Lenovo ThinkPad W550s Review

This workstation Ultrabook sports a 15.5-inch 3K touch display, Nvidia Quadro graphics and one of the longest battery runtimes we've measured, but are these travel benefits worth the performance trade-off of its Intel dual-core processor?

Mobile workstations are a subclass of business notebooks designed for professional applications such as CAD and photo editing. The ThinkPad W550s is Lenovo's second stab at this market alongside its ThinkPad W541 mobile workstation. What makes the W550s interesting is that it's based around a low-wattage Intel Core i7 dual-core processor as opposed to the quad-core processors like in the aforementioned W541. The W550s in addition has a relatively anemic Nvidia Quadro K620M graphics card. These performance trade-offs result in a thinner body and the same screen size as the W541.

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Wish they made a 4.5 pound version of this in the T550 with a LV CPU. I'd be interested in that machine.

 

What exactly does the "3D gaming" part of battery life test mean?

If it's a demanding game given the very limited performance it's working not as hard as its brothers.

 

Powermark cycles through various 3D scenes from 3DMark06. They ran with a rather fluid framerate on this machine. Either way, the intent is to stimulate the graphics processor. The test as a whole is rather hard on the battery, which is why we use it.

 

Thanks.

Does the 3D Mark sequence have a FPS cap, or have you considered using one?


The problem I see is it's not very fair if different machines in a battery life comparison have different levels of load applied to them. If there's no FPS cap, the faster machines would put out more frames per second and end up doing more work than something with a ULV and a K620M. For less demanding tasks such and web, document editing and video playback, the amount of computation needed to maintain the loop is mostly the same no matter how much extra performance you have. With any modern system the result achieved is the same, and in this case the device capable of maintaining a usable state for the longest time wins. But for something like 3D rendering, the quality achieved on the faster machine is better (even though the better quality may not be visible with such an old benchmark). In this case the battery life comparison isn't very meaningful.

This is even more likely to be relevant in the mobile workstation category. Workstations are often used for non-real-time computation. The machine may finish the task fast or slow, but it has to finish. Say I want to pick a mobile workstation for rendering videos on site. If I'm concerned about battery life I won't ask "how much time do I have for rendering before the battery dies?" I would ask "how much video can I render before the battery dies?" It's perfectly fine for a more powerful machine to die in a shorter time span if the amount of work done is actually higher.


As for the W550s, this level of battery life is definitely impressive.

 

You'd want to look at Futuremark's site to possibly find that kind of information (FPS cap and so on) - http://www.futuremark.com/benchmarks/powermark