackpoint. I am also currently using a W520 and I think it is about the right time to upgrade since p71 has a proper keyboard and finally offers some graphics cards you can game with.

Can you submit your video card benchmarks on this site? There is no p4000 on the mobile graphics chart yet.

Anyway, again, i'm glad to see your review. I have been searching the internet the past 4 weeks and no one has said anything. Finally I saw your post. I guess everyone must be waiting for them to ship.

 

Are you sure it doesn´t have a Precision TrackPad? My P51 has one and as far as I know, every ThinkPad of this generation should have one.

The stress-testing - that is with the AC-adapter connected? My P51 also throttles, but only on battery, with the AC adapter connected, it runs at almost full speed. Also, is it the 230 W adapter? Have you checked all the power related settings in the BIOS, the Lenovo settings app and Windows power management?

 

Very appreciative of the review. I hope Lenovo sorts out the throttling issues for you. I considered this laptop seriously but opted for another desktop in the end.

 

Sure! Full Passmark:

And the sad throttling during the benchmark (Yellow is thermal, bright red is current limit)

I stand corrected! I didn't realize you could have precision and Synaptics side by side.
I'm not just getting throttling during stress testing and benchmarking. Even rebuilding indices in SQL or doing geometry calculations in ArcGIS results in throttling. It was plugged in to the 230 watt power adapter the entire time with a 100% charge. My guess is a combination of bad luck in the silicon lottery (which should never happen with Xeon branded silicon) and a poor thermal paste application. I opened a ticket with Lenovo and they're sending a tech out. Question is how long will it take? There was a shortage of the Xeons when I ordered it, resulting in a 3 week delivery delay. We'll see if the depot has any for repair. A simple repaste would probably fix it but Lenovo said they're just going to replace the MB.

Will update when the repairs are completed!

 

Thanks for this review

do you use softwares like solidworks/catia/creo/siemens nx?
could you test this gpu with SPECviewperf 12?
are there better performances than m5000m?

 

I downloaded specviewperf but unfortunately I don't use 3dsmax or any of the other applications that it tests for, so I don't have the required licensing to run the benchmarks . It won't even load without 3dsmax being installed. I primarily do GIS work with ArcGIS, ArcGIS Pro and QGIS.

The best comparison I could find for GPU compute was from the Passmark GPU compute results.
My P4000 (which is not overheating, I haven't seen it go over 60C under full synthetic load) scored 4753
The full desktop M5000 averages 4300
The M5000M averages 3435

So the P4000 easily beats out both the mobile and desktop M5000 card.

In regular 3D Mark the P4000 still dominates the M5000M and still beats out the desktop M5000:


Wish I could run the better benchmark, but I hope this helps .

 

do you know this?
https://www.autodesk.com/education/free-software/all

 

Holy long benchmark! That took forever lol. GPU never got over 61C

 

Many Thanks! These infos are really usefull

 

Happy to help!

 

So, undervolting didn't help with the current limit? Interesting. Is this value defined by Lenovo in the EC firmware?

I'm definitely interested in this model in particular since the current competition (e.g. from Dell or HP) has unappealing looks IMHO. But, I never owned a Lenovo so I hope they're open for upgrades and with no component whitelisting?

 

Lenovo whitelists Network-cards (WWAN/WLAN). Maybe in the case of the P71 also the GPU (which uses MXM), although I am not 100 % sure about that.

 

The undervolt greatly reduced the current limit throttling, but it didn't stop it completely. The thermal performance is getting so bad now that decompressing a large .tar yesterday caused thermal throttling. I figure it's a bad paste job in combination with too-low current limits in firmware.

Once the tech fixes the thermal issue I'm going to test the current problem. That's something they can fix via a firmware upgrade. The actual cooling solution seems plenty adequate. When I did that long GPU benchmark the GPU never got over 61C. Definitely plenty of headroom for more CPU current.

 

I guess you're right.

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkP...ill-P70-support-Lenovo-OEM-P5000/td-p/3581982

I'm used to Dell workstations where there's no such whitelisting whatsoever (e.g. you can mount Geforce cards as well), so that's completely unacceptable for me then.

