Preface

Last year, I ordered one ThinkPad P73 and one P53. After I got it, I only had time to complete the evaluation serials 1, 2, and 3 of the P73, and I was too troubled to continue. The result is: I am looking forward to the first time using the flagship in my own hands-on measurement. The desire of the ThinkPad 15-inch model, a mobile version of the professional graphics card, was not fulfilled---ThinkPad P53 was left idle for two months after it was acquired, and it was discounted before it was opened...

This year, the ThinkPad mobile workstation series has been updated. The successor of the ThinkPad P53 is the ThinkPad P15 Gen 1. Although the professional graphics card is still the same as the previous generation, the CPU is upgraded to the Intel Core 10th generation. More importantly, today The second update is brand new, the body is redesigned, and it is said that the heat dissipation has been strengthened, so that the performance can be fully utilized!

Under such circumstances, the author has been paying close attention to ThinkPad P15 and P17, and continued to collect information from various channels, and finally released a single Taiwan-US version of ThinkPad P15 Gen 1 in September and received it in early November.

Unboxing

The packaging of the ThinkPad P15 Gen 1 (hereinafter referred to as P15) is not as gorgeous as the ThinkPad P1 Gen 3, which belongs to the P series (see the "ThinkPad P1 Gen 3 Review Part 1" issued by the author)-the reason is probably ThinkPad P1 The "blood" of P15 comes from the ThinkPad X1 family-therefore, the interior of the P15 is relatively simple, it is directly the body fixed by black foam, and the power supply packed in a corrugated carton is on the left.

After taking out the two, you will find that there is also a transparent plastic bag containing paper documents.

The paper documents in the transparent plastic bag are the setting guide and the safety guide.

The power supply and power cord are directly placed in the corrugated carton without any cushioning material.

The power supply is wrapped with a transparent film, the specifications and models are the same as those used in the previous generation ThinkPad P53: square connector, 20Vx11.5A=230W, model ADL230SDC3A, produced by Delta Electronics. The factory date is 2020.09.

Exterior

The top view of the upper cover (A side) of P15, the official description is that the material is glass fiber reinforced plastic GFRP 50% (PPS695 + GF 50%).

It is found that the Lenovo logo that did not exist on the left side of the upper cover of the previous generation is now back. It is no longer the low-key engraving of the ThinkPad P50/51 era, but a more conspicuous metal nameplate with a good texture.

The top view of the bottom (D side) of the P15, near the rear of the fuselage is a long foot pad, and then a large-area heat dissipation grille. There is a dust-proof net under the grille, so the internal parts can not be seen;

To the right of the center is a maintenance compartment cover with a cooling grille at the bottom of the square;

One foot pad at the front and left and right.

On the left side of the P15, from left to right are: left heat dissipation window, HDMI 2.0, USB-A 3.2.1 (support power off), Nano-SIM slot, 3.5mm audio input and output composite port.

The Nano-SIM slot needs to use a pin-type card extractor;

This P15 does not have a WWAN card pre-installed at the factory. From the point of view that it still has a Nano-SIM slot, the official arrangement for the P15 is better than the ThinkPad P1 Gen 1.

On the right side of the P15, from left to right are: Smart-card (smart card) slot, SD card slot, USB-A 3.2.1, right heat dissipation window, and security keyhole.

On the back of the P15, there is a heat dissipation window on the left and right, and then from left to right: RJ45 wired network card interface, USB-C 3.2.1, 2x Thunderbolt 3, power interface.

The other three sides of the P15 are inclined and tapered, with a shape that shrinks toward the bottom. Officially, the material used at the bottom of the fuselage is PPS + GF

Looking carefully at the back ports, I found that the USB-C port and other ports are not on the same horizontal line, which is a bit unusual.

The P15's screen cover adopts a classic vertical screen axis, and the unfolding angle can exceed 180 degrees.

The screen of this P15 is a 4K OLED touch screen, known as Antireflection/Antismudge (Antireflection/Antismudge), but in fact, the mirror effect is still more obvious than the matte screen.

The top view of face C of P15 is as follows:

The six-row keyboard has a small keyboard, and the dual-pointing system is different from the previous generation-the three physical buttons under the touchpad are cancelled;

Below the dense round hole between the top of the keyboard and the top cover of the screen, is the speaker. The previous Dolby Atmos white font logo in the upper left corner of the keyboard is now moved to the palm rest in the lower left corner of the keyboard, and the font is also grayed out .

The location of the fingerprint reader is the same as the previous generation, located on the palm rest under the arrow keys;

Compared with the ThinkPad P71 on the left, the red pointing stick cap (commonly known as "Little Red Riding Hood") of the P15 is much shorter in height:

Disassemble

The disassembly of the P15 starts from the bottom, and there are a total of 12 screws (including one in the maintenance compartment cover) on the entire bottom.

