Thinkpad P16 Gen 3

[AL123]

Lenovo have finally announced their new top workstation laptop based on ultra 200 HX and NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell

 

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-s-most-powerful-AI-CAD-laptop-adopts-USB-C-charging-ThinkPad-P16-Gen-3-launches-with-Nvidia-RTX-Pro-5000-and-192-GB-RAM.1104952.0.html

 

Despite the title the 180W total power limit seems more like an announcement that they are getting out of the high end workstation laptop market?
 

Plus sides are Ethernet is back, and there are some ports on the rear but I would prioritise power over convenience of rear ports. 
 

Also doesn’t really seem that much smaller/ lighter than Dell/HP so why limit power so much?

 

 If they at least limited the graphics it would be more credible but announcing a laptop with and RTX 5000 Blackwell with so little power seems like pure marketing to me

 

Dell went the other way limiting their Pro Max Premium with 165W power to the H series CPUs and RTX 3000 Blackwell and it is a bit slimmer/ lighter than the Lenovo and Pro Max 16 Plus

Thought it’s worth posting this atleast to compare with the Dell Pro Max 16/18 Plus and HP Fury 16/18 G1i.

 

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Specifications: https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_P16_Gen_3

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Quote

GPU power was around 130W sustained when running a render around 15% slower than the Pro max 18 running at 175W, didn’t get a chance to do combined test but I’d say the 170W combined claim seems about right

 

According to the specs the P16 G3 seems to allocate up to 105W for the GPU and 45W for the CPU under GPU load, so 150W combined. That's not that far from the 170W on the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus. I guess the actual difference of performance should be more significant with the RTX 4000 Blackwell and higher.

[AL123]

10 hours ago, ebourg said:

 

 

According to the specs the P16 G3 seems to allocate up to 105W for the GPU and 45W for the CPU under GPU load, so 150W combined. That's not that far from the 170W on the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus. I guess the actual difference of performance should be more significant with the RTX 4000 Blackwell and higher.

Haven’t seen any TDP specs on the Lenovo do you have a link? I pretty much ruled it out as soon as I saw 180W! 

 

Dell/ HP seem to be leaving over 80W+ free on their power supplies I can’t see 30W being enough for screen+ RAM + SSD chipset etc. I saw brief total system  above 300W on the Pro Max 18, haven’t measured at the wall socket yet. 

 

Dell also limit their Pro Max 16 Premium with 165W power supply to the RTX 3000 Blackwell which suggests 4000/5000 cards would not be a good fit around this power level, never saw much point when they had RTX 5000 series cards on the old precision 5690 laptops 

While the performance with more power isn’t  linear with these cards the range is also much higher this time. 
 

The CPU’s are more efficient too, but the sweet spot is around 100W which still needs very capable cooling will be interesting to see more details on the cooling setup. 

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10 hours ago, AL123 said:

Haven’t seen any TDP specs on the Lenovo do you have a link? I pretty much ruled it out as soon as I saw 180W! 

 

The TDP/TGP are specified in the PSREF.

 

On the P16 Gen 2 the TGP was 60/80W up to RTX 2000 Ada, and 115/130W above. On the P16 Gen 3 it's now 90/105W.

[AL123]

On 9/13/2025 at 8:53 AM, ebourg said:

 

The TDP/TGP are specified in the PSREF.

 

On the P16 Gen 2 the TGP was 60/80W up to RTX 2000 Ada, and 115/130W above. On the P16 Gen 3 it's now 90/105W.

Thanks yeh I found a Reddit topic that posted them also but was having trouble viewing PSREF on my phone.

 

most worrying is the CPU limit if I am reading it right is 60W TDP without graphics load. that seems very low if it will be the PL1 value. Just checked my notes and  for a fairly multithreaded simulation that doesn’t even fully load all 24 cores for the whole run I saw the HP Zbook Fury 18 G1i throttle back to about 85W while the Dell Pro max 18 stuck around its 98W PL1 for the whole run, result was about 15 % faster on the dell. 
 

could be looking at the Lenovo being 30-40% slower for heavily multithreaded  tasks, it’s not always linear but still 60W seems very low to me, 

 

The GPU limits might not be as bad for general graphics but certainly given I’m seeing a significant difference in GPU compute performance on RTx Pro 4000 between 175W sustained on the Dell Pro Max 18 Plus and 125-130W on the Pro Max 16 Plus was around 18 % for a GPU compute load of 100% again not as big as you might expect but still significant 

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The 60W TDP is a bit surprising, because on the P1 Gen 8 with the 285H and a thinner design the TDP is 70W. The P1 also has a faster memory (CAMM2 LPDDR5X-8533 vs SODIMM DDR5-5600). I wonder if the single thread performance with the P1 could be higher than the P16.