 

Any updates on tech visit? I have a P51 and seem to be experiencing thermal issues myself.

 

So an update. The heatsink units are on a 30 day delay. They told me back order, they told another Lenovo forum member that the repair depots just haven't received them yet. Either way I decided not to wait and requested a complete exchange of the unit. It should ship June 29th and arrive July 9th. If you're having issues and are within 30 days of purchase I'd strongly suggest this route.

 

Does the P71 have exactly the same screen options as the P70? I'm interested in UHD screen in particular. According to the notebookcheck review P70 had problems with annoying low-frequency PWM and screen bleeding , I wonder if it's the case with P71 also.

 

Well, got the replacement. New just like old. Thermal and current level throttling. Will be returning and purchasing an Alienware 17 R4. At least it can keep it's cool.

 

Why alienware? You could have better options. IMO

 

Only true for WWAN starting with Skylake (and at least some Broadwell) models; no more WLAN whitelists.

 

oh man, I ordered mine 3 weeks ago, was supposed to be shipped on August 1, not it got postponed to August 10. Hopefully, they won't change this again.

However, after reading about your issues, I wonder if I shall cancel the order or not. Currently, I use a 2015 15" MacBook Pro with Bootcamp (.NET developer), is all good, except 16Gb sometimes is not enough when using a couple of VMWares.
Really, scratching my head now what to do, is it worth the wait or not

How is the noise level under normal load?

 

Which better options?

 

Msi 16L13, msi gt62vr, msi gt72vr, clevo p650hp6, clevo p670hp6, clevo p750dm2, clevo p775dm3

 

I'm looking for portable/ultra portable that can take 32GB RAM and\or 4K display. I love my surface pro 4, but it's just 16gb ram which is not enough for me.

Is anything out there similar to my requirement?

 

I suggested those because that user was considering an alienware 17 r4 (4.42 kgs).
I think your needs are really different. If you are seraching an i7-7700hq, you could consider a dell xps 9560 or a dell precision m5520

 

I'm in the same boat as the OP. I have access to 2 work provided P71 machines. One has the Xeon 1505M and the other a 7820HQ. Both with P4000m GPUs. The CPU cooling is grossly inadequate, even for the 7820HQ. Both processors score within a point of my XPS 15 9560 (7700HQ) on Cinebench R15.

What's the point of spending up to +$700 on a processor upgrade if every processor will ultimately throttle down to the speed of an 7700hq? I guess if you only have single core requirements or need ECC?

I have not torn this model down yet, but if Lenovo is using a similar heatpipe design as the P70, there is no way a single heat pipe (shared with the GPU mind you) can keep up with a sustained 45w load. I haven't had a chance to test the P4000m yet, but I suspect it will also be thermally limited at its limits. There is no way a $4,000 machine with P5000m and 1535m v6 will perform anywhere near its potential.

Such a bummer.

 

Just received my p71, with 64Gb RAM, Xeon 1505 and I got quite disappointed, the CPU scores about the same 597cb as my 4 years old MacBook pro in Windows BootCamp mode (i7 4870HQ), like WTF.
Man, only if MacBook would support 64Gb, or at least 32Gb, would never buy anything else

Now, got a dilemma, on what to do with this P71, yes I like that it has 17" HDPI screen, 3 SSD and 64Gb, but CPU, why throttle it?

 

do you know this poll?
How do you want your next laptop to be built?
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/how-do-you-want-your-next-laptop-to-be-built.808062/

 

The issue I see here is the undersized heatsink paired with a Xeon/faster i7, you would need more than a repaste to fix it. Even with liquid metal, I don't think it would help much since it doesn't magically allow an undersized heasink to perform properly.


I would also be careful of running the CPUs at full turbo due to the CPU VRM not having any heatsink (look at the top).


But hey, at least the mounting system has 4 screws.




@D2 Ultima @bloodhawk @Papusan @Starlight5

 

I... I... what? @Dackzy

 

OMG, what in the world did I just look at? Only extremely vulgar expletives come to mind as I try to forget the pathetic excuse for heat sinks I just saw. Stupid must be contagious. They should just glue a stack of pennies onto the CPU and GPU, then call it a day.

