Thinkpad P14s Gen 5 AMD Review

11/17/2024

After using my new Thinkpad for a few weeks, I feel I am ready to provide an in-depth, hands-on review of the laptop.

Keyboard

The typing experience is really great for a laptop! The keys have a satisfying click and requires a reasonable amount of force to actuate. The keys aren't mushy or sqiushy, and will still actuate if pressed on the corners of the keycap. Surpasses any other laptop keyboard I've tried, including Macbooks.

Trackpad

Also a really great experience. Tracking is smooth and responsive, there is basically no latency between inputs - Pretty much on par with the tracking responsiveness of a Macbook trackpad. The texture is also smooth and pleasant to use. Multi-finger gestures work well. However, the trackpad tends to be mushy when you press down on the bottom corners or the bottom third of the trackpad. This is still an area which Macbooks excel in, probably due to the Macbook chassis not being tapered towards the bottom of the laptop. Overall, the trackpad is very much useable, just don't expect to be playing video games with it. (I used to play video games with my Macbook trackpad for a long time).

Display

The display is 2880x1800@120Hz 400 nits, low-power, low-blue light, with 60Hz as an option as well. It's... fine. The 120Hz is always nice to have, though for its price the display meets expectations without surpassing any of them. Not much to say.

Chassis

The chassis is made of plastic, but don't let that fool you. Like most other Thinkpads, it is sturdy and surprisingly light. Unfortunately, it does collect fingerprints pretty well, and you can definitely see fingerprints/handprints from the palm rests on either side of the trackpad.

Battery

The battery isn't great, lasts around 3-5 hours for me depending on if I limit my GPU clock speeds and use a powersave CPU frequency governor. This doesn't really affect me as I keep my laptop plugged in, but I definitely would not this laptop if battery life is a main concern.

Gaming

The games I play aren't very graphically demanding. I play:

  • War Thunder
  • 8BitMMO
  • OpenTTD
  • Zero-K and Beyond All Reason
  • Terraria
  • Minecraft
  • Counter-Strike 2
  • Trackmania NF

My Software Setup and Development Environment

  • OS - Arch Linux
  • Browser - LibreWolf
  • Terminal Emulator - GNOME terminal
  • IDE/Text Editor - (N)Vim, VSCodium
  • Word Processing - LibreOffice, OnlyOffice
  • Notes - Obsidian, Logseq
  • Package Managers - pacman, yay, nixpkgs, flatpak
    • I use pacman for anything that requires direct access with preinstalled dependencies (such as needing to interact with hardware information or kernel headers). I use flaptak for all GUI-based, non-programming apps. My IDE is installed from the AUR using yay because that depends on dependencies in the system (like python3) that I don't want to reinstall from flatpak. Finally, I use nixpkgs and tools such as nix-shell for containerization and to avoid dependency hell at all costs.