Question Lenovo X1 Extreme very slow and sluggish

GQMan

Member
Dec 4, 2007
30
2
71
Just received my brand new Lenovo i7 8850, 32 gb ram, 1 tb nvme.2 ssd purchased December 24 and I was very excited as I chose it over MacBook 2018 and dell xps 15. Out of the box I ran some cinebench and intel Extreme utility software to run some tests/benchmarks for CPU. In Cinebench I got 150 on single core and similar on multi thread test while in Intel utility tuning software I am getting 566. Even browising and typing is very laggy and choppy. I am very frustrated as I paid $2.8k CDN and I should not have to go through these tunings and setups, it should at least run its basic settings.

Bought this laptop for photo editing as I use a lot of photoshop, lightroom etc and my old MacBook 2012 is running faster. My old MacBook even loads from startup faster than X1 extreme. I loaded photoshop sametime on MacBook and X1 extreme and MacBook is opening much faster than X1 Extreme. I don't even notice a big change in the ssd nvme.2 drive as it does not seem very fast compared to MacBook.

I contacted Lenovo and am returning it as I already wasted 2 days testing it and by now am quite frustrated. I am sure there is some settings I need to update but I don't know what settings to change.

If anyone can shed some light as to what I can do to make it run faster I would really appreciate it very much.
 

fire400

Diamond Member
Nov 21, 2005
5,204
21
81
Update the BIOS to latest version

Load factory default BIOS settings

Wipe all the SSD partition(s) on fresh install of Win10 Pro x64, install zero Lenovo software.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10

Update the Win10 OS environment, should take less than 30 minutes on latest ISO image from Microsoft.

Adjust power settings to "high performance" & disable sleep/monitor & timeout settings in power mode.

Run IntelBurnTest, "low settings"
simultaneously with...
Run Unigine benchmark for 8 hours straight (usually overnight), "max settings"
https://unigine.com/en/products/benchmarks

If the computer is still glitchy and buggy after this, I'd just dump the computer as it may be defective or it has less-than-great engineering end-user experience issues.

I've had a few ThinkPads even with new hardware interconnect modules have massive issues with WiFi disconnecting, software glitching and random errors that just won't remedy easily - the fix for me, was to replace the computer entirely with a different submodel or product class, or major modify a hardware configuration, and then of course, Windows 10 has been known to wreck stable operating software/hardware environments for no damn reason whatsoever.

p.s.- the X1 Extreme has had various mixed reviews of throttling/overheating, hence why you want to burn-test your model before you get "stuck" with it.
 

GQMan

Member
Dec 4, 2007
30
2
71
Thank you fire400 I appreciated your detailed reply.

Conducting all these tests and running various benchmarks is something I was afraid of doing as i dont have the luxury of time for this and prefer spending my disposal time with the kids. I dont know why these machines simply cant work to their standard specs as advertised. I am no fanboy of any brand but I never had one issue with OSX ever since I went macbook in 2012. Its been a nightmare since I went back to windows with x1 extreme this year. The specs of the laptop and ports it included were the key for me going with X1. I may have to go macbook pro 2018 and not having to worry about heating/throttling.