Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 6 (Intel) Internal Hardware Overview
Breaking into the P14s G6, as you would expect for a workstation-grade corporate laptop, Lenovo has used the space offered by the thicker laptop to offer some upgradability/repairability. It is not a ton, most users are not going to be doing much beyond swapping out the SSD or memory (and maybe a battery.) It is a step up from thin-and-light laptops, where everything is soldered down.
Removing several Phillips screws to unhook the bottom cover, we have a pretty typical full-size contemporary laptop.
Lenovo designates the memory, SSD, and battery as all being customer-replaceable. All of which are held in with screws and clips.
Starting with the SSD, Lenovo has taken an interesting approach with the P14s G6 by shipping a PCIe Gen5 SSD in a laptop that only offers PCIe Gen4 connectivity to the M.2 slot itself. With Arrow Lake-H’s 8 lanes of PCIe Gen5 routed to the NVIDIA GPU, this leaves just Gen4 lanes for the SSD and other peripherals. It means a Gen5 SSD will be bottlenecked by way of limited PCIe bandwidth, but this allows Lenovo to ship the laptop with modern, higher-performing drives that will offer better performance across the board, even when their peak sequential transfer rates are limited by the PCIe bus.
Lenovo includes a copper bracket/heatspreader over the SSD slot, so there is a fair bit of metal for heat soaking to help keep SSD performance up, even if the heatsink itself does not receive further cooling. Our review sample shipped with Lenovo’s “performance” SSD option, which in this case was a 1TB Samsung PM9E1 SSD – Samsung’s latest and greatest OEM drive. Lenovo does not guarantee a specific drive here, and their support documents list that the company also uses SK hynix’s PC801 SSD as their alternative performance SSD offering.
Moving on to system memory, Lenovo has opted to stick with tried-and-true SO-DIMM slots, which are buried underneath a pair of flaps at the center of the system. Being that this is a relatively high-end configuration of the P14s G6, Lenovo has included 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory.
Unfortunately, Lenovo has yet again artificially handicapped the laptop by only including a single SO-DIMM. And at DDR5-5600, this is not even the fastest DIMM speed that the P14s G6 supports, as it can get up to DDR5-6400 speeds with CSO-DIMMs. So although the laptop has ample memory, it can only provide half as much memory bandwidth as Arrow Lake-H would like to be fed.
A mitigating factor here, at least, is that this configuration also comes with a discrete GPU, NVIDIA’s RTX PRO 500 Blackwell, so the system is not leaning on the integrated GPU for high-performance graphics. Still, it is an unfortunate and unnecessary handicap for the laptop when two 16GB SO-DIMMs could provide twice as much memory bandwidth at roughly the same cost.
Finally, a good chunk of the laptop’s internal space is taken up by the battery. Though screwed into the laptop very well, this is a removable part (assuming you can find one down the line).
Lenovo offers two options here with the P14s G6: either a 3-cell 57Wh battery or a higher-capacity 75Wh battery. Our review sample came with the latter. Both batteries offer rapid charging and can be charged from empty to 80% in just an hour. With the inclusion of a discrete GPU, the higher capacity of the battery comes in handy, to say the least.
On a final note, Lenovo did opt to save some space with this laptop by using the BGA version of Intel’s BE201 Wi-Fi 7 + Bluetooth 5.4 adapter. So while it is visible within the laptop, you will not be replacing the soldered-down controller.
Now, let us go ahead and see what the full performance of the laptop is like.
