Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 Review: A Laptop That Will Torpedo Your Work/Life Balance

I don’t much like the feeling that I’m taking my work with me. I want to hide from any thought that my “workstation” PC is smuggled into my backpack, the machine buzzing with the ire of blogs and reviews still unwritten.

The fact that Lenovo’s big workstation PC, the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8, feels so thin and fits so well into my bag is a bad portent. I can’t pretend the device is good for gaming, either. The ThinkPad P1 is a workhorse without thrills and very few frills. It’s also late to the party. But damn is it thin, and damn does it feel so nice it makes the thought of the daily grind a little more palatable.

Cracking open the lip on the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 feels like it makes the all-dark, militaristic torpedo of a PC enticing and so dread-worthy. This rendition of the workstation PC comes with a 16-inch, 3.2K (3,200 x 2,000 pixel resolution) OLED touchscreen with a stock 120Hz refresh rate. By the way, that’s not just OLED but tandem OLED. It’s essentially two layers of organic light-emitting diodes in front of each other, promising no compromises in beautiful contrast or brightness. And if you can’t stand the glossy, highly reflective screens that you get on Lenovo’s other OLEDs like the Legion Pro 7i, the matte filter on the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 helps keep it from becoming a mirror only Narcissus would enjoy.

Beyond that, the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 is packing an excellent keyboard (plus the standard TrackPoint red “nipple”), a slick haptic touchpad, and palm rests that feel like I’m laying my hands on a smooth platform of muslin instead of plastic. This laptop hit the scene at the tail end of 2025, though I can’t imagine how Lenovo might improve the simple, though effective, design in the new year.

For review, Lenovo sent me the 21Q8001UUS model with an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H CPU and an Nvidia RTX Pro 2000 GPU. Otherwise, it’s packing a standard set of 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 1TB of storage. With those specs, the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 costs $3,525 from Lenovo’s website. You can choose to build this laptop with 64GB of RAM and up to 4TB of storage. At that point, you would spend well over $4,305. Those specs could not have come at a more unfortunate time, now that Intel has promised the next generation of Series 3 CPUs are set to outperform Intel’s older chips in performance and battery life.

There are so many reasons to like the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8, but it’s the victim of poor timing. It may not offer the performance you actually want when spending more than $3,500 for a laptop with these specs inside.

A delightful typing experience

This is a clean typing experience if there ever was one. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

When I first start testing a laptop, I always check if it will pass the “fits in my backpack’s laptop sleeve” test. You wouldn’t believe how many 16-inch models fail to meet that standard, especially those that promise high-end performance in “slim” designs. The ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 barely manages to make room. I’m not complaining. As my cat will tell you, if it fits, it sits (in my bag—and that goes for both feline and notebook).

Once it’s slotted into your backpack, the laptop won’t feel like a lead weight around your shoulders. Sure, the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 is not exactly light since its all-aluminum chassis starts at around 4.06 pounds and grows a teensy bit heavier depending on your configuration, but that’s not enough to keep me from flinging it on my bed one-handed at the end of a day.

The nipple in all its glory. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

What’s more, the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 is as silent as the grave. Even under strain, when I was conducting my slate of graphics benchmarks, the fans rarely picked up above the level of hushed library conversation. There are very few embellishments on this ThinkPad. After all, this is supposed to scream “professional” with the kind of subdued exuberance of a QA tester who just got done with their fifth TPS report. You’re getting the traditional TrackPoint nub, which is less useful than it is iconic for most people used to today’s trackpads. You also have an embossed ThinkPad logo on the right-hand palm rest and another logo on the laptop lid, with a single red LED light telling you when the laptop is on.

Speaking of minimal embellishments, you’ll get just enough I/O ports for most daily tasks, and nothing more. There are two Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports plus another Thunderbolt 4. Both types accept the 140W GaN charger that comes in the box. There’s also a single USB-A, HDMI 2.1, and a headphone jack. Thankfully, Lenovo did leave us with a full-size SD card reader. The ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 rounds things off with a fingerprint reader power button at the top right of the open shell.

