Major Components and Performance
Screen grabs of network and storage performance.
The Gen 5’s AX WLAN card connects to my AC router at the full available bit-rate. (I’ll update this once I get an AX router in-house) Download performance is excellent via my gigabit cable connection. Upload speed limited by my ISP.
ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5 – Wifi and Thunderbolt
[Update 2020.06.28] Got an AX router. Radio bit-rate nearly tripled. Downloads saturate my cable connection. Nice.
ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5 AX Wifi
The Toshiba NVMe SSD in my test unit exhibits excellent performance. Lenovo uses a variety of drive suppliers and the actual SSD delivered may be different.
ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5 – Drive Speed
About that Bitlocker-encrypted C: partition – I’m not a fan. Encryption is fine and useful, but defaulting to it without so much as a by-your-leave is not. I use a local account, so while the drive was encrypted, encryption was not fully activated. Full activaton can happen when setting up with a Microsoft account, or signing into one. It can trip up the unsuspecting user if they don’t realize that an encryption key has been created and saved to the account.
Trying to do forensics or data recovery and discovering that a drive has been silently partially or fully encrypted is no fun.
Even when not fully activated the default status leaves the primary partition not accessible from Linux (see Linux – Live) and while there may be available tools that allow access, I prefer to turn off Bitlocker fully on my ThinkPads. Others will have different requirements…
Bitlocker status can be viewed here:
ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5 – Bitlocker Console
At least in this version of Windows 1o the option to fully disable isn’t offered there. It’s over here: (this can also be done via command line if necessary)
ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5 – Bitlocker Encryption Controls
Decryption on this nearly OOBE machine without much on it only took a few minutes:
ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5 – Bitlocker Decrypting
Also on my list of things that I don’t much care for: this is a Modern Standby machine. That’s just the way things are these days, but it’s not the way I want my ThinkPads to behave. You may disagree… As I said in my Gen 4 article:
Modern Standby is a sleep mode that keeps one eye open. The laptop can still access the network (subject to a bit of user control) and get background things done when “asleep”. Lenovo’s implementation/enhancement is Smart Standby.
Some configuration is possible via Lenovo Vantage, and there’s a BIOS option (in the fancy GUI, self-healing BIOS) to switch completely over to the old S3 sleep mode (see Linux – Bare Metal Install). This has been a relief to Linux users (Linux doesn’t support Modern s0i3 sleep… yet) but Microsoft says that if it’s toggled Windows must be reloaded. I’m not entirely sure that’s true – but fair warning.
I’m going to live with it for now. Perhaps get used to it…
Almost forgot virtualization. Easy-peasy with VMware Workstation Player (free). That’s not the only virtual host available but it’s the one I tend to use. Pointed the “create new machine” function at the Ubuntu 20.04 and Fedora Workstation 32 ISOs and Bob’s your uncle.
Screenshot with both virtual clients running. Ubuntu assigned 4GB of RAM, Fedora 2GB.
ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5 – Virtual Machines – Ubuntu and Fedora