 

A barebone config of the P71 with the Xeon 1535M V6 and P5000M retails for around 3900.

The more you know...

 

That's the P70 interior, but chances are things didn't change much with P71. Besides the atrocious CPU cooling, the interior is rather cheap looking compared to Dell Precision series.

 

What do you mean? Its pretty much all Magnesium. The mainboards sits in a Magnesium base-cover + an extra Magnesium structure-frame. Thats about as stable and expensive as ThinkPad construction gets.

Here are the P70 and P71 parts lists:
https://download.lenovo.com/parts/ThinkPad/p70_frubom_20151029.pdf
https://download.lenovo.com/parts/ThinkPad/p71_frubom_20170502.pdf

P70 has two thermal-assemblies:

• 00NY300: CPU/MXM N16E thermal,w/fan,DEL
• 00NY301: CPU/MXM N16M thermal,w/fan,DEL

P71 also has two:

• 00NY301: CPU/MXM N16M thermal,w/fan,DEL
• 01AV344: CPU/MXM N17E thermal,w/fan,DEL

They share the 00NY301 (which is the weaker one likely for the low-end M600M/M620M - appears to be a weaker GPU fan), but the other one is different. How they are different, I am not sure.

One thing to keep in mind is that the cooling solution of the P70 and thus also the P71 (because its just a refresh) was designed for Skylake. I do think Kaby-Lake does run somewhat hotter in comparison.

That seems rather unlikely. Are you sure you have set the CPUs to max performance in the UEFI-BIOS or in Windows? There are also some settings hidden in the Lenovo Settings app, if you have that installed.

Notebookcheck is currently testing the P71 with the Core i7-7820HQ.

 

I still think that the solution isn't enough for the CPU and GPU.

Xeons are advertised to boost around 4GHz or so, including the 7820HQ. You would need more than 1 heatpipe (that's also shared with the GPU) to dissipate all the heat.

GPU also look weak with only two dedicated heatpipe to cool the 100w 1070 down (P5000M).

 

Yeah, I know it's magnesium, but I wasn't referring to the material (Precision uses the same), but at some of the details I've noticed.

The CPU heatpipe being shared with the GPU is a sign of poor design IMHO. The rather small CPU fan probably doesn't help either. Speaking of which, not having removable fans is another (though Dell seems to have done the same on 7710).

Then e.g. instead of painting the whole panel whose parts might be visible, they just painted the visible edges. E.g., when you remove the keyboard, you're greeted with a big unpainted magnesium panel. So you end up with this:



Compared to this:



The Dell part under the keyboard is plastic I believe, but still, I get the impression they've paid more attention to details in their design. It wouldn't have bankrupted Lenovo if they've used a bit more paint

Eagerly awaiting the notebookcheck test to see if P71 improved on the P70 design which was inadequate for a proper workstation (e.g. CPU load causing the GPU to throttle because of the shared heatpipe):

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-P70-20ER000XUS-Workstation-Review.179558.0.html

 

well that is sad AF

 

Everything was on high performance. Thermal and current throttling were shown to be present in Intel extreme tuner.

Single core was about where I expected. Every multicore run in cinebench triggered current throttling until the fifth run when it was thermally throttling. It scored below 680 in every multi core benchmark run after the fifth benchmark. The test environment is a little warmer than most offices (27c) but not obscene.

You shouldn't be surprised by this. Many workstation devices I've tried throttle like this on a sustained load. I expect notebookcheck's review to look a bit like the new Fujitsu Celsius... Another "workstation" laptop with a single heat pipe cooling a mobile Xeon 1535 v5 and getting beat by 7700hq devices in sustained multi threaded loads.

I'm glad Notebookcheck is finally checking for consistency of benchmark scores and sustained performance throttling and calling devices and manufactures out on it a little more. This type of behavior is really deceptive in my opinion. People read one off reviews on products like the surface pro, the GS line of MSI laptops and other thin and light performance machines and think, "gee this is a really fast machine because it got X score on this benchmark." Potential buyers think they are comparing apples to apples, but the MSI GS63VR will only get that awesome score once or twice and then drop to CPU scores seen two generations ago or worse.