Little red LEDs sell this as a real worker’s workbook.© Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

While the keyboard will feel familiar to anybody with ThinkPad experience, those who lack that pedigree will eventually come to love the P1’s keyboard. The keys have wide spacing and raised edges that make typing feel fast and seamless. The buttons come down with a hearty clack that helped me get into the groove as I wrote this article. In that vein, Lenovo also took some time to ensure the haptic trackpad had enough texture that the glassy panel wouldn’t feel like an ice rink. A haptic pad uses force feedback to simulate a click without depressing any mechanical switches. If there’s any philosphy the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 embodies, its a puritan level of finding joy through simple, effective work.

Bright, hi-res tandem OLED screen

It’s not as pretty as some OLEDs, but you can take it outdoors without much issue. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

For the price you’re paying, you would want the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 to become your multimedia go-to. With a 3.2K tandem OLED touch display, it sure as hell can be the one device you look for when streaming content. Whether it will look as good as some other displays is another question entirely. This is a work laptop, which means it necessitates some compromises so users can also take this 16-incher places where there’s more ambient light.

This is a tandem OLED display, which, it should be said, is one of the best options available for screens right now. A typical OLED is nominally less bright than a high-quality LCD, like a mini LED screen, which has built-in backlights. Self-emissive screens need to rely on other techniques, hence why there are two layers of diodes inside the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8’s display. The screen promises a peak brightness of 1,500 nits in HDR, but what you should care more about is that there won’t be a situation where the screen is too dark to see anything, especially when outdoors.

Don’t worry, there’s a privacy shutter for the webcam. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

I’ve yet to witness a screen manage to hit the perfect balance of beauty and usability. A glossy display combined with OLED will inevitably look better than one with a matte display. At the very least, Lenovo’s ThinkPad P1 threads the needle better than most. I only caught some spots of light diffusion when positioning the screen directly in front of a light source or with my back directly facing the blaring New York sun in winter. Even then, the spots only took up a small area of the display, and I could discern much of what was happening on-screen.

The screen also supports VRR, or variable refresh rate, between 40Hz and 120Hz. Is that good enough for gaming? Potentially, depending on what you’re planning to run. For the sake of listening to the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8, the experience is just about what you can expect from a laptop of this size. It’s carrying two downfiring 2W stereo speakers. The beveled design of the shell means you’re not losing out on as much audio quality as you do on flatter designs when the sound gets muffled by the desk underneath. While the laptop supports Dolby Atmos sound, you still won’t feel like it’s good enough to compete with any minimal external speaker setup. The speakers are only good enough to listen to your colleagues drone through a Zoom meeting.

Great for some tasks, meh for others

The ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 may not be perfect for creative tasks like rendering, but it can still hold its own. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

There are several configurations of the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 available, though there’s a variable “build your own” option to mix and match various specs. There’s a version of this laptop that will likely set you back close to $4,000 if you pack it with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU. I can’t tell you how that might perform, though I can offer a little insight about the Core Ultra 7 255H.

This is a 16-core, 16-thread CPU with a max boost clock of 5.1GHz. This Arrow Lake-level chip is different from the HX chips that were found in so many gaming-ready laptops from 2025. They may have similar core counts as Intel’s maximum power chips, though they’re performing at a lower wattage. They’re designed as a jack-of-all-trades chip, though we’re still sitting on a Series 2 design. Similarly, the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 runs the Nvidia RTX Pro 2000 GPU. That’s in the same family as the other Blackwell-level graphics cards from the GeForce RTX 50-series, but it’s not made for gaming. It’s there to handle graphics tasks as they come up, not for dedicated rendering on par with a full-fledged, large-and-in-charge creative or gaming laptop.

