Lenovo ThinkPad X9 15 Aura Edition (2025) Laptop Review

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 is only available in Gray. See the bottom of the laptop.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9's build quality is outstanding. Its full-aluminum chassis feels very sturdy—not quite as rigid as, say, the Apple MacBook Pro 14 (2024), but pretty close, exhibiting very little flex on the lid and keyboard deck. The finish doesn't scratch easily; it picks up some fingerprints and smudges, which you can wipe off with a microfiber cloth with relative ease, though this will likely be a little harder as the smudges accumulate with more regular use. The feet feel solid and stick firmly to the bottom.

The hinge is outstanding. It feels smooth when opening and closing the lid, and it's very stable, exhibiting only a small amount of wobble when typing heavily. The range doesn't quite reach 180°, so you can't lay the screen completely flat on the table, but the angle is likely good enough that you can easily share content with someone sitting opposite you.

Accessing the Lenovo ThinkPad X9's internals is very easy; you only need to remove six Philips screws and release the bottom panel's clips—a prying tool isn't necessary. The screws are captive, meaning they remain attached to the bottom panel, so you don't have to worry about losing them. The storage slot supports M.2 2242 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

Get Lenovo's official user maintenance guide.

• 65W power adapter
• Documentation

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 is available with the following displays:

• 15.3" OLED 2880 x 1800 120Hz (touchscreen, glossy, 100% DCI P3)
• 15.3" OLED 2880 x 1800 120Hz (glossy, 100% DCI P3)

The two available displays are identical; the only difference is that one has touch input support. Both panels look very sharp, with a pixel density in the same ballpark as the Apple MacBook Air 13 (2024)'s Retina display. The 16:10 aspect ratio is well-suited for productivity; it gives you more vertical space than a standard 16:9 screen, allowing you to see more information at once when reading a document, so you don't have to scroll as much. The downside is that you'll almost always have black bars at the top and bottom when watching standard 16:9 videos.

The display's 120Hz refresh rate helps provide a better user experience than a standard 60Hz display, as it makes motion look smoother, like when scrolling through a document, and improves input responsiveness. However, setting the refresh rate to 120Hz will drain the battery faster. You can set it to a fixed 60Hz to save battery, and there's also a Dynamic Refresh Rate setting that automatically switches the refresh rate between 60Hz and 120Hz, depending on whether you're actively using the laptop or looking at static content. Dynamic Refresh Rate isn't the same as FreeSync or G-SYNC, though, so you'll likely still see screen tearing when gaming.

The display's contrast ratio is effectively infinite since OLEDs can turn off individual pixels to produce perfect blacks.

The display is bright enough for use in most indoor settings. Outdoor use is possible, but you may have trouble seeing some content under direct sunlight. It gets very dim at the lowest brightness setting, which is great for dark room viewing as it causes less eye strain.

The display handles reflections well. Its glossy finish mainly struggles with bright light sources, like a lamp or open window during the day. These reflections are visible even when viewing light-color content with the screen at maximum brightness, but they aren't overly distracting.

The display's horizontal viewing angle is decent. Like most OLED panels, colors shift fairly quickly as you move to the side.

The display's vertical viewing angle is decent. Again, color shift is the main issue when viewing from above or below. You'll have to look at the screen more or less straight on if you need perfect accuracy for color-critical work, which can be challenging in spaces where you don't have a lot of room to tilt the screen, like an airplane with small tray tables.

The display's out-of-the-box accuracy is decent. The white balance inaccuracies are relatively minor and hard to spot, and the color temperature is very close to the standard 6500K target. Color accuracy depends on the selected color profile. The display uses the DCI P3 color space when there isn't an active color profile, resulting in a high dE (due to oversaturation). Switching to the Default color profile results in nearly identical measurements. You can set the color profile via the X-Rite Color Assistant app; here are the measurements in the sRGB, DCI P3, and Adobe RGB color profiles:

sRGB

• Avg. White Balance: 1.19
• Avg. Gamma: 2.23
• Avg. Color dE: 0.819
• Avg. Color Temp: 6653K

DCI P3

• Avg. White Balance: 4.41
• Avg. Gamma: 2.67
• Avg. Color dE: 4.158
• Avg. Color Temp: 6688K

Adobe RGB

• Avg. White Balance: 1.08
• Avg. Gamma: 2.2
• Avg. Color dE: 1.281
• Avg. Color Temp: 6677K

The display's color gamut is superb. It has full coverage of the sRGB and DCI P3 color spaces, as well as near-full coverage of the Adobe RGB color space. This panel is suitable for media consumption and color-critical work like photo and video editing. The regular, non-touch display has the same advertised color gamut.

