Lenovo ThinkBook 16p Gen 3 Review (2023)

Lenovo's ThinkBook 16p Gen 3 (starting at $1,438; $1,802 as tested) is a bit of an enigma. This AMD Ryzen-based business laptop is presented as a visually striking device for small-to-medium businesses seeking high performance and security features—a laptop that's able to perform business tasks and content creation. Lenovo certainly delivers on most of those fronts, but its laptop's limited color-gamut coverage, and underwhelming showings in most of our performance tests, make it difficult to recommend as a top pick for content creation. However, the ThinkBook 16p Gen 3 would be fine for most basic office productivity and lighter content creation tasks, especially if your organization can get a bulk deal on this one.

A Business Laptop That Can't Find Its Place

One of the key aims for the ThinkBook 16p is content creation, with its AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX 3.3GHz CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics processor. X-Rite Pantone-certified color calibration was even applied to the screen. However, while our Datacolor Spyder tests show 99% accuracy for Adobe sRGB color space, it shows only 76% on Adobe RGB and 77% on DCI-P3—not terrible, but hardly the stuff of professional content creation. Since the laptop is well-designed and responsive, but not quite as powerful as many workstation laptops, gaming laptops, and even consumer-grade content creation models, the question becomes: "What's it best for?"

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

This ThinkBook features a bright 16-inch screen, a trim design, and an attractive aluminum case with a low-reflection surface in Mineral Gray. Measuring 0.73 inches by 13.95 inches by 9.92 inches (HWD) and weighing 4.18 pounds, it's a bit on the hefty side.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Lenovo's ThinkBook keyboard, like many these days, produces a shallow stroke with a modest spring at the bottom. It’s easy to type on, even at speed. However, I continue to long for the deeper press and more forceful feedback available with the standard-setting keyboards you get on Lenovo's ThinkPads.

Because this unit has a 16-inch display, there’s room for a number pad to the right of the main keyboard layout. That's a plus for those who often work in spreadsheets, although the narrower caps on the number keys may limit fast data entry. Also, due to the separate numeric keypad, the touchpad sits more to the left than it would otherwise. This does not present a problem, assuming that most of your input will be with the letter keys.

The arrow keys are in the ideal inverted T, separate from the other keys, a welcome design element. However, they do double duty with Home, Page Up, Page Down, and End as Function keys. This is serviceable, but obviously not as convenient as the six-key cluster that's standard on desktop keyboards and includes Insert and Delete. The top-row keys are less than half as tall as the letter keys, and they don’t line up vertically, which makes it tricky to use them when touch-typing. These include Escape, Volume Up and Down, Airplane Mode, and Delete.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Dolby Atmos Gets the Most Out of Small Speakers

As with all laptops, the ThinkBook’s speakers confront the challenge of small size. The dual 2-watt (W) speakers face downward, which mutes the volume slightly. However, the audio gains a boost from Dolby Atmos, the system behind most movie-theater audio.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Dolby Atmos supports multi-speaker 7.1 surround sound, plus two additional overhead speakers and software to locate the sound “object” within a three-dimensional audio space. (Of course, nine speakers are not going to happen on a laptop.) As implemented on the ThinkBook, Dolby Atmos gives the audio a distinct dimensional quality, so you can almost hear the raindrops changing location as leaves sway in the breeze of the demo clip. But with only 2W per channel, the sound is limited in impact, like listening to a symphony orchestra performing in a shoe box. At least distortion is minimal, and that's impressive to hear from a business laptop.

Connectivity includes Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0. The 71-watt-hour, 230W battery supports Rapid Charge Pro, which can get the battery up to 50% from zero in 30 minutes.

Lenovo's standard warranty for the ThinkBook 16p is one year of Depot Support. With this plan, if your problem isn't solved after phone consultation for technical or common-use issues, you're responsible for delivering the laptop to a designated service center for repair or exchange, and for picking it up once repaired. Extensions to the base warranty can be purchased for up to four more years; Onsite and Premier Onsite services can be purchased for up to five years.

Like most Lenovo laptops, the ThinkBook 16p comes with Lenovo Vantage installed. This software is basically an interface that helps you personalize audio and visual settings, update drivers, clean up accumulated junk, optimize Windows settings, and find customer support.

Our ThinkBook 16p review configuration comes with Windows 11 Pro, as well as a trial copy of McAfee security and antivirus software. It’s helpful to have this protection starting out, though the software becomes a bit of a pest as the end of the trial period nears. Finally, it will give up and offer a free version of the McAfee software, even if you already installed a free version of a different antivirus brand.

Useful Ports All Around...the Back, That Is

Lenovo's ThinkBook 16p has a full complement of ports, with four along the rear edge: USB 3.2 Gen 2, USB 3.2 (this one always-on), HDMI 2.1, and a 230W power connector. This rear positioning turns out to be quite useful, especially for the power connector.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Along the left edge are a 3.5mm headphone/microphone jack and an SD card reader...

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

...and on the right side are a 40Gbps USB4 port, a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, and a Kensington Nano security cable lock notch.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Frankly, it would be better if Lenovo had managed to squeeze in an additional USB port on the left side—for maximum accessibility. But otherwise the port locations and quantity are quite satisfactory.

