Lenovo Thinkpad T430 Review 2015

When you're the gold standard for business notebooks, you must do everything in your capacity to stay on top. And Lenovo is progressing just that using the ThinkPad T430 ($1,124 as tested), which adds a whole new Precision Keyboard and enhanced Dolby audio. Plus, the 9-cell battery inside this workhorse promises epic endurance to look along with Ivy Bridge muscle. Is the ThinkPad still the king?

Design
Taking a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach, the Thinkpad T430's lid is outfitted within the durable, yet extremely comfortable, black soft-touch finish. Other mainstays include strong chrome hinges as well as the Lenovo and Thinkpad insignias inside top everywhere you look corners.

Opening the lid through the sliding latch down the front lip from the notebook is still a breeze. Inside, you will notice the familiar bright red trackpoint inside center in the new island-style keyboard. Volume controls as well as a royal blue ThinkVantage button sit atop laptop keyboards along with a black power button. Just below the laptop keyboard rests a touchpad flanked by discrete mouse buttons. A fingerprint reader sits to the right on the touchpad.

With its 9-cell battery, the 5.2-pound, 13.1 x 9.1 x 1.2 inch T430 is about the heavy side from the thin-and-light notebook category. It easily outweighs several.8-pound, 13.2 x 9.2 x 0.81 inch Dell XPS 14, though this ThinkPad weighs exactly like its predecessor. Nevertheless, the T430 can easily still slip in and out of a messenger bag or backpack with relative ease.


Display
The 14-inch, 1366 x 768p, 147 lux display isn't very bright, 40 lux in short supply of the 187 thin-and-light category average. This is somewhat disappointing, considering that the previous model, the T420, a much brighter 230-lux screen, as well as a higher resolution of 1600 x 900. Fortunately, that screen can be available around the T430, a $50 option we strongly suggest.

Still, the matte display about the T430 delivered sharp, crisp text on CNN.com and Washingtonpost.com. Viewing angles were decent, with clear images from 45 degrees left or right with the display.

Thanks to Dolby Advanced Audio technology, the speakers flanking the laptop keyboard delivered fairly loud, rich audio. On George Michael's "Freedom," warm piano chords along with a crisp drumline cascaded gently over Michael's rebellious tenor. Of the four presets inside control panel (Movies, Music, Gaming) we discovered that Movies was slightly louder, but Music delivered a richer sound. When we switched on the Gaming preset, the vocals sounded a bit hollow and muffled.


Durability
Lenovo ThinkPad T430 DurabilityLike previous ThinkPad T Series notebooks, the T420 is built to last. The rubberized ABS plastic lid, carbon-reinforced bottom and internal roll cage shield against shocks and drops. In addition, 2012 models are reinforced with carbon fibre for enhanced strength and stiffness. The ThinkVantage Active Protection stops hard drive if this senses changing motion.

Keyboard and Touchpad
Lenovo ThinkPad T430 KeyboardInstead from the classic keyboard we've arrive at know and love for the ThinkPad, the T430 features an island-style Precision Keyboard. Our concerns were immediately allayed, as being the matte black, smile-shaped keys had a lot of space and provided firm, springy feedback. The keyboard about this notebook feels greater than the AccuType layout about the IdeaPad series along with ThinkPads we've tested with island-style keyboards, such because Lenovo ThinkPad X230.

The only thing preventing the T430 from offering an excellent typing experience will be the plastic palm rest. We'd prefer a soft-touch surface. Like the X230, Lenovo has an optional backlit keyboard. It doesn't cost anything extra.

The 2.75 x 1.5-inch touchpad is small, but pleasant to utilize. We liked the feel from the small raised dots from the touchpad against our fingers. Multi-touch gestures for instance pinch-to-zoom, two-finger scroll, rotate and press were swift and responsive as were three-finger press and flicks.

The four discrete mouse buttons provided nice tactile feedback, perhaps the smaller two buttons that sit within the angled front lip with the machine. The bright red pointing stick generated for accurate, zippy movement. Almost too zippy--we needed to dial along the speed in settings so as not to over-shoot our target. The rough texture on the nub firmly grabbed our finger, eliminating worries about slippage.

Performance
Powered with a 2.6-GHz Intel Core i5-3320M CPU with 4GB of RAM, a 500GB 7,200-rpm hard disk drive and an Intel HD Graphics 4000, the Lenovo ThinkPad T430 submitted solid performance. During our real-world testing, we streamed video from Netflix with 12 open tabs in Google Chrome and six open tabs in Internet Explorer while managing a virus scan.

On PCMark 07, which measures effectiveness in Windows 7, the ThinkPad T430 scored 2,907. That's 664 points over the thin-and-light category average, and far higher than each,107 submitted by the T420.

The ThinkPad T430's 500GB 7,200-rpm hard disk booted the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional in 49 seconds, faster compared to 0:59 category average but over a par together with the T420. The T430 duplicated 4.97GB of multimedia files in 1 minute and 57 seconds for any speedy transfer rate of 48.5 MBps, much faster compared to the 29.6 MBps category average.

During the OfficeOffice spreadsheet macro test, the T430 took 4 minutes and 36 seconds to suit 20,000 names with their corresponding addresses, well before 6:05 average. The XPS 14 completed the job in 5:26.