The display's flicker is unlikely to be an issue for most people, as the flicker frequency is relatively high. However, it may still cause eye strain if you're sensitive to display flickering.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 has an excellent keyboard. It has a spacious, relatively standard layout that's easy to get used to. The keys are mostly stable—only a few exhibits some wobbling. While the key travel is a tad shorter than most Lenovo ThinkPads, the overall typing experience is still excellent, as the keys are easy to actuate and provide a good amount of tactile feedback. There's some padding to provide a softer feel when bottoming out, but you still get a satisfying yet quiet thump when you reach the bottom. You can toggle between two backlight brighness levels using FN + Spacebar or turn it off completely. The backlight is white, leaning on the cooler side.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 has an outstanding touchpad. It's large and responsive to all movements and gestures. Palm rejection works as intended, and there are no issues with actions like dragging and dropping or zooming in and out of images. This is a haptic touchpad, so you can click anywhere. The haptic engine could use a little tuning, though, as the tactile feedback is quite subtle.

One notable design change compared to other ThinkPads is that there's no Trackpoint on this laptop. How do you feel about the removal of such an iconic feature? And is it a dealbreaker? Let us know in the discussions below.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 has great speakers that are among the better ones you can find in the Windows world. They sound clear, full, and well-balanced, with a good amount of bass. They get very loud, though there's a bit of distortion at higher volume levels.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 has an excellent webcam. Though a tad overexposed, the image looks clear and detailed, with true-to-life colors. There's some noise here and there, but not enough to impact the overall video quality. As for the microphone, voices sound clear, albeit a little boxy and on the quieter side. There's no physical privacy cover; you can only disable the camera at the software level using the F9 shortcut.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 has a great port selection. The USB-A supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speed of up to 10Gbps and is always on, meaning you can use it to charge a mobile device even when the laptop is in sleep mode. Both USB-Cs support Thunderbolt 4 (up to 40Gbps data transfer speed and two 4k displays @ 60Hz), DisplayPort 2.1, and Power Delivery. Lenovo advertises HDMI 2.1 support; however, the HDMI port can only output a maximum resolution of 4k @ 60Hz. As such, we consider it an HDMI 2.0.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9's wireless adapter is an Intel Wi-Fi 7 BE201. Like Wi-Fi 6E, Wi-Fi 7 gives you access to the 6GHz band but with even faster speeds and lower latency. However, you need a router that supports Wi-Fi 7 to benefit from these features. See our best router recommendations if you want to upgrade your home Wi-Fi.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 is available with the following CPUs:

• Intel Core Ultra 5 226V (8 cores/8 threads, up to 4.5GHz, 8MB cache)
• Intel Core Ultra 5 228V (8 cores/8 threads, up to 4.5GHz, 8MB cache)
• Intel Core Ultra 5 238V (8 cores/8 threads, up to 4.7GHz, 8MB cache)
• Intel Core Ultra 7 258V (8 cores/8 threads, up to 4.8GHz, 12MB cache)
• Intel Core Ultra 7 268V (8 cores/8 threads, up to 5GHz, 12MB cache)

These are low-power processors designed for general productivity tasks like web browsing, text processing, spreadsheets, and video playback. Unlike their Meteor Lake predecessors, these Lunar Lake processors are proper SoCs (System on Chip) with the RAM built in. This change limits the RAM configuration, meaning you can only get 16GB of RAM with the Core Ultra 5 226V, while the 32MB memory configuration is only possible if you upgrade to one of the remaining four options (Core Ultra 5 228V, Core Ultra 238V, Core Ultra 7 258V, or Core Ultra 7 268V). Another significant change compared to the previous generation of Intel CPUs is the lack of Hyper-Threading, resulting in slightly slower multi-thread performance.

All five SoCs have the same core count and composition: four performance and four efficiency cores. There's a performance difference between these chips, but it's relatively minute (around 5% to 10% difference between the low-end Core Ultra 5 226V and the top-end Core Ultra 7 268V) and hard to notice in light, general productivity workloads. Finally, all four SoCs have an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) to handle AI tasks, like Windows Copilot, image generation in photo editing apps, and background-blurring on video calls. The Core Ultra 5s' NPU has a rated performance of 40 TOPS (Trillions of Operations per Second). The Core Ultra 7 258V has a rated performance of 47 TOPS, and the Core Ultra 7 268V has a rated performance of 48 TOPS.

You can see more information about the Lunar Lake SoCs in Intel's support page.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 is only available with integrated graphics. The Core Ultra 5s use the Intel Arc 130V GPU, while the Core Ultra 7s use the slightly faster Intel Arc 140V. Both are low-power GPUs designed for general productivity. These ARC GPUs are a step up in gaming performance compared to Intel's previous generation of integrated graphics, allowing you to play some moderately intensive games at 1080p (with low graphical settings), but they don't improve much in terms of raw computing power in productivity workloads. As for the difference between the 130V and 140V, the latter is roughly 17% to 20% faster in most instances.

