Lenovo's ThinkPad brand has a reputation for being tough, and the P50s is no exception. It has a black, matte chassis built to resist dents and scratches, and it feels solid in your hands. The 15.5-inch display is nestled between an island-style keyboard and a touchpad with integrated fingerprint reader. The keyboard is comfortable and has a backlight for working in low light conditions.
The P50s is a portable workstation, meaning that it's designed to run professional applications like AutoCAD on the go. It has a Nvidia Quadro GPU and certified drivers, which makes it more of a workhorse than the typical productivity notebook. However, it also uses last-generation processors and an SSD that's not particularly fast. This makes it a less compelling choice for people who do most of their work on the go.
We used Geekbench 3 to measure the P50s' processor performance, and it scored a 7 out of 10. That's good enough for most productivity tasks, but it falls short of what we'd expect from a workstation-class machine. On our Civilization VI test, the machine ran the game at medium settings without issue, but we wouldn't recommend pushing it much further.
The screen may look a bit dull at first glance, but it's actually very bright and has good contrast. Its color gamut score of 70 percent of AdobeRGB is a little low, but it's better than the average laptop. The matte finish also helps it stay usable in bright sunlight, where glossy screens can often be hard to read.