After loosening the anti-lost screw on the maintenance compartment cover, I was ready to take it off. It was found that the cover was difficult to open, and it required very strong feminine force to remove it.

In view of the need for such a large amount of force, I thought that double-sided tape was used here, and I took off the maintenance cover and found that it was not the case. The opening force was designed to be a bit inconvenient.

On the upper part of the maintenance compartment are two vacant stepped memory slots. This P15 has four memory slots. The two pre-installed memories are installed in the other two slots.

In the lower part of the maintenance compartment are two M.2 2280 SSD slots. A KIOXIA 1TB SSD is pre-installed at the factory. The model is KXG6AZNV1T02.

The function of the light yellow plastic column at the back corner of the maintenance compartment cover corresponds to the opening detection switch of the chassis located on the main board below it.

The small hole near the light yellow plastic column is an emergency reset jack.

After removing the maintenance compartment cover, as shown in the figure below, loosen each of the screws in the upper right corner of the maintenance compartment and the lower left corner of the heat dissipation grille at the bottom of the fuselage to start disassembling the keyboard on the P15 C side:

I removed the front of the P15 keyboard and found that the three keys F9, F10, and F11 use the new Fn function key icon. For this, the official term is Unified Communications controls (unified communications control function), specifically in the keyboard of the next article Part of it will be studied again.

The lower left corner of the keyboard is an empty WWAN card slot. There are four WWAN antennas of different colors nearby. In this way, combined with the SIM card slot mentioned above, the official P15 without a pre-installed WWAN card provides a complete WWAN pre-installation. It’s a very good arrangement to set up hardware equipment, much better than the ThinkPad P1 Gen 3 policy.

The WWAN of P15 supports MIMO. There are four WWAN antennas. The blue main antenna and orange aux antenna are the same as the WLAN antenna, arranged at the top of the screen frame:

In the P15 official hardware maintenance manual, the 5G antenna interface is mentioned, and its position is as shown in the figure below. The official said: If the computer supports 5G, please connect one end of the 5G antenna to the connector. (5G antenna connector(internal):

If the computer supports 5G, connect one end of the 5G antenna and the other end to this connector), the author has not inquired the detailed information of the 5G antenna cable.

After removing the keyboard, you can continue to disassemble the entire C-side frame of the P15, but the author feels that it is of little significance, so I did not continue. Instead, turn it over, loosen all the screws on the D side, and remove the bottom case of the P15.

The removal process of the bottom case requires the use of a plastic opening pick, which is not as easy as removing the bottom cover of the ThinkPad P1 Gen 3.

The P15 bottom shell is more complicated to purchase in-house, with various reinforcing ribs, fillers, dust-proof nets and insulating sheets.

The P15 bottom shell is more complicated to purchase in-house, with various reinforcing ribs, fillers, dust-proof nets and insulating sheets.

If you look closely at the rear port, you can see the reason why the USB-C port, its location, and other ports mentioned above are not on the same horizontal line: this USB-C port is provided by the graphics card.

Part of the GPU cooling fan, together with the large heat pipe coming from the direction of the CPU, is a total of two large heat pipes and a small heat pipe. In addition, you can see N19E/N18E (GeForce) on the GPU heat sink

N19E said it supports professional graphics cards such as the mobile version of NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000;

N18E (GeForce) indicates that it supports the mobile version of RTX 2080 (N18E-G3) and RTX 2070 (N18E-G2) --- is used by ThinkPad T15g;

On the side of the cooling fan of the graphics card, you can see the words "GP540/GP740" marked on the motherboard. Combining with the GP540 found in many places above, the author can draw the following guess:

1. GP540 and GP740 are design models;

2. The G of GP means Gaming, which points to the gaming version (such as T15g). Of course, P refers to the P series of mobile workstations that use professional graphics cards—so, under GP, P15 and T15g are shared motherboards;

3.5 and 7 mean 15 inches and 17 inches, but in fact the two are now one-P15 and P17 share the motherboard;

4. As for the 40 at the end of GP540/GP740, it should refer to the five generations of P50/70, P51/P71, P52/P72, P53/P73, P15/P17 (00, 10, 20, 30 and 40).

This is the reason for the subtitle of this article "Three Minds and Two Minds"-GP540/740 is the motherboard design, and three models (T15g/P15/P17) are released, and they try to exert force in two directions at the same time (G stands for E-sports version, P represents the professional version) ---- Maybe a 17-inch e-sports version of ThinkPad will appear next year? Will it be called T17g then? These are all good questions...