AL123 Posted September 6 Share Posted September 6 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebourg Posted September 12 Share Posted September 12 Specifications: https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_P16_Gen_3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebourg Posted September 12 Share Posted September 12 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AL123 Posted September 12 Author Share Posted September 12 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebourg Posted September 13 Share Posted September 13 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AL123 Posted September 14 Author Share Posted September 14 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 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebourg Posted September 15 Share Posted September 15 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebourg Posted September 30 Share Posted September 30 The PSREF of the T16g variant is now available: https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T16g_Gen_3 RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 replace the RTX PRO Blackwell. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alyosha2001 Posted November 6 Share Posted November 6 Can anyone who has it tell if they can be undervolted? Or share some opinions in therms of noise? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebourg Posted November 11 Share Posted November 11 Some links to the first reviews: Thinkpad P16 G3 first benchmarks (285HX / RTX 4000 Blackwell) https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1or91s8/thinkpad_p16_g3_first_benchmarks_285hx_rtx_4000/ Lenovo Thinkpad P16 Gen 3 Unboxing and First Impressions 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phyfficus Posted Friday at 02:29 PM Share Posted Friday at 02:29 PM Dear all, This is my first post, and it's directly born a bit out of necessity: Can someone please solve some of the mysteries surrounding this notebook? We are a small tech company buying every few years a hand full of mobile workstations. (Currently, we have Lenovo P51 and 1st generation HP ZBook 14 in operation.) Last week, I reached out to our IT shop to configure the new Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 3 according to our needs and discuss some technical questions. To my surprise, he didn't really know that much about this notebook yet - even if he had it in stock in some standard configurations. So, I reached out to Lenovo support - and, so far, I didn't get useful answers, either. For the potential alternatives (Dell Pro Max 16 Plus and HP ZBook Fury G1i 16) I can find everything online - detailed technical specifications (incl. TDP/TGP), various benchmarks, and for the HP even an 80-minutes YouTube video showing basically to replace every single component. Can someone please confirm if it is simply to early (or Lenovo is slower than competitors) for the details or is their something serious in the rumors that the thermal design of the ThinkPad P16 Gen 3 might not be competitive with dGPUs of type Nvidia RTX Pro 4000 or 5000? We are typically satisfied with the ThinkPads we have (but the ZBooks are also working fine since years). And we have also no problems to stick to an RTX Pro 3000 if more power cannot be handled by the device. It is, however, really strange if I do not get a clear answer on technical questions when it's about purchasing + 6.000,- € notebooks. Any serious and trustable information is welcome! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebourg Posted Monday at 01:36 PM Share Posted Monday at 01:36 PM Quote we have also no problems to stick to an RTX Pro 3000 if more power cannot be handled by the device. The RTX PRO 3000 Blackwell has an average 3DMark Time Spy GPU score of 12448, and a Reddit user posted a score of 17164 for a P16 Gen 3 with a RTX PRO 4000. That's lower than the average (around 21000) but it show that the P16 Gen 3 is clearly able to handle a GPU more powerful than the RTX PRO 3000. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alyosha2001 Posted Monday at 09:23 PM Share Posted Monday at 09:23 PM Their panels are lalebel as "Eye Safe". Has anyone tested them for at leat PWM, or temporal dithering? Can anyone post any subjetctive opinion of how easy are they with eyes and nervous system? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phyfficus Posted 21 hours ago Share Posted 21 hours ago On 11/17/2025 at 2:36 PM, ebourg said: The RTX PRO 3000 Blackwell has an average 3DMark Time Spy GPU score of 12448, and a Reddit user posted a score of 17164 for a P16 Gen 3 with a RTX PRO 4000. That's lower than the average (around 21000) but it show that the P16 Gen 3 is clearly able to handle a GPU more powerful than the RTX PRO 3000. Thanks for making that clear! The respective discussion on Reddit is actually one of the reasons for our concerns. Since the 3DMark Time Spy GPU is primarily focusing on the DirectX 12 (gaming) performance, I was looking out for other experience/test with the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 3 which sheds some light on e.g. CUDA and/or OpenCL performance. This screenshots in the Reddit post show, as you mentioned, that the dGPU performance is slightly below average for an RTX Pro 4000. Would be good to know if this is also the case for an RTX Pro 3000 or not. In addition, the post also mentions that the CPU is not really able to come up to maximum frequency. Here, it would be also my question if this is due to actual cooling or a set point from Lenovo? It is not to blame Lenovo, at all. The ThinkPad P1 Gen 8, e.g., seems to have a quite capable thermal management system. However, we need to know what such a mobile workstation is really able to deliver. We also have a presentation from one of the other two competitors on the market (which was originally) not on our focus. We will see who convinces us... so far, it is very quiet from our contact person at Lenovo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebourg Posted 4 hours ago Share Posted 4 hours ago On 11/17/2025 at 10:23 PM, Alyosha2001 said: Their panels are labeled as "Eye Safe". Has anyone tested them for at least PWM, or temporal dithering? Can anyone post any subjective opinion of how easy are they with eyes and nervous system? The P16 Gen 3 and P1 Gen 8 share the same Tandem OLED display which has been reviewed here: https://youtu.be/GqyOD0JpOzY?si=jNfy2FFK32Vfs_M8&t=800 The PWM frequency is 1200Hz so it shouldn't be noticeable. The IPS display on the other hand doesn't use PWM. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phyfficus Posted 2 hours ago Share Posted 2 hours ago The author of the Reddit post mentioned above added full SPECworkstation 4.0 results to his post: Seems like that the ThinkPad P16 Gen performs better than expected, however, also worse than the direct competitors when you choose an RTX Pro 4000 or 5000. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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