Review: Lenovo ThinkPad T490s

Conclusion

The battle between AMD Ryzen and Intel Core has made its way to the laptop market, where Intel has traditionally held the upper hand.

As we enter 2020, AMD is able to trumpet a series of much-needed design wins, and the mere fact that high-quality units such as the Surface Laptop and Lenovo ThinkPad are available with a choice of Ryzen processors is testament to AMD's progress on mobile.

But there's more to it than first meets the eye. Getting into best-selling laptops is one thing, but optimisations to maximise performance and battery life are another, and the latter in particular is an area in which AMD will need to deliver dramatic improvements with mobile Zen 2 processors launching in the coming months.

As things stand, Intel continues to deliver a convincing overall experience, and despite the presence of a low-power display, it is astonishing to see the T490s achieve an improvement in battery life of up to 80 per cent when compared to the T495s. That staggering statistic alone should be enough to convince most consumers, and while the Ryzen machine holds the upper hand in multi-threaded benchmarks and IGP performance, it is the Core i7 that ultimately provides the fast response, quiet operation and all-day battery life that many users crave.

Bottom line: the ThinkPad T495s may have been the best AMD laptop we'd tested in years, but funds permitting, the Intel-based ThinkPad T490s is even better.

Lenovo ThinkPad T490s

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The Lenovo ThinkPad T490s is available to purchase from Insight.

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