Powerhouse flagship laptop with 32 GB RAM as standard: Lenovo ThinkPad X9-15p Gen 1 review

[Redaktion]

Lenovo built the ThinkPad X9 in 2025 to compete with the Apple MacBook Air for the hearts and minds of corporate customers—and their purchasing budgets. The 2026 addition to the line, the Lenovo ThinkPad X9-15p Gen 1 Aura Edition, goes after Apple too, but shifts the focus to the creator crowd.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Powerhouse-flagship-laptop-with-32-GB-RAM-as-standard-Lenovo-ThinkPad-X9-15p-Gen-1-review.1350740.0.html

[DC]

Lenovo you need to rethink the bottom hump design it looks terrible and creates a spot for the laptop to hang in your bag or hit other objects.

[bge]

Lenovo built the ThinkPad X9 in 2025 to compete with the Apple MacBook Air

Why wasn't it called ThinkPad Air then? But since it has a fan, it can't be put in the same category as the Air anyway.

Weight-wise and RAM speed-wise (128-bit (aka dual-channel) at 9600 MT/s), it's good tho.

Since the RAM in this laptop is not upgradable: If you care about using this laptop for AI extensively, know that with 32 GB of memory (RAM+VRAM) and current SoTA AI LLM Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model, for its class and size[1], and its best bang for the buck, 4-bit quant, you will be restricted to about this amount of context:

.. I've come to the conclusion that (1) 32768 is the biggest context I can get away with in an adequately smart model, and (2) it just ain't enough.

More about running AI locally: notebookchat.com/index.php?topic=315954.0 ("Your own ChatGPT, offline: AI without the cloud on your laptop") and comments.

[1] artificialanalysis.ai/models/open-source?models=qwen3-6-35b-a3b%2Cqwen3-6-27b#artificial-analysis-intelligence-index (find and select a smaller model (you can search other models in the table) that outperforms it at at same speed, the dense 27B is better, but it's much slower)

[e55231]

>Note that we tested with the refresh rate set to 60 Hz, as this was the factory preset.

What is the point of that when you do specifically ignore factory presets and test on the performance profile for the performance results? It makes it seem like you are specifically being biased and makes me assume you tested the battery results in a different preset than the performance results... You don't specify which power profile was used for the battery results.

[ultroo]

and again no matte display option for the 15" (last years 14" had one), totally useless these mirror screens!
at least they ditched the complete 2242 ssd design flaw..