Lenovo ThinkBook 13x Gen 4

Should a small business invest in a small business laptop? Lenovo's ThinkBook line is priced and positioned below its famous corporate-fleet ThinkPads, targeting small-office entrepreneurs, and the ThinkBook 13x Gen 4 (starts at $1,580; $1,640 as tested) is one of the most petite in the series with a 13.5-inch touch screen. The ThinkBook is a classy, well-built lightweight with an original extra—a lamp that sticks to the top of the screen to illuminate you for video calls in dim rooms. But we wish it had a couple more ports and cost a few hundred less.

Configuration and Design: Square to Be Hip

You shouldn't confuse the ThinkBook 13x, whose 13.5-inch display has a 3:2 aspect ratio (2,880-by-1,920-pixel resolution), with the ThinkBook 13s, which has a 13.3-inch screen with a 16:10 ratio. Lenovo says the 13x's squarer panel gives it more viewing area than a 14-inch laptop with a 16:9 aspect ratio, helped by vanishingly thin bezels that yield an impressive 97% screen-to-body ratio. The IPS screen allows dynamic switching between 60Hz and 120Hz refresh rates, and it meets the VESA DisplayHDR 400 and Dolby Vision specs.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Except for Windows 11 Pro instead of Home (a $60 upgrade), our test unit—model 21KR000QUS—matched the $1,580 base model at Lenovo's online configurator, with an Intel Core Ultra 5 125H processor, 16GB of memory, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, and the near-3K touch screen backed by Intel Arc integrated graphics. Doubling the storage adds $89, while jumping up to a beefy Core Ultra 9 185H CPU is $432 (and enables a $119 upgrade to 32GB of RAM).

Wrapped in an attractive dual-tone Luna Gray aluminum unibody, the ThinkBook 13x measures 0.5 by 11.6 by 8.1 inches and weighs 2.7 pounds. That's a bit more compact than another business laptop with a 13.5-inch, 3:2-aspect-ratio display, the HP Dragonfly G4 (0.65 by 11.7 by 8.7 inches), but the HP is lighter at 2.22 pounds. Another of our favorite ultraportables, the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Touch UM3406, has a 14-inch 16:10 screen; it's 0.59 by 12.3 by 8.7 inches and 2.82 pounds.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

With the laptop's IR face-recognition webcam and a fingerprint reader built into the power button, you can skip typing passwords with Windows Hello. The webcam can sense your presence or absence to unlock or lock the system, pause video playback, or even play, rewind, and fast-forward videos if you wave at it. The screen can adjust both brightness and color as your environment changes. 

Uncharacteristically for Lenovo but in keeping with recent Apple and Dell laptops, the ThinkBook 13x skimps on ports, providing only an audio jack and three USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports (one at left and two at right). You'll find a tiny side shutter switch for the webcam, but if you want to plug in a USB-A flash drive or other peripheral or an HDMI monitor, you're out of luck without a dongle. Lenovo included Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 6E radios to handle wireless communications.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Using the Lenovo ThinkBook 13x Gen 4: A 'Magical' Rectangular Ring Light 

A magnetic strip and row of pogo pins atop the screen lid let you clip on what Lenovo calls a Magic Bay Light, a roughly 1-by-4.5-inch LED lamp that a provided Lenovo Smart Meeting app enables you to change from auto brightness to a dimmer or blindingly bright manual mode. (Lenovo has previewed other Magic Bay accessories ranging from a 4K webcam to a wacky prototype aromatherapy diffuser, but the light is the only one now available.) 

The lamp definitely improves your colleagues' view of you in dark environments, and it can even show a temporary avatar or still (optionally watermarked "Not a real-time video") if you need to step away briefly. I can attest, however, that it shows as two garish reflecting bars if you wear glasses. Also, if you set Windows Camera or another video app to the required "Lenovo Virtual Camera" instead of "Front-facing camera," the 1080p webcam becomes a 720p webcam. 

