Hands-On with Lenovo's Hot ThinkPad X1 Carbon Ultrabook

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi everybody it's Dave altavilla for hot hardware.com here with the hot off the press Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Ultrabook this is lenovo's hot new 14-in Ultrabook machine based on and built on carbon fiber material for a shell and internal roll cage believe it or not so super thin and super light 31 in thick here in the front 71 in thick here in the rear at its thickest point and it weighs in it just 3 lb it is built with traditional ThinkPad quality with it you get a standard AC adapter of course as well as this gigabit Ethernet USB dongle because the machine is so thin you actually can't get a full- siize ethernet port to uh fit in the side of the chassis but um you get this dongle to go with it let's take a look around though allnew Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon and show you what this uh lightweight beauty is made of all right so the ThinkPad carbon X1 that we received in for testing was driven by an Intel third generation ivybridge core i5 3427u dual core processor clocked at 1.8 GHz with a 3M of on chip shared L3 cache also the machine can configured with 4 gig of ddr1 1333 system memory although you can get the machine configure with up to 8 gig of onboard system memory as well the disc drive subsystem was a 128 gig sata3 SSD by SanDisk but you can get up to 256 gig SSD options in the machine as well sound is courtesy of Dolby Home Theater version 4 and integrated Communications you've get ethernet via USB dongle we showed you that as well as Intel Cino advanced n625 S Wireless uh Wireless r Radio based on Intel Cino 80211 n Wi-Fi technology Bluetooth 4.0 is on board here as well as optional 3G Wan connectivity let's take a look around at ports and iio options actually before we do that Lenovo claims that the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is essentially 14 in of Ultrabook and a 13in form factor so we're going to go ahead and try and prove that out for you here I am placing on top a 13.3 in Intel Ultrabook white book this is the uh sort of plain vanilla machine that Intel sent us for the ivybridge mobile launch and it is a 13.3in form factor for sure 13.3in screen and as you can see uh it is actually almost the exact same dimensions width and depth as the ThinkPad carbon X1 the only thing you see here are these uh rounded Corners uh for the Intel whitebook that um uh the the more squarish corners of the ThinkPad carbon X1 sort of uh stick out beneath but other than that essentially Lenovo is correct in that the ThinkPad carbon X1 does compete with a standard 133 inch Ultra Book form factor although it has a 14-in screen also we would note that the rubberized coating on the top surface here is actually really nice resists fingerprints almost completely so yay for that on the left edge of the machine is the AC adapter power port interestingly enough a USB style press fit connector sort of an interesting design there um additional venting here on the side of the chassis USB two port and a wireless onoff switch and on the right edge of the ThinkPad carbon X1 we've got an SD card slot a headphone jack display port USB 3 port and a Kensington lock Port the hinge mechanism is is very solid and uh fortunately allows the display to swing completely down flat um so wide range of motion there and allows for a lot more viewing angles available uh with the machine as a result of that so really like to see that again fully extending hinge mechanism for the lid all right so K are on the bottom of the ThinkPad carbon X1 and we have to point out a little bit of a gotcha we're used to and accustomed to these days this weight class of machine the ultra thin and light notebook coming without a user serviceable battery so you can see that here uh no access to remove a battery and replace it however what you don't see on the bottom as well is a door to get access to the systems dim slots the so dim or system memory DDR3 memory on board this machine came configured with a 4 gig DDR3 system memory setup in a single sodm slot uh so if you want to upgrade the memory you can't just drop another 4 gig stick in you have to pull the 4 Gig stick and drop in an 8 gig stick and to do that you have to remove each of these screws and get access to the bottom of the system by pulling the bottom skins off not the easiest thing to do by any stretch of the imagination unless you're a Savvy user and the factory does not recommend it uh what's even a little bit more puzzling is that Lenovo decided to go with a single Channel setup one sodium slot because of the size of the system maybe perhaps um is only available in this so they're running single Channel DDR3 which robs some of the system memory bandwidth we've seen many Ultrabooks with dual Channel setups to get that full uh memory bandwidth and it may hamper performance a little bit in some of the tests and we'll uh we'll be taking a look at that in our full review uh but the keyboard area of the ThinkPad carbon X1 that's where this machine really excels this is a ThinkPad Lenovo thinkpads have historically offered some of the best typing experiences in notebooks that we've ever tested hands down and the ThinkPad carbon X1 is no exception the keyboard area is spacious comfortable and these shaped key caps Lenovo calls them smile shaped key caps actually cradle your fingertips a little bit and are very forgiving with uh keystroke errors and so very comfortable typing experience we can fly on this keyboard it's back lit that's great and um also very large multi- gesture touchpad area as well with three button Mouse control and of course the patented think uh nub here for mousing around if you prefer that also the display in the ThinkPad carbon X1 is again a gorgeous piece of equipment you've got a 14in display with a 1600x 900 resolution it is not a glossy display it is a flat matte finish display anti-glare and really nice viewing angles sharp contrasts and um really good um image quality and color saturation so very pleased with both the display and keyboard area on the think pack carbon X1 and uh once again yay for a back lit keyboard you really just nice to have that feature finally in an Ultrabook and finally here we are running PC Mark 7 which is one of the standard benchmarks that we use here at hot hardware and the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is going to score somewhere in the neighborhood of about 5200 which is is about on par with the average 13 or 14in Ultrabook that we've tested in the market these days in terms of battery life uh Lenovo claims 7 hours of untethered uptime is uh possibly available with this machine now we will prove that out in our own testing U but also they have uh rapid charge technology on board which allows the AC adapter to charge the battery um to about 80% capacity for example in only as little as 35 minutes so impressive technology there for quick char charging that uh battery on board uh in terms of price uh as configured our system came uh in at 14.99 with a core i5 3427u processor and that 128 gig SSD you can configure down to about as low as 13.99 for the lowest end skew with a core i5 3317 U processor or the high-end skew all the way up to 1849 for a core i7 3667u enabled machine with a 256 gig s SSD so uh some options there it is a premium priced Ultrabook but we would offer that it is also a very premium built Ultrabook as well really nice machine come check out the full review with all the Benchmark details I'm Dave altavilla with the ThinkPad X1 ultracarbon stop on by hot hardware and thanks for stopping by\n"