Testing the ThinkBook 16p Gen 3: In Search of the Goods

Our review configuration, top-of-the-line for the ThinkBook 16p Gen 3, cost $1,802 at the time of writing. (Lenovo's pricing does fluctuate quite a bit day to day.) That includes the Ryzen CPU, the GeForce GPU, 32GB of LPDDR5-6400 (up to 6,400Gbps) memory, a 1TB solid-state drive (SSD), the power supply with Rapid Charge Pro, and a steady WQXGA 165Hz display that delivers 555 nits, the brightest among our comparison units.

For our benchmark comparisons, we're matching the ThinkBook 16p against comparably equipped laptops suitable for both business and content-creation applications. However, this supposed media editing laptop features consumer-grade, Nvidia RTX 30-series graphics—not one of Nvidia's A-series GPUs designed for professional graphics applications.

So, we've included two consumer-grade content creator laptops, and some gaming machines, in the mix. (Some gaming laptops have been positioned as creator laptops in the past, like the Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XC, which isn't in the running here.) Those consumer laptops include the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus laptop, which has a mildly slower GPU inside, and a much more comparably-specced HP Envy 16. The ThinkBook 16p comes short of impressing us throughout its run of our benchmarks, regardless.

In this test lot, the ThinkBook is the only laptop with a Ryzen CPU inside, as there aren't many in the business space compared to Intel. However, every system here comes equipped with Nvidia GeForce graphics. Dell's Inspiron, an entry-level comparison for the ThinkBook, has the least powerful: the GeForce RTX 3050 with 4GB of video memory. That's followed by the HP Envy 16 with the same GeForce RTX 3060 with 6GB that's inside the ThinkBook. Finally, a couple of slightly pricier gaming laptops, the Acer Predator Triton 300SE (2022, 16-inch) and the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (G733), were tested with the GeForce RTX 3070 with 8GB, to give a sense of higher-end options. (Content creators sometimes opt for gaming units, after all, for their high-end CPUs and robust GPUs.)

Productivity and Content-Creation Tests

Our primary performance benchmark is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess a laptop's storage load time and throughput.

Three further benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Lenovo's ThinkBook 16p scores well above our standard of 4,000 points for general productivity applications, at 6,555, but that's second from the bottom in our comparison set of content creator and gamer laptops—only the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus comes in lower. In the PCMark storage test, the ThinkBook lands in the middle of the pack, but on all others, it comes in last. That Photoshop score of 779 is ho-hum for a laptop that is designed as a content-creation machine for professionals primarily. The addition of Efficient cores (E-cores) in the 12th Generation Intel mobile Core i7 and i9 chips give them the extra multi-threaded muscle that helps them top the Ryzen 9-based ThinkBook in these tests.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark benchmarking suite: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

Additionally, we run tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines, like texturing, and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests—rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions—exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

Even when compared with slightly more pedestrian laptops featuring Nvidia graphics, the ThinkBook is well outpaced by all but the Dell in graphics tests—save for one instance where it surpasses the Envy. For its primary positioning as a content creation laptop, the ThinkBook lags in both CPU and GPU power compared with most of the systems here. Plus, most of those gaming laptops have entry configurations that are cheaper than and even more comparable to the ThinkBook in components.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movieTears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

For display testing, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Par for the course, the ThinkBook comes in dead last on our battery rundown, lasting just 6 hours and 3 minutes. Even the comparatively underpowered Dell lasts nearly 10 hours longer.

Lenovo's ThinkBook does excel in display brightness, coming in first with 555 nits at 100%. This is an impressive score, in line with its bright, well-saturated colors supported by a snappy 165Hz refresh rate, all of which make the laptop a pleasure to work with. Unfortunately, while the ThinkBook achieves 99% color coverage on the Adobe sRGB color gamut, it covers only 76% and 77% of the Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 gamuts, respectively. These are not terrible scores, but they're underwhelming for professional video and image handling.

It's actually the HP Envy 16, and the gaming laptops, to a lesser degree, that beat out Lenovo's media editing machine in this regard, with the Envy scoring the best on color coverage across the board. While its OLED display pumps out a dimmer maximum of 325 nits on the 100% brightness test, it's definitely the standout for content creation.

Lenovo's ThinkBook 16p Gen 3 is an attractive laptop in a sturdy aluminum case that, with thin bezels and a bright display, is easy on the eyes. Alas, its limited color coverage, not to mention middling performance, constrains this system for professional-grade content creation.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Of course, this laptop has plenty of power for typical business applications, such as word processing, spreadsheet use, web browsing, and videoconferencing. Knowing this, there’s definitely room to lower the specs for a better price. Configuring this system with an AMD Ryzen 7, 16GB of RAM, and perhaps a 512GB SSD could lower the price by more than $200. Without having to sacrifice Windows 11 Pro or the bright 165Hz display, the ThinkBook 16p then makes for a decent midrange business laptop for general use.

However, if content creation is your game, you'll likely either have to spend more in the business sector or consider consumer-grade options, like the HP Envy 16. HP's alternative delivers the best color coverage of the bunch, and it earns high marks for the money on most of our benchmarks. At its pricing, the Editors' Choice award-winning HP Envy 16 is a downright competitive alternative.