Late last year while attending Autodesk University I had a chance to meet with the team over at Lenovo to get up to speed on their latest offerings. While reviewing the laptops, one in particular stood out to me from any other laptop I've seen before. 

As many of you know I'm a bit of a color management geek and am fascinated by all things surrounding color management and the accurate reproduction of color within visualization.  As such, I was very impressed to find the new Lenovo ThinkPad W530 had an integrated spectrophotometer.  For those less familiar with color management, one of the things needed in order to achieve accurate and repeatable color is a hardware measurement device that is able to profile and calibrate your screen.  Generally you use a device like a Color Munki (http://www.colormunki.com/) or i1 Pro (http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=323) to do this with laptops or desktop displays, but thanks to the integrated spectrophotometer on the W530, maintaining accurate color has never been easier or more convenient.

To calibrate the display only takes a few steps.  Just launch the Pantone Color Calibrator software, set the white point and gamma, close the lid, wait a few minutes and you're done.  While this software is no where near as encompassing as those included with the Color Munki or i1 Pro, I think this is a great thing in this case and is a great step towards mass adoption of color management. Given this laptop is a Mobile Workstation aimed at the visualization industry, among others, I am delighted to Lenovo push the industry forward.
 

INTEGRATED COLOR MANAGEMENT

I've included screen shots of each of the steps below.

GAMUT COMPARISON

One thing laptops are not generally known for are large color gamuts, so after the calibration software ran, I opened the ICM profile that was generated in ColorThink.  ColorThink is a specialized application that can be used for visualizing the size of color spaces.  Below you will see the triangles below represent the size of gamuts for a few devices and colorspaces. The horseshoe shaped background represents all of the colors the human eye can see.

Most desktop wide gamut displays are close in size to the AdobeRGB colorspace, which I've illustrated in black below.  Next I plotted my desktop display, which is arguably one of the best and most advanced displays on the market today, the NEC PA301W. Keep in mind that I'm only comparing color gamuts and not display performance. Most desktop displays can not rival the PA301W, let alone a laptop display.  In green you can see the gamut of the W530 and finally in red the sRGB colorspace.

The W530 is lacking a bit in the greens compared to AdobeRGB, but does a reasonable good job of encompassing most of the colorspace.  To be exact 95% according to Levovo specifications.  One thing I had to laugh about is the apparent lack of understanding displayed in Lenovo's marketing materials around their display's capabilities.  Everywhere they reference "95-percent color gamut", which is a pretty ambiguous and analgious to telling someone " I drove 95 today". Is that 95 miles, kilometers, miles per hour? You get the picture.  The proper reference they should be making is of course 95% of the AdobeRGB color gamut as there are many more standardized color gamuts in existence, sRGB for example.

BENCHMARKING

While the main feature that attracted me to this laptop is of course the spectrophotometer and Pantone software, while I had the laptop here in the office on review, I thought I'd also run it though its paces on a few benchmarks for CPU, GPU and Display performance.  I'm not providing any sort of analysis on the results of each benchmark, but I've included links to each so you can run these same benchmarks on your own machines to see how performance compares to your current system or to others already submitted to each benchmark site.

The W530 I tested was equipped with the following GPUs and CPU:

GPU = Intel HD Graphics 4000 (GPU, 16, 400Mhz) + Quadro K2000M (GPU, 2, 745 Mhz)
CPU = Intel Core i7-3920XM @ 2.90GHz

V-Ray RT Benchmark

A few years ago Vlado from Chaos Group posted a test scene to use for benchmarking GPUs and CPUs using V-Ray RT.  That scene and other artist's results can be found here: http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbulletin/showthread.php?52400-test-scene

The results I got with the W530 were as follows:

GPU (Cuda Single Kernal) = 17m 21.7s

CPU = 37m 11.2s

As a point of reference someone recently posted a benchmark with two Evga Titans SC Overclocked to 1175. This scene rendered in 49.06 s.  While the K2000M is no slouch, it's certainly no where near enough to do anything serious with GPU rendering.  Right now you're not going to find any laptops that are, but given the increasing popularity of GPU rendering, I thought it worthwhile demonstrating its capabilities.

