Lenovo ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition Review

Introduction

The Lenovo ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition arrives as a sleek and arguably more modern entry into the brand’s longstanding ThinkPad series of business laptops.

It brings some welcome style to a range of laptops that has otherwise been characterised by quite rugged and traditional design tropes up to this point in a bid to compete with the slew of recent sleek Windows ultrabooks such as the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro and Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024).

At £1649.99/$1989 it also comes with a remarkably competitive price tag against those rivals with a capable spec sheet that includes a Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor and 32GB of RAM as well as a 14-inch 3K 120Hz OLED screen.

With the seemingly never-ending conveyor belt of modern Windows ultrabooks in 2025 though, it seems like the ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition is going to have to do a lot to take the crown as one of the best ultrabooks we’ve tested. I’ve put it through its paces for the last couple of weeks to see how just how capable it is.

Design and Keyboard

• Lightweight and immensely portable
• Meagre port selection
• Comfortable keyboard and huge trackpad

With the ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition, Lenovo has gone a lot more for aesthetics than functionality against the more business-class ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, with a space grey-type colourway that gives me major MacBook Air vibes. In addition, the aluminium frame keeps it both durable and light, tipping the scales at just 1.24kg.

That lower weight for its size class combined with a modest 13mm thickness makes this ThinkPad a very portable laptop. It was easy to sling into a laptop bag and rucksack on a recent work trip to Paris, and worked a treat.

The slender nature of the ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition has had the unfortunate side effect of meaning we’re lacking ports. You’re limited to one Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C port on each side, plus an HDMI on the left and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the right. That’s another reason this ThinkPad is comparable to a MacBook Air, although not necessarily for the right reason.

The keyboard here is a smaller form factor choice, keeping with this laptop’s more compact nature. The board has a function row, arrow keys and some navigation keys dotted across it, with a shallower 1.35mm travel that makes it easy to type quite quickly. There is crisp white backlighting for after-dark working, although ardent ThinkPad enthusiasts will be disappointed to find no Trackpoint in the middle.

The trackