Benchmarks: Vitals and Battery Life
Power consumption and temperature are no cause for concern, but as is the case with most thin-and-light laptops, this is due partly to throttling. With the ThinkPad T495s, power consumption under load averages 41 watts at the start of the test, resulting in temperature peaking at 88ºC. The numbers shown in the graphs depict the average for the last five minutes of load, at which point the chip has dialled-down to 2.5GHz.
Lenovo's claims of a 16-hour battery life may be exaggerated, yet a runtime of over 11 hours when looping a high-definition video at 50 per cent screen brightness is nonetheless impressive. This is something we've not previously seen on an AMD Ryzen laptop, and battery life is at the very least competitive with Intel systems.
In response to reader requests, we're in the process of updating our laptop reviews with a quantitative assessment of noise levels. The ThinkPad T495s fans switch off at low load, making it practically silent most of the time, and when stressed noise output peaked at a comfortable 38.9dB. Though the fans are clearly audible under heavy load, the laptop doesn't become overly obtrusive and is in fact quieter than an HP EliteBook x360 1030 G3.
We are also in the process of changing our testing methodology to incorporate the new PCMark 10 Battery Profile benchmarks. Three tests will be used; Office, which intermittently uses the writing, web browsing and video conferencing workloads from the main PCMark 10 benchmark; Video, which loops a 1080p full-screen movie file for the duration; and Gaming, which uses the common Fire Strike test to stress the GPU until the battery is drained.
In order to make the results comparable between laptops, each system is configured with a balanced power plan, wireless radios disabled, and screen brightness set as close to 120cd/m2 as possible using a calibration device. As expected, the more powerful IGP is reflected in just two hours of gaming, but it is refreshing to see the AMD-based ThinkPad deliver almost nine hours of battery life in the Modern Office test. Plenty to get through a full working day.