Taken together, these specs will offer something in between a thin-and-light notebook and a heftier desktop device. That means a marginally better battery life and far less usefulness as any kind of gaming platform. The RTX Pro 2000 Blackwell includes 16GB of DDR7 VRAM, more than you’ll get in any mobile device running a discrete RTX 5070 GPU. However, in some tasks, you’ll find the RTX Pro 2000 provides graphics performance equivalent to a last-gen RTX 4060 laptop GPU.

There’s a subtle sleekness to the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

The Intel Core Ultra 7 255H doesn’t exactly scream performance. In Geekbench 6, it performs on par with an AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 in single-core but hits 4,000 points better in multi-core tests. However, compared to Intel’s HX chip variants, like you see with the Core Ultra 9 275HX, it will still underperform by 300 points in single-core and 3,000 points in multi-core settings.

In Cinebench tests, which show off the CPU’s rendering capabilities, the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8’s mid-range Arrow Lake chip will still win out over Lunar Lake chips, including the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V found in an Acer Predator Triton 14 AI, but just barely. It can’t hold a candle to Apple’s M5 chip, even though the latest 14-inch MacBook Pro was hindered by a certain amount of thermal throttling.

In 3DMark tests, the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 hits solid scores, but this GPU is not what you need for anything more than lower-end graphics work and light gaming. In many tests, the RTX Pro 2000 claims little space above an RTX 4060 from 2023.
However, in regular work applications you’ll see it can make a case for itself. In my Blender tests, where we have the PC render a scene of a BMW relying on the CPU and GPU, the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 could beat the Ryzen AI 7 350 in a Framework 16 laptop by 30 seconds thanks to the Intel Core Ultra 7 255H. The GPU managed the scene in 21 seconds, which is slower than a Razer Blade 14’s RTX 5070 GPU and 14-MacBook Pro with M5 chip, but it’s still no slouch.

As for the CPU, the Intel Core Ultra 7 255H isn’t going to beat a base 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 in terms of performance. Apple’s latest CPU outperforms it by nearly 1,000 points in Geekbench 6 multi-core tests. This mid-range Intel Arrow Lake CPU would barely overtake a MacBook Air with M4. And at the $3,500 price point, where we don’t even have it specced out with the best CPU or up to 8TB of storage, that performance should sit in the back of your mind as you dial in on your particular specs.

Seriously strong battery life

At a little more than four pounds, this isn’t a laptop that takes much effort to haul around. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

A gaming PC with a full RTX 50-series GPU would inevitably drain a laptop of all its precious battery life. The ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 threads the needle and manages to sport a full all-day battery life despite its solid CPU and GPU capabilities.

With regular use, where I’m using the laptop for my daily writing, blogging, and photo editing, I could nearly net a full day’s work out of this laptop. The PC went into battery-saving mode on average six hours after I started my workday, and I could squeak out another two hours of use from full. That’s only doing menial browsing and typing tasks. When abusing the GPU, you’ll naturally see a less-than-full-day battery life.

The extra benefit of the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 is the fast-charging capabilities you get from the 140W power brick. This isn’t a regular power adapter but a GaN charger. A gallium nitride power adapter will naturally be more efficient than most of the larger bricks you’re accustomed to. The ThinkPad P1 Gen 8’s brick is comparatively petite, and it still manages to support faster charging on the laptop’s 90Wh battery than what you typically see. Lenovo promised I could go from 0 to 80% in an hour. In my tests, I could get it from near zero to just below 80% in under an hour.

That 140W GaN charging brick allows for quick charging time. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo

I’m left with an interesting quandary. I enjoy the hell out of the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8. Knowing it costs as much as it does, I can’t help but imagine there are certain advantages you’ll get from a more powerful desktop-level laptop rather than a workstation PC as slim as this one. The ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 is the kind of PC for the workhorse who wants as much power as possible without needing to sacrifice any one thing—except GPU performance. It looks and feels better than any current MacBook Pro you’ll find today (until Apple finally gets out of bed and gives us an OLED MacBook Pro). ThinkPad’s appeal remains, but we’re still waiting for that perfect CPU and GPU powerful and long-lasting enough to make me loathe the thought of ever getting near my work PC.