The X1 Carbon is a fanboy’s nightmare.

2020 Update: Since purchasing this machine, I have long ago made it worthwhile by fixing the throttling and battery issues through software TDP limit tweaking, undervolting, and disabling Hyperthreading. While my feelings on first impressions have not changed, and as an average user who is not tech savvy, my review here remains truthful, I can no longer claim that the battery life or performance is poor. This machine ended up being my daily driver up until the launch of the 6-core X1C7, and I still prefer the X1C6 for typing.

The 1.8mm of key travel on the X1C6 isn’t as great as 2.3mm on the T430, but compared to any other laptop on the market it is best in class. The X1C7 reduces this further to 1.5mm, and going from 1.8mm to 1.5mm is even more noticeable than 2.3mm to 1.8mm. Both machines are still my top picks for current gen laptops, and the battery issues are now non-existent thanks to the advent of USB-C Power Delivery and huge capacity power banks, which is the greatest innovation for laptops in a decade as far as I’m concerned. I now daily the X1C7 due to the increase in battery life (yes, even though battery capacity itself was decreased by ~11%), and the keyboard is usable at 1.5mm.

Beware: This is NOT a fair review!

Ever since I heard about the arrival of the X1 Carbon in 2012, I’ve been wanting to get my hands on the device. An Ultrabook with proper ThinkPad branding and a nice sleek design? Sign me up. Well, maybe.

Unfortunately, ULVs were pretty poor at the time, still under performing their M variants, and when the second generation of the X1 Carbon rolled around three years later, it had the most ridiculous keyboard anyone had ever seen on a mobile laptop in recent history.

Adaptive touch keys, a single button TouchPad, and the weirdest key layout anyone had ever seen were all present in one ridiculous package when the X1 2nd generation came around. This generation is universally hailed as the worst due to the keyboard alone, despite having a much improved processor and display (the original X1 Carbon didn’t have an FHD option — though it is available now via third party mods).

The 3rd through 5th generations were fairly uneventful incremental improvements, with the 3rd generation undoing the horrors that were bestowed upon the keyboard in the previous generation, and it was around that time that ULVs finally caught up to the previous M series in performance numbers — this probably being the most impressive improvement to mobile CPUs in nearly a decade.

2017 came and I almost wrote off the previously announced Quad Core ULV chips as vaporware, as this was my most anticipated improvement to ULVs and Intel chips as a whole in recent history. Eventually (Q3 2017) Intel came through, and we were given the beauty that was the 8250u, 8550u, and 8650u processors. It was then that I knew I would finally pick up a new Thinkpad, and deal with the ugliness of the chiclet keyboard in exchange for that sweet quad core goodness.

Before diving into the actual review of the X1 Carbon 6th Generation, it is important to note that I had very high expectation for this machine. I am writing this from the viewpoint of a hardcore ThinkPad fanboy. My main mobile machine that I thought I could replace with the X1C6 is an insanely modified T430 that I built from basically scratch.

I have bought, disassembled, destroyed, or otherwise mutilated probably more than a dozen T430 Thinkpads in the last 2–3 years alone, building budget options and upgraded machines for others. There are probably 4 or 5 friends that now use a T430 as their daily driver that they spent less than $250 on because I convinced them to give it a shot (and offered to build them one to their specifications!). My own T430 is built from at least 6 of those machines, and I’m frequently found displaying cult like behavior when it comes to the T430.

With that said, here are the (relevant) specs that I’m pitting the X1C6 up against:

• FHD B140HAN01.3 1920 x 1080 Display
• 188Wh Battery (9-cell + slice)
• 4.0 GHz Quad Core / 4.2 GHz Single Core Ivy Bridge (3840QM)
• Classic Keyboard with properly flashed Embedded Controller
• Advanced BIOS and Overclocking unlocked
• 16GB DDR3L 1866MHz RAM
• Slice Batteries — the precursor to “Power Bridge”
• 2TB of SSD storage.

The above configuration that I carried around as my daily driver runs sprints around almost any current generation laptop, benchmarking almost on par with the highest tier Xeon found in the latest generation of P series notebooks (if you don’t believe me, here’s the link — I have the top benchmarks for that CPU thanks to my modified BIOS).

With all the work and upgrades done, both my T430 and my X1C6 model come at just about the same price range — ~$2,000 USD. With those things in mind, lets finally begin the review.

The Good

It’s really light and thin. My T430 is an absolute behemoth of a laptop. I haven’t weighed the thing, but the PSREF puts the T430 at 5.13lbs with the 9-cell — adding the slice battery puts this machine at nearly 7 pounds! The X1C6 weighs in at merely a third of the weight at just two and a half pounds. This is no contest — and is one of my biggest reasons for wanting to switch. The X1C6 also gets a small bonus point here because it will actually fit comfortably in just about all 13.3" laptop sleeves and bags. It’s that small.

