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Office hui, films pfui: Lenovo ThinkPad E580 tested

18.3.2019

Translation: machine translated

This ThinkPad comes with an i7 processor, AMD Radeon RX 550 and 256 GB SSD. And all this at a price of less than 850 euros. Sounds like great value for money.

I'm not entirely unbiased towards Lenovo's ThinkPad series. Privately, I still own a ThinkPad X220 from 2011, which runs and runs without ever thinking of giving up the ghost. That's why I associate the ThinkPad brand name with robustness, reliability and, above all, longevity. Let's see how a current ThinkPad performs.

Notebooks

Lenovo ThinkPad E580

Intel Core i7-8550U, 8 GB, 15.60", 256 GB, DE

Technical data of the tested version:

Intel Core i7-8550U
AMD Radeon RX 550 2 GB
8 GB RAM (SO-DIMM, DDR4-2400)
256 GB SSD (M.2, PCIe 3.0 x4 / NVMe)
15.6" Full HD IPS display (anti-glare)
Dolby Advanced audio speakers, dual array microphone and front camera (720p video resolution)
Fingerprint reader
3-cell lithium polymer battery with 45 Wh
Military standard MIL-STD 810G
Windows 10 Pro

Retro design with plenty of ports

Evil tongues would say that this device has a "plastic bomber" design. But that's not true, because the notebook lid is covered in aluminium. I really like the design. ThinkPads simply have charm. It is welcome that even design elements from IBM's first hour in 1992 are still part of the current series. The red accent on the mouse buttons is just great.

USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C (power connection), HDMI, 2 x USB 3.0 Type-A, jack connection

The black, robust-looking E580 has the military standard MIL-STD 810G, weighs 2.1 kilograms and measures 36.9 × 25.2 × 1.99 centimetres (W × D × H). As far as the connections are concerned, Lenovo is moving a little with the times. A USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C, which also serves as a power connection, is located on the left-hand side. Next to it are an HDMI port, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports and a jack port.

SD slot, USB 2.0 type-A, RJ45 port, Kensington lock

On the right side you will find an SD slot, a USB 2.0 Type-A, an RJ45 port and a Kensington lock. Incidentally, Lenovo has omitted the VGA port here compared to the predecessor E570. Instead, the USB-C port can also be used as a DisplayPort connection using an adapter. That sounds good, as the existing HDMI port can operate an external monitor in UHD resolution at just 30 Hz.

Display: Sufficient for office

The 15.6" IPS display comes with Full HD resolution and is anti-glare. Although it does not have a high resolution, text and images look sharp. Unfortunately, that's the only really positive thing I can say about this panel. The colours appear pale, which is also confirmed by a measurement using "x-rite i1Display Pro". The colour space coverage is subterranean - only 58.1 per cent of sRGB is covered. For Adobe RGB it is 41 per cent and for DCI-P3 42.2 per cent.

The brightness is also not convincing. On the highest setting, I measured an average of 235 nits. As can be seen in the picture above, the illumination is not even. It drops significantly in the bottom right corner. The static contrast of the display is 1151:1 and the dynamic contrast is 2937:1.

Large keyboard

You also get a numeric keypad. Picture shows the keyboard of the Swiss version

I am now used to a key travel of one millimetre. Nevertheless, I'm pleased to finally have a little more travel under my fingers again. The 1.78 millimetres are a rarity these days, but the ten-finger system works better with it and thanks to the clear trigger point. In terms of volume, the keyboard is one of the quieter models. Another plus and a rarity these days is the numeric keypad, which should be a must for an office device. The keyboard has a two-stage backlight

The touchpad measures 10 × 6.8 cm and the surface is made of plastic. This feels a little less smooth than a glass surface, but the pointer moves just as quickly and accurately. Gestures also work without any problems. The touchpad has integrated click buttons. As usual for ThinkPads, you will also find three additional mouse buttons above the pad, which belong to the red trackpoint. This is located between the "G", "H" and "B" keys. The good thing about the small knob is that you can control the mouse without moving your hands away from the keys. You use the aforementioned buttons to click, with the centre button being used for scrolling.

Speakers that sound bad even with certification

Wow, the stereo speakers mounted in front of the keyboard on the side under the chassis have Dolby Advanced certification. But Lenovo could have easily saved the money for this. The sound is almost like that of my Fisher Price radio from my childhood. In other words, like from a can. It doesn't matter what genre I listen to, low frequencies always sound muffled and it feels like half the frequencies are lost in the mid-range. Only the treble sounds clean. At least the speakers match the display and therefore help to achieve a uniformly inferior output quality when watching films.

