Lenovo designates the ThinkPad W520 as a notebook computer. It comes with an Intel Quad Core i7 2920XM CPU, 16 GB RAM, a Lenovo ThinkPad W700 battery, an NVIDIA Quadro 2000M video card, and Windows 7 Pro (64-bit). The unit weighs in at 5.95 pounds and measures 14.7” x 9.7” x 1.3”, so it’s pretty thin and not too heavy – so truly portable.
The Lenovo ThinkPad W520 is twice as fast as my ThinkPad W510 at certain chores and eclipses it on battery life. The ThinkPad W520 has superior battery life over the W510 and reaches 6-7 hours of battery life at a moderate screen brightness. Lenovo continues to provide excellent thermal management cooling in the W520 workstation. See the performance and battery life sections below for more detail. In short, the ThinkPad W520 with the new Intel Sandy Bridge chipset is a strong improvement to the Lenovo W Series of portable workstations.
The look of it suggests that Lenovo stuck with its previous series of workstation in terms of structure and design. There are some minor changes only in the look of it, like designing of the display cover with Lenovo ThinkPad W520i AC adapter blend of carbon fiber and glass fiber. Some users, however, find that the display cover surface is highly succumbing to catch finger prints and dust.
The screen is the giveaway. Measuring 15.6in, it comes in a range of resolutions. The display on our review sample had the Full HD resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, and superbly sharp bright and clear. Other available resolutions are 1600x900, and 1366x760. You can even opt for a model with a touchscreen.
Viewing angles are superb, and if you're thinking of using this laptop to deliver presentations or watch video then you'll also enjoy the speakers that sit vertically either side of the screen. These deliver very good sound quality - much better than we're used to from a business laptop.
One of the most popular features of ThinkPads has been the positive tactile feel of the keyboard, and the W520 continues this sentiment. Keyboard feel is great, but layout of some keys (such as Delete) is a challenge at first and may annoy some users because of unconventional Lenovo ThinkPad T410i battery placement. Also, there is no dedicated numeric keypad, not a big deal for me personally, but some users may take exception. The real estate area normally devoted to the numeric keypad is occupied by speakers on either side of the main keyboard.
We should clear things up by saying the Lenovo ThinkPad W520 isn’t a gaming laptop although the specs seem to point in that direction. At the moment there are 4 big names that manufacture business laptops: Fujitsu, Lenovo, Dell and HP. Fujitsu’s sales have dropped so this leaves the other three to battle for supremacy. There is another issue: business laptops are generally considered to be big 17″ portable computers which take up all the space, but we consider 15″ models to be the perfect choice for the business man or woman who occasionally has to carry the laptop around.
If you plan on carrying confidential data around, the integrated fingerprint scanner will keep it secure. There's plenty of space on the fast-access 500GB hard drive for all of your files, and this can be expanded through the 4-in-1 memory card reader. An ExpressCard slot allows the Lenovo ThinkPad W520 charger laptop's potential to be expanded by further increasing performance or adding peripherals.
Ports and connectors are plentiful, and run to an SD card slot, 34mm ExpressCard slot, headset connector, Ethernet port, smartcard slot, a toggle for wireless, mini-IEEE 1394 connector, combined eSATA/USB connector, two further USB connectors, an external monitor connector, and DisplayPort.
The Lenovo ThinkPad W520 comes with a 9-cell 94Wh, 8.7Ah battery that managed to get 6.5 hours using the Reader test, while the Classic mode got the laptop to reach 2 hours of battery life. One issue we had with the W520 was the high temperature. When idling it hit 140 degrees F and when we pushed it to the Lenovo ThinkPad W701 charger limit it nearly caught fire at 176 degrees F.
When it comes mobile processing power, it doesn't get any faster than the Intel Core i7-2920XM processor. With four cores and eight threads, this processor handles anything you can throw at it while still asking for more. Compared to the speedy dual-core Intel Core i5-2540M we tested in the T520 which got 18.15 seconds in wPrime, the 2920XM blew it out of the water with a time of 8.705 seconds. Combined with our two Intel SSD 510s running in RAID0, the W520 scored an equally impressive 20,700 in PCMark Vantage with a HDD test score of 48,300.
It doesn't come cheap, and the Lenovo ThinkPad W520 is really designed for graphics professionals and others who need a powerful Lenovo ThinkPad W530 charger portable with a super high-resolution screen. If you need these things, this is a superb computer.