 

Can you try the test again after repaste the system?

 

I would expect it to perform much better than the Celsius, because the CPU cooling system of the Celsius is much smaller. The Celsius also has two separate cooling systems for GPU and CPU, while the P71 has a shared one, the CPU heatpipe is connected to the GPU cooling-system. This means that with pure CPU load, the GPU fan should also help to cool the CPU.

The Celsius H970 showed abysmal CPU performance from the very first test, it was unable to achieve its performance-potential from the very beginning. The ThinkPad P71 Cinebench-score is visible in this review and it easily beats the Celsius H970 (despite having a nominally slower CPU).

 

Both are sad machines imho.

 

Hello. I just purchased a P71 and came across this thread. Thank you to the OP and the other posters for such a well informed and interesting thread.

I'd like to reassure potential purchasers of lower end P71s with some data of my own. As I write this, I am running a 4 minute CPU stress test in Intel's Extreme Testing Utility. I believe this is the same software program that the OP referred to in the original post and that he relied upon to find Thermal Throttling.

For my laptop, I'm not getting any thermal throttling at all despite running the testing utility's CPU stress test.

Presumably this is because I have a far less powerful unit, with only the base i7 7700HQ @2.8GH, 16GB RAM, etc. By usual standards, it's of course quite powerful, but it's no high end Xeon workstation.

It's whirring along quite comfortably and the air coming out of the right fan is coming rapidly but isn't too hot. More precisely, XTU reports "Package Temperature" as 73 degrees Celcius. I've run the test several times, and haven't noticed any throttling at all.

Results were similar when I ran the RAM test.

Obviously, Lenovo should still be blamed for the disappointing performance of high end P71 workstations. Kudos to the posters here for pointing that out. However, purchasers of less high end P71s like mine will hopefully be reassured.

Overall, I'm quite happy with it. Some windows updates failed to run and the start menu has exhibited some strange behavior, but that could be as much Microsoft's problem as Lenovo's. Other than that, it's been exactly what I'd hoped for. ...And huge.... definitely huge.

Hope this helps others. It's not hard to install or use XTU if others want to try with their own machines.

 

Run AIDA64 FPU only for at least 30 minutes and see if the CPU throttles.

Try also with OCCT, Realbench, etc.

 

I'm not sure if Dell/Lenovo use those poor stick on "paste" still? Maybe the CPU will improve a bit with a repaste. Though it's awkward to have to repaste something nearly new / hasn't yet degraded in thermal performance. Ironically in the Lenovo ads I remember the presenters making a big deal of the dual fan system.

Just a quick question. 7700HQ has a high TurboBoost frequency of 3.8Ghz too - apart from the lack of ECC support / smaller cache - it's not really different from the Xeon - is it?

For some reason, I keep wondering - why the Xeon chips have a TDP of just 45W? (looking at the frequency - it's a pretty high TurboBoost for a laptop - reminds me of the older Extreme Edition Core i7 Quads - which had a TDP of 57W).

 

As an update....copied from my Reddit post...

The 2nd replacement unit that I got seemed to do better. Once I applied an undervolt it wouldn't throttle during an XTU stress test. A Prime95 stress would cause it to thermal throttle. I was relatively happy until my consulting workload picked up and I noticed I was getting thermal throttling again under extended geoprocessing loads and just recently under extended SQL loads. I decided to try and correct the issue myself by repasting.

During the repaste process I discovered the cause of the thermal issues. There are 2 design flaws present. One in the heatsink screw and standoff assembly and the other in the thermal pads used.

The screws they used to attach the heat sink assembly to the system board are designed in such a way as to prevent over tightening during assembly. They will only allow the heatsink to get within a specific distance to the board. That gap is too wide. When I removed my heatsink I noticed that the gap was so wide that there was an obvious leftover air gap where the TIM covering the GPU heatsink didn't make contact with the die at all. There is also a noticeable slant to the impression in the TIM from the GPU die indicating that it isn't mounting flush.

