Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition Review

Introduction

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition continues Lenovo’s long-term practice of adding ultrabook sensibilities to a traditionally utilitarian product line.

As the latest in a long line of their X1-suffixed ThinkPad models, this latest option cuts the weight down even more to under a kilo, making this one of the lightest laptops in its size class.

As well as this, my sample also came with a decent Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, a 1TB SSD and an excellent 14-inch 2880×1800 OLED screen with a silky smooth 120Hz refresh rate.

In this spec, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition is going to run you £2420/$2549. That easily makes it one of the more premium business laptop choices available against both the Dell Pro 14 Premium and Lenovo’s own ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, as well as more slick and stylish big-screen ultrabooks, including the Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024).

I’ve been testing this lightweight marvel of a ThinkPad for the last couple of weeks to see how well it performs as my main work laptop and whether it’s one of the best laptops we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• Especially lightweight and portable
• Solid port selection
• Comfortable keyboard and accurate trackpad

The ‘Carbon’ designated Lenovo ThinkPad laptops have been around since 2012, and have always been about lightness. That’s one thing that the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition seems to have taken to heart.

This is a 14-inch laptop made of a strong, but featherweight alloy that combines recycled aluminium, carbon fibre, magnesium and plastic to offer a durable finish and an immensely portable machine with a kerb weight of just 984g.

That’s virtually on par with the Asus Zenbook A14, and provides you with a laptop that’s incredibly easy to sling into a bag and take to your important meetings.

As this laptop carries the signature ThinkPad branding, I suppose it means that Lenovo hasn’t had to comply with some of the modern pain points of stylish ultrabooks, such as a meagre port selection – I’m looking at you, HP Omnibook X 14). The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition features a pair of Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-Cs and a USB-A on the left, along with a second USB-A, HDMI, and headphone jack on the right.

It also comes with other classic ThinkPad fixtures and fittings, such as a light-up logo on the lid, and the classic Trackpoint pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard. There is also a handy lay-flat hinge that’s easy to fold down for more collaborative workloads.

The keyboard itself is the same great option that has been fitted to laptops of its kind since 2012. Its distinctive tactility and slightly dampened feel make typing a breeze. It’s also a handy 75% layout with a set of arrow keys and a useful function row with navigation keys in the top right corner. It also comes with a decent white backlight for when you need to work after dark and want the keys to be a bit more visible.

It’s on the trackpad side of things where this ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition is a smidgen different to other laptops of its kind I’ve tested. A lot of other ThinkPads I’ve used come with dedicated mouse buttons at the top of the trackpad, where this option goes for capacitive pads instead. The trackpad itself is quite roomy for a laptop this size, and comes with accurate and responsive tracking to boot.

Display and Sound

• Sublime detail and smooth motion
• Excellent colours, black level, and contrast
• Surprisingly decent speakers

A lot of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 models come with Lenovo’s tried-and-tested 14-inch 1920×1200 resolution IPS screen. This model bumps it up to a much stronger 2880×1800 resolution OLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate for sharp output and smooth motion.

The benefits of OLED on laptop screens may be well-traversed by this point, but that still doesn’t stop it from helping this panel look fantastic. It features the signature inky blacks with a measured level of 0.01, while there is also some excellent dynamic range to displayed images with a measured 29180:1 contrast ratio with my trusty colorimeter, and a virtually perfect colour temperature of 6600K.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition’s colours are also virtually faultless, with 100% coverage of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts, while getting 95% Adobe RGB is also a feat in itself. It helps to prove this panel to be ideally-suited to both more standard productivity tasks, and for more creative workloads, too.

A peak SDR brightness of 400.2 nits meets Lenovo’s quoted 400 nit peak, as well as giving this screen a fair amount of punch in its displayed images. It doesn’t necessarily fall into the same trap as some other OLED screens with a more meagre brightness figure.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition’s speakers are quite good for a set of downwards-firing laptop options, with a decent bit of depth and space to their sound that makes them perfectly cromulent for casual listening. There is also Dolby Atmos smarts here for more spatial presentation, too.

Performance

• Solid performance with its Core Ultra 7 258V chip
• Decent integrated graphics
• Immensely fast PCIe Gen 5 SSD

Inside, my sample of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition packs one of Intel’s Lunar Lake laptop chips, with the mid-range Core Ultra 7 258V that’s become quite the mainstay in this weight class. It’s an eight-core/eight-thread chip that offers some decent performance overall.

The difference between this chip and the 268V in the Dell Pro 14 Premium is a 200MHz higher boost clock on the processor’s four Performance cores, but they are virtually identical otherwise.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition’s zippy single-core performance in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 is therefore comparable to Dell’s choice, while also being similar to the Ryzen AI 7 Pro 360 chip inside the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6.

The multi-core results in both tests are stronger with comparably-priced AMD machines, such as the MSI Prestige A16 AI+ and Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) that benefit from eight more threads to make it a much more potent chip for those more intensive tasks. Nonetheless, this Lenovo option is no slouch, but without hyperthreading, it falls some way behind.

The Intel Arc 140V integrated graphics within the Core Ultra 7 258V are decent, and compare well in the 3DMark Time Spy test against AMD’s cohort with the Radeon 880M iGPU. It is also a lot stronger than the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, with its Snapdragon X Elite chip and much weaker Adreno integrated graphics.

Where this ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition is unmatched with other laptops I’ve tested up and down the price ladder is with its SSD.

The 1TB capacity inside makes this one of the higher-tier models on the options list and gives you a good bit of space to work with, but its measured read and write speeds of 13873.34 MB/s and 11748.03 MB/s easily make it the fastest SSD I’ve tested in any laptop, thanks to it being an SK Hynix PCIe Gen 5 part. The 32GB of RAM on offer also gives you enough headroom for lots of multi-tasking, as well as to undertake more intensive tasks if you so wish.

Software

• Remarkably clean Windows 11 install
• Only a couple of Lenovo-specific apps
• Copilot+ PC AI smarts are present

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition comes with a clean install of Windows 11 with little in the way of additional software. The only Lenovo-branded software that shipped with my sample was Lenovo Commercial Vantage, which allows you to do everything from check on system utilisation to fiddling with power and battery settings. It’s a handy catch-all app.

There is also a small menu that can be accessed by double-tapping the Trackpoint. This menu brings up quick options for choosing everything from the spatial audio settings of the onboard microphone to system volume and a battery charging threshold to keep the internal cell in as good condition as possible for as long as possible.

The Core Ultra 7 258V chip inside is also powerful enough to meet Microsoft’s minimum requirements for this ThinkPad to be classified as a Copilot+ PC. This means you can access some of Microsoft’s special AI features that have been featured on most of the other recent ultrabook releases, such as the option for AI filters and generative image work in Paint and Photos, and the nifty Windows Studio webcam effects for auto-framing and maintaining eye contact.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 11 hours 51 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for between one and two working days

With the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, Lenovo is quoting up to 18 hours from its modest 57Whr cell, which would make for a respectable result. In the PCMark 10 battery test with the brightness at 150 nits though, this Lenovo laptop only managed to last for 11 hours and 51 minutes.

This beats our usual 10-hour target and means you’ll be able to get through nearly two working days away from the mains. However, it is well behind other business-grade laptops, with a result that’s essentially half of the Dell Pro 14 Premium’s nearly 23-hours. Even the adjacent ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 with the same capacity lasted for an extra two hours. 

The 65W USB-C charger does a decent job of putting juice back into the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, taking 45 minutes to get it from zero to half charge, while a full charge took 91 minutes.

Should you buy it?