Weak quadro. You might get the feeling of experiencing a déjà-vu when first looking at the ThinkPad P52s. The mobile workstation looks exactly like the ThinkPad T580. Is combining the case of an office laptop with a Quadro GPU a good idea? Find out in our detailed review.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-P52s-i7-8550U-Full-HD-Workstation-Review.313424.0.html
All that space and not one dedicated M.2 2280 slot. Also no options for better FHD screen or dedicated graphics. It's somewhat disappointing.
So we should wait for T580s then?
In a nutshell, this is a ThinkPad T580 with the following "features":
- significantly more expensive than faster and better T580, hurray!
- slower processor performance under sustained load
- poor GPU performance comapred to MX150
- huge performance gap between P52s and P52
- no real M.2 slot with full speed PCIe lanes
- thicker, larger, heavier and more expensive than Dell XPS 15 9570 which is 60% faster
The T580 is actually about $200 more expensive than P52s. About $124 more expensive with perks.
The HP Zbook 14u or 15u which are about same price would be better choice since they are much lighter (3.27lb for 14u and 3.89lb for 15u) and offer up to 6X faster PCIEx4 M.2 NVME SSD performance and also at least 2X more GPU performance with their 65W AMD Radeon Pro WX 3100 graphics which beats the 30W Quadro P500 considerably in benchmarks (i.e. 3589 vs 1685 in Passmark test).
I was considering this laptop to carry me through architecture school (I am moving from an old MacBook Pro and starting my 4th year). Based on the comments I am somewhat dubious. Can one of the other commenters make a different recommendation? I need something that will be relatively light and durable (laptop comes with me every day to school). It needs to have the following minimum specs: 16GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, i7 quad core processor, and a strong dedicated graphics card. My daily programs are Rhino, Revit, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign (I hope to also be rendering with 3DS Max, V-ray). Dell Precision 5520 is too expensive with all of the upgrades but that would have been the front runner.
I just bought this second hand, wanting to get my hands on a "legendary" P52s. I am not very dependent on a capable GFX card, but having the P500 makes it at least possible to do some editing and rendering, even gaming. Putting in a couple os NVMe drives and maxing the internal RAM will make for a powerful workstation for not a lot of money, gave about 700$ for it. It is a wonderful laptop for those who appreciate a capable 15'6 with Thinkpad quality and above average battery time, even today.
Well, what is it today "powerful workstation"? It is slightly faster than the Pentium 2022. The bottom for performance.
Now, if it was possible to replace the motherboard with a new U-series processor with exactly the same connector layout, then it would probably be a good use of an old rugged case. But then again - even the screen is morally outdated.
And that U-series of processors from Intel was the most unfortunate acquisition in many years...