The screen is a dream. It took me almost two years to chase down a full HD 1080p modification kit for my T430, and it suffers from flicker issues when on power. The X1C6 came with a beautiful (and thin) WQHD 2560x1440 display, with the same color gamut and brightness as the 1080p I have on my T430. There’s no contest here. If you order the FHD model, however, you are not getting much of an upgrade from what the T430 is capable of with mods.

The RAM is lower voltage, and the SSD is fast. The T430 supports 16GB DDR3L RAM up to 2133MHz, though I only have 1866MHz. I installed dual two and a half inch 1TB SSD drives after swapping the CD drive for a second SSD bay. The X1 Carbon comes with a 512GB NVMe drive which carries with it a significant speed increase, though it’s not as large. The RAM is 2133MHz and — more importantly, takes 12.5% less power due to it being soldered LPDDR3 (1.35V vs 1.2V).

The Neutral

The CPU throttles — but it’s (sorta) fixable.

At stock, you will basically never sustain above 3GHz under even a medium load. Apart from a ridiculously short boost to 25W, this machine then throttles the moment it gets near 15W and will sit below it, tanking your clocks to sub 2.0GHz under any serious load. It is literally impossible to run a 1 minute Intel XTU test without throttling on stock settings. You will never thermal throttle with this machine with stock TDP settings, because the BIOS gimps the CPU so much it can’t even attempt to get hot.

Luckily, you can burst up to 44W with 25W sustained thanks to Intel XTU and the TDP limits not being locked. This makes the CPU perform better than most HQ chips, and with less battery usage thanks to the great bins on the Kaby Lake-R chips. With ThrottleStop, you can enable TDP up and get a constant 25W out of it, making the performance not only more reasonable, but superior to the majority of laptops out there right now. This is technically the greatest feature of this laptop, but it’s listed as neutral because at stock the Carbon has the worst CPU performance I have EVER seen in the last few generations, due to insane BIOS throttling that comes shipped with it.

The Ugly

The keyboard is atrocious.

Yes, I’m coming from a classic keyboard, but it isn’t just that. Aside from shifting to the new 6-row layout, the travel is abysmal. When the switch to the island style keyboard arrived via the xx30 line, the key travel and switches remained unchanged. So even though you lost the layout, the typing experience did not change much (despite what others might try to tell you because of their inherent bias). As the generations progressed, people began to report a reduced key travel, and in a machine as thin as the X1C6, key travel is reduced to almost nothing. It was the first thing I noticed when I started using the machine, and it’s not pleasant at all. The trackpoint feels like garbage for the same reason — there’s no depth to it whatsoever.

Battery life is a joke.

Despite all the ridiculous throttling the X1C6 does, it will not hit the advertised 19.3 hour battery life basically ever, unless you are idling. With a 57Wh battery, hitting 19.3 hours would require an average of 2.95 watts of power throughout. While typing this post, I’ve been hovering between 5 and 9 watts, which translates to a middle ground of about 8 hours — and that’s without doing any development or CPU intensive work. Light web tasks generally seem to hover around this amount, so don’t get your hopes up if you were expecting more than 6–8 hours under normal circumstances. Disabling turbo completely and enabling Speed Step is the only reasonable way to hit the target wattage, rendering the machine unusable for anything but light web browsing. For reference — I use 30% brightness at almost all times.

You will of course get better results with an FHD display, but don’t expect the results to blow you away — official numbers state something like an extra two hours at most from a full charge — and that’s with the 500 nit HDR display when compared to the entry level 300 nit FHD. This is probably my sorest point next to the CPU throttling, as my T430, while weighing an enormous amount, has 3.3x as much battery capacity and lasts longer doing actual work than the X1C6 does doing light web tasks. Seriously disappointing.

Conclusion

At the $2,000 price point, it seems absurd that the performance of the machine is so gimped at stock settings. I definitely expected some kind of miracle out of the X1C6, but the least Lenovo could have done was configure the TDP-up so it ran at 25W out of the box. If you’re expecting anything even remotely close to the advertised battery life, you’re stuck enabling TDP-down and getting CPU performance that a cheap tablet PC could provide.

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t expecting this tiny thing to blow away the monster that is my T430. But it’s been six years, and this is what Lenovo puts out as their flagship? Really? A locked down ultrabook that can’t even get half the performance of my 2012 hardware. If I throttled my T430 as hard as the X1C6 does I’d easily get 20+ hours of battery life, and better performance.