Photos:
https://imgur.com/N4J8mYr
https://imgur.com/pTD5Ou1


The thermal pads cooling the GPU voltage delivery components are too thin. Many aren't making contact with the heatsink at all and are obviously 1/2 the thickness they need to be to actually make contact. As you can see in the image above there are no component impressions in many of the thermal pads.

The gap between pad and component is obvious when mounted:
https://imgur.com/qgBGWj3

The CPU die appeared to make somewhat better contact, but the amount of TIM left on the die and on the heatsink indicated that there was a much larger gap there than desired:
https://imgur.com/H2m7xFs
https://imgur.com/5nEFKgS


The thermal pads for the CPU voltage components appeared to make some contact but were very sloppily installed and overlapped on some of the edges creating small gaps:
https://imgur.com/35iGXOF

I blasted Lenovo twitters until someone replied and escalated me to a case manager. Again. I am going to see what they'll offer to do. The reality is this could be easily fixed by removing the screws they used and replacing them with ones that would allow a careful, manual torque down onto the board to insure proper mating of the heatsink, TIM and dies. It would also require replacement of the thermal pads with pads of the appropriate thickness.

I will likely just make my complaint with the case manager and, unless they offer to actually fix the design, I will fix my PC myself. When I had to wait on the 3rd unit for almost a month they upgraded my GPU from a P4000 to a P5000 at no charge and gave me a 10% refund on the entire order. I feel like they've done what they could monetarily to make things right. I could probably get a refund but at this point the unit is setup the way I want and with the exception of the heat issue it works the way I want.

The tricky part will be finding the proper screws. If I go that route I will update here and my original thread on the Lenovo forums with the screws I used and pad thicknesses used.

Would I suggest someone buy one of these brand new today? No.

I have serious concerns about the longevity of the GPU and CPU dies as well as the voltage components due to overheating. Sure you can extend the warranty and not worry about it but I don't find that an acceptable solution to what is an obvious set of design flaws coupled with questionable workmanship.

For those that Lenovo has told it's "normal" for a laptop CPU to constantly thermal throttle...just no. Not in a million years. I wouldn't expect a consumer level laptop to be able to deal with the heat generated by something like Prime95 but I do have that level of expectation on a workstation specifically designed for high-end computation that is in this price bracket. I also have the expectation that the workstation will properly cool the voltage delivery components to ensure my investment doesn't prematurely fail.

 

Pic broken

 

Had to convert to links, IMGUR just wasn't cooperating today.

 

That's even worse than I expected.


2nd pic: seems like a part of the copper slug is extending towards the vram area, causing the thermal pad to have an uneven contact surface with the heatsink. Could be remedied with fitting two piece of different thickness thermal pad to compensate for it?

Looks like the aluminum top left part of the heatsink is bent. Two right vram makes an impression but the left two doesn't. If that area is flat then the thermal pad would have the same imprint on all 4 vram...

And the two large rectangular box you made is for the chokes I think, that's not too important to cool but still sad to see negligence.

On a sidenote, did you check that the two FETs above the R47 chip and near the screwhole are covered with thermal pad?




3rd pic: I see what you mean by the VRM thermal pad being too thin.





4/5: I wouldn't say that there's too much gap, maybe there is, but you can't judge by the amount of thermal paste remaining as the "stamp" thermal paste for the CPU is already way too much from the beginning.

What I'm curious about is if the mylar sticker on the CPU edges are too thick and causes poor contact between the heatsink and CPU.



6: so they use the rollcage as the CPU vrm heatsink huh... Would be interesting to repad this one.





@PsyberEMT I actually have a P71, 1505v6 and P4000. Thanks for the info about the internals. I'm planning a repaste of the machine and your post give a lot of insight towards planning.

Ps: can you PM me how to get the P5000 upgrade?

 

@D2 Ultima @Mr. Fox @Papusan @Dackzy

Might want to check above. After I'm done posting the review for my X1 Carbon today the next one would be the P71 (laptop being discussed in this thread).