You can configure the Lenovo ThinkPad X9 with 16GB or 32GB of RAM. The memory isn't user-replaceable.

You can configure the Lenovo ThinkPad X9 with 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB of storage. The storage is user-replaceable; the slot supports M.2 2242 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 with an Intel Core Ultra 7 268V SoC scores well in the Geekbench 5 benchmarks. Its strong single-thread performance is excellent, rivaling significantly more power-hungry CPUs like Intel's 14th Gen HX chips typically found in powerful gaming laptops and workstations. As for its multi-thread performance, while it's very good for a low-power chip and is more than adequate for this laptop's intended use (light, general productivity tasks), know that there are faster chips on the market, like the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition 15 (2024)'s Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. 

Unfortunately, although the new Arc Graphics are better than previous generation integrated GPUs from Intel, they're still pretty weak compared to current-gen entry-level discrete GPUs, at least when it comes to non-gaming, computing tasks.

Below are additional benchmark scores in Geekbench 6 in case you're more familiar with those numbers:

• CPU Single-thread: 2,854
• GPU Multi-thread: 11,177
• GPU Compute: Not supported

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9's Intel Core Ultra 7 268V SoC performs relatively well in the Cinebench R23 benchmarks. This performance level is squarely in the premium ultraportable territory—good enough for light to moderately intensive workloads but not ideal for highly demanding tasks. For the latter, you're better off getting a workstation or gaming laptop with a more robust cooling system, like the Razer Blade 18 (2024) or the Apple MacBook Pro 16 (2024).

Here are additional benchmark numbers from Cinebench 2024 in case you're more familiar with them:

• Single-thread: 126
• Multi-thread: 576

While you can render 3D images using the CPU, getting a laptop with a dedicated GPU is best, as even an entry-level discrete GPU like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 can complete renders in considerably less time.

The Intel Core Ultra 7 268V's integrated Arc Graphics 140V scores decently well in the Basemark GPU benchmarks. This performance level is roughly in the same ballpark as an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 (mobile), an entry-level discrete GPU first launched in 2019. It can handle some demanding games at 1080p, though you'll have to lower the graphical settings to get playable frame rates. The Core Ultra 5's Arc Graphics 130V is weaker, so expect to get even lower frame rates.

We performed the web browsing and video playback tests using the default Balanced mode, and the gaming test using the Best Performance mode, as it's more representative of real-world usage.

Borderlands 3 runs poorly at 1080p on the Lenovo ThinkPad X9 with a Core Ultra 7 268V SoC. Although you can get over 60 fps with low settings, the gameplay is extremely choppy due to frame drops. Lowering the resolution to 720p will likely reduce the stuttering but won't completely fix it.

The Intel Lunar Lake SoCs can run Civilization VI and other similarly demanding strategy games smoothly at 1080p, as these types of games typically don't require a lot of GPU processing power. The average turn time is decent and within the expected range for a low-power, current-gen ultraportable CPU.

Counter-Strike 2 is playable at 1080p with some tweaks in the graphical settings, but you might experience some choppiness here and there, which isn't ideal for an FPS game.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is somewhat playable at 1080p on the Lenovo ThinkPad X9. You can get close to 60 fps with the lowest graphical settings, but you'll likely experience some stutters due to frame drops in busy scenes. The large frametime spikes are scene changes and aren't representative of the performance.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9's keyboard only gets mildly warm under load and likely won't cause any discomfort even though the hot spot is near the middle. Using the device on your lap isn't a problem, as the bottom of the laptop is cooler at 40.9 °C (105.62 °F). The fans are audible but relatively quiet; the noise isn't distracting, as it just sounds like heavy airflow.

The posted results are measurements taken in the Best Performance mode. You can change the performance mode via Windows' settings or the Lenovo Commercial Vantage app; the latter merely mirrors whichever mode you set in Windows' settings.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 has a few pre-installed applications, including:

• Lenovo AI NOW 1.2: AI software that can help with the PC setup process, summarize content, retrieve information, and generate text.
• Lenovo Commercial Vantage: Lets you view system status, change various settings, and give access to IT admins to troubleshoot and fix issues.
• X-Rite Color Assistant: Lets you change the display's color profile and calibrate the display.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 has a fingerprint sensor (integrated into the power button) and an optional Windows Hello facial recognition IR camera. You can use either to log in quickly, authorize purchases in the Windows Store, and auto-fill saved passwords on supported websites.