The 13x supports Windows Camera's recently added AI Studio Effects, including background blur and auto framing. Lenovo Smart Meeting goes further by optionally softening skin tone and adding a green-screen background image option. The webcam's images and videos are colorful and sharp, with minimal static.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

We're fans of tall 3:2 aspect ratio screens for reading web pages and Word documents, and the ThinkBook's is a pleasure to work with—exceptionally bright, with rich, saturated colors. Its contrast is high, and viewing angles are wide, though the touch glass catches some room lights. The screen's details are sharp, with no pixelation around the edges of letters. Its white backgrounds are clean instead of dingy or grayish.

Dolby Access software (also available within the Lenovo Vantage app that controls other system settings and Wi-Fi security) provides dynamic, music, movie, game, and voice modes and an equalizer for fine-tuning the laptop's four Harman Kardon speakers. The sound is loud enough, with better-than-average bass, with a little boom or echo at the top volume. Vocals and instrumentals are crisp through the speakers, and it's easy to make out overlapping tracks. 

As with all too many laptops, the ThinkBook's backlit keyboard starts with two strikes against it—you must pair the Fn and cursor arrow keys in the absence of dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, not to mention those arrows that are arranged in an awkward HP-style row instead of the correct inverted T (half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right). The keyboard has a shallow but snappy typing feel; it was easy to maintain a rapid pace. The buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly but has a tinny click. Considering Lenovo's track record for keyboards and touchpads, this is slightly below the level of quality we've come to expect.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Testing the Lenovo ThinkBook 13x Gen 4: Above-Average Aptitude

For our benchmark comparison charts, we pitted the ThinkBook 13x Gen 4 against two abovementioned Editors' Choice award winners: The HP Dragonfly G4 is more expensive ($2,279 as tested) and the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Touch UM3406 much less so ($849.99 as tested). The MSI Commercial 14 is another small-business slimline ($1,129 as tested). Finally, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 3 is the ThinkPad family's closest match to this ThinkBook—almost identically priced ($1,624 as tested) with a 13-inch, 2,160-by-1,350-pixel IPS screen.

Productivity Tests 

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. 

Three other 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 Geekbench 5.5 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. We also 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). 

Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems. It uses Adobe's famous image editor, Creative Cloud version 22, 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, from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The ThinkBook placed honorably in the middle of the pack in most tests. However, all five lightweights easily cleared the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate decent everyday productivity for the Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace suites. With the first higher-wattage Core Ultra 5 125H rather than 125U we've seen, the ThinkBook performed well in our CPU benchmarks, though the Asus and MSI produced better scores yet. 

Graphics Tests 

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

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses low-level routines like texturing and high-level ones like game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests are rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The 13x slugged it out with the Zenbook for the lead here, though neither Intel's nor AMD's integrated graphics are a patch on the discrete GPUs of serious gaming notebooks. You won't play the latest shoot-'em-ups or perform CAD or CGI rendering on these ultraportables, but you'll be fine for casual media work and video streaming. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test each laptop's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears 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.

To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows 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).

Lenovo says the ThinkBook 13x has the largest battery of any 13-inch laptop, and it showed, with all-day battery life in the sense of 24 hours rather than working hours. It also showed off the brightest screen in the group, though its color coverage—while fine for productivity—predictably fell short of the Asus' OLED panel.

Verdict: A Fine Choice But Not a Slam Dunk 

The ThinkBook 13x Gen 4 lives up to its brand's small-business value proposition, undercutting the similarly screened HP Dragonfly G4 and delivering better performance and double the battery life of the ThinkPad X1 Nano. But that doesn't make it a bargain, with Asus and others selling ultraportables with superior OLED screens for hundreds less. Also, its lack of HDMI and USB-A ports is a pity. The 13x is a slick, capable laptop with Lenovo's excellent build quality, but it could use a price cut.