Digital Trends

Lenovo ThinkPad T61p

September 11th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

When we first lifted the T61p out of the box, it felt a bit heavy given its thin dimensions. We’ve handled hundreds, if not thousands, of notebooks in our day, and this one feels very solid, thin, and a bit heavy. The ThinkPad line has always been considered one of the most sturdy, if not the most sturdy, line of notebooks, and it’s not by accident. The T61p feels like it’s made of very solid materials and would last through years of use and abuse. The claimed weight of the notebook is 6.4lbs, which takes it out of the ultra-portable class naturally, but is light for a desktop replacement in our opinion.

We tested the T61p by using it as our home desktop for a few weeks, and came away impressed. Compared to our hand-built gaming rig, the T61p felt just as fast in everyday usage. The amount of desktop real estate is impressive due to the super-fine resolution. In fact, even though it’s a 15.4” display, it’s fine enough to run two web browser windows side-by-side—try that on your laptop!

Obviously, a 2.4GHz dual-core processor is going to run circles around office apps, email and web browsing, so it comes as no surprise that the T61p is up to these simple tasks. And since it has discrete graphics care of an NVIDIA QuadroFX 5700 chip (not the top-of-the-line, but respectable) we even played a few games. To give you an idea of its OpenGL performance, we were able to get 42.6fps in Doom 3 at 1600x1200, which is impressive for sure.

We were able to squeeze three hours and 20 minutes out of the included nine-cell battery by running the display at half illumination, which is very good. We’re sure that if the CPU were under load, or if we were playing Bioshock on an airplane it would be considerably less, however.

The T61p booted to Windows in a respectable one minute and eight seconds, which is fast enough. It’s Windows Experience Index score is a decent 4.4. Ironically, it gave a score of 5.9 for the graphics, which is the highest you can get, but only 4.4 for the CPU, despite the fact that the T7700 is the fastest mobile processor available. 

Conclusion

The T61p is a very capable and powerful notebook that should be on any cubicle jockey or road warrior’s wish list. It packs all the latest and greatest technology into a relatively thin, yet sturdy, chassis that feels incredibly solid and reeks of high-quality craftsmanship. We take issue with some of the ThinkVantage tools, and wish it had a 7200rpm hard drive, however, but these are minor annoyances.

If you’re looking for a future-proof notebook that can actually replace, and outperform, your current desktop, the T61p is a very safe bet. 


Pros:

• Will out-perform most desktops
• High-res display
• Decent battery life


Cons:

• Largely useless software
• 5400rpm hard drive