Battery performance: continuous YouTube streaming

I set the brightness of the display to the medium level for continuous streaming with YouTube. The automatic shutdown occurs after 7 hours and 19 minutes. This is a rather modest result, which the Dell XPS 15, for example, also achieved.

Note: The battery lasts well in everyday office use. Depending on the activities, I achieve around 9 hours.

Battery performance: Stress test with HeavyLoad and Furmark

To push all the hardware to its limits, I ran the HeavyLoad stress test and FurMark at the same time with the screen at maximum brightness. The battery dies after 1 hour and 7 minutes, which is a rather moderate performance.

CPU

The Intel Core i7-8550U was introduced in the third quarter of 2017 and is an economical 64-bit quad-core SoC - i.e. designed for mobile devices. It is based on an improved version of the Kaby Lake microarchitecture and is manufactured using the extended second generation of the 14 nm+ process. It operates at a clock speed of 1.8 GHz, has a turbo boost of up to 4 GHz and a TDP of 15 watts. The power consumption can also be reduced to 10 watts or increased to 25 watts by the manufacturer, which reduces the clock rate to 800 MHz or increases it to 2 GHz. The variant installed here is clocked at 1.8 GHz.

The chip is also equipped with Intel's UHD Graphics 620, which runs at 300 MHz and has a maximum dynamic frequency of 1.15 GHz.

Graphics card

The entry-level mobile GPU Radeon RX 550 from AMD was introduced in July 2017 and is based on the Lexa graphics processor. It is manufactured using the 14 nm process and supports the limited feature list of DirectX 12. The version installed here has 2 GB of GDDR5 video RAM, which is connected via a 128-bit interface. The GPU employees at a frequency of 1100 MHz and has a boost of up to 1287 MHz. The TDP is 50 watts.

Performance: Cinebench R15

With Cinebench R15 from Maxon, you can test how your PC performs when rendering Cinema 4D content. Processors with more cores will always deliver a better result here. If you want to compare processors with Cinebench R15, this is only possible if both processors have the same number of threads.

This is how the ThinkPad performs:

If this device did not have a dedicated graphics card installed, it would have to rely on the UHD Graphics 620 graphics processor integrated on the SoC. With this, around 52.11 fps would be possible, as the Microsoft Surface Pro 6 shows. This means that the AMD Radeon RX 550 installed here delivers a performance increase of around 26 per cent.

With the 558 CPU points achieved and the 65.53 fps, the E580 achieves a similar performance to the Zenbook 14 from Asus, which is equipped with an Intel Core i5-8265U and Nvidia GeForce MX150 and achieves 569 CPU points and 81.04 fps.

Performance: Geekbench 4

Geekbench 4 is a cross-platform benchmark. It runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and iOS. In version 4 of the CPU benchmark, the base value of 4000 points reflects the performance of an Intel Core i7-6600U clocked at 2.60 GHz. In addition to simulated real-world scenarios with which the CPU is tested (single-core and multi-core), Geekbench can also determine GPU performance in the areas of image processing and machine vision. You can also compare the results with other systems thanks to the Geekbench Brower.

Geekbench results of the ThinkPad:

The result achieved here is also comparable with the Zenbook 14. In terms of CPU score, the ThinkPad is slightly ahead (the Zenbook 14 achieves 4495 single-core points and 13,999 multi-core points). However, it loses the OpenCL benchmark with 31,992 to 41,825 points.

If you would like to see the benchmark results in detail:

Conclusion: Good price-performance with two flaws

Lenovo has only slightly dampened my fondness for ThinkPads with the E580. With this device, you get a generously equipped office notebook in 15.6-inch format for the price. The beauty of the retro-inspired design is debatable. It looks robust and, above all, is well thought out. You get a lot of power (i7 processor, dedicated graphics card), enough storage space and connections, an excellent keyboard and battery power for a working day.

Unfortunately, the device has two flaws. The display is good enough for office employees, but at 235 nits it is unfortunately not the brightest. In addition, it is poorly lit and, I can't say it any other way, the colour space coverage is below par. It achieves just 58.1 per cent in sRGB. Almost every current external IPS monitor achieves almost 100 per cent. In order to make watching films more enjoyable than just poor colour reproduction, the good thing also has an audio output from the can.

If you are looking for a high-performance work laptop for everyday office use, you will be happy with this ThinkPad. However, if you want to do more with it, I can't recommend buying one. <p

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Martin Jud

Senior Editor

martin.jud@digitecgalaxus.ch

I find my muse in everything. When I don’t, I draw inspiration from daydreaming. After all, if you dream, you don’t sleep through life.

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