Professional users looking for a high-performance mobile workstation may want to wait a few weeks. Today, Lenovo announced its new ThinkPad P51s, P51 and P71 laptops, which will ship in March or April with 7th-Generation Core Series CPUs and high-end Nvidia Quadro graphics. Designed for engineers, architects, 3D animators and other extremely demanding users, the new P-series laptops are also available with 4K displays, color calibrators and DDR4 memory.
Available in March for a starting price of $1,049, the 15-inch ThinkPad P51s is the lightest, slimmest and most affordable of the three mobile workstations, with a starting weight of 4.3 pounds and 0.79-inch thickness. It's available with up to a Core i7 CPU, Nvidia Quadro graphics and your choice of 1080, 1080p touch or 4K screens.
Shipping in April for a starting price of $1,399, the ThinkPad P51 weighs 5.6 pounds and is 1.02 inches thick, because it makes room for an optional Intel Xeon E3 processor and Nvidia Quadro M2200M graphics. It also supports up to three storage devices in RAID 0 or RAID 1.
The 17-inch ThinkPad P71 will also debut in April with a starting price of $1,799 and a minimum weight of 7.6 pounds with a 1.2-inch thick chassis. This business behemoth is available with an X-Rite Pantone sensor for calibrating the screen color on its 4K display. It also features up to a Xeon E3-v6 processor and Nvidia Quadro P5000M graphics.
We reviewed the predecessors to these laptops: the ThinkPad P50s, P50 and P70 and were impressed with their high-end performance, gorgeous displays and snappy keyboards. However, if you're in the market for a workstation, you'll definitely want to wait for the newer models, which will have better performance thanks to their upgraded CPUs and graphics cards. We're also still waiting for Dell to upgrade its Precision workstations with 7th Gen Core processors.