LUXMark

In similar vain to the V-Ray RT benchmark, LUXrender also has their own benchmark using OpenCL. I rendered the "Sala" scene using both GPUs and CPUs with the following results:

OpenCL GPUs Only                 = 182
OpenCL GPU (only Quadro)     = 105
OpenCL GPU + CPU                = 520
OpenCL CPU Only                   = 399

The higher the number the better. To download this benchmark and view other results please visit: http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/LuxMark

SPECviewperf v11

SPEC has been providing benchmark applications for high end graphics applications for years so I have included results from their latest version 11 application below.  You'll notice the missing 3ds Max results and there is a good reason for that.  With the addition of so many new rendering modes in 3ds Max, Autodesk and SPEC partnered to create a new updated benchmark specifically for 3ds Max. Due to the amount of work involved they decided to charge for this benchmark.  The personal version is $20 and $499 for the professional version. However, I soon discovered the resultant application was sub-par to say the least, specifically usability.  Sub-par to the point of not even being able to get it installed!  I paid $499 for the professional version only to find that you must have 3ds Max installed for it to run. A departure from their other benchmarks and not clearly identified on their website.  Not only does it require 3ds Max, it must be 3ds Max 2011 and not the Design version. Needless to say I gave up after spending two hours trying to get this to work, only to find it needs three generation old software that I did not have to allow it to work and requested a refund.  In my opinion the ball was clearly dropped in the creation of this benchmark which is unfortunate. 

catia-03                    = 34.03
ensight-04                = 18.07
lightwave-01             = 49.88
maya-03                   = 47.42
proe-05                    = 15.63
sw-02                       = 37.26
tcvis-02                    = 29.59
snx-01                      = 24.77

Dimtiris, a frequent poster on the CGarchitect forums, has some great GPU benchmark comparisons on his website here: http://pcfoo.com/specviewperf-11-gpu-scores/

CineBench

CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. Created by MAXON this benchmark is great for measuring CPU and OpenGL performance.

Using their latest Cinebench 11.5 I got the results below:

OpenGL                    = 43.86 fps
CPU                          = 7.14 pts

Benchwell

For Maxwell Render users there is a benchmark called Benchwell which tests CPU rendering on a test teapot scene. Using the 304.74 benchmark I was able to render the scene in 15m 16s.  To test with this benchmark and to see other results you can visit the following link: http://support.nextlimit.com/display/maxwelldocs/Benchwell+Test

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS

Overall the laptop performed well and even after hours of running benchmarks back to back, the bottom left of the laptop was warm to touch is nothing was hot. Lenovo obviously did a very good job of cooling this machine down. Design wise, I found the appearance to be pretty uninspired and utilitarian, but if you're only interested in a mobile workstation that performs ,this may be of less importance to you.  I tend to care about aesthetics so I like all of my devices and software to look "pretty" too.  As you can see below it has a full compliment of ports and connections, including a biometric reader and card readers. 

From a placement standpoint, I found the location of the CD tray release button to be unfortunate.  Every time I went to pick up the laptop by its sides I released the tray. My wife who uses a Lenovo at work, commented on the same thing. I also wish the keyboard was lit. I found it difficult to see the keys when working in the dark or a dimly lit room.

SPECIFICATIONS

A full list of system specifications and configurations can be found here: http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/tech-specs/laptop/thinkpad/w-series/w530/

The machine I tested was equipped as follows:

Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-3920XM (2.90 GHz, 8MB L3, 1600MHz FSB)

Memory: 16GB DDR3 1600MHz

Harddrive: 500GB (5400rpm)

Graphics: NVIDIA® Quadro® K2000M 2GB VRAM

Battery: 9-cell (94Wh): Up to 11.1 hrs

The w530 with color sensor pricing starts at $1322 on the Lenovo website and tops out around $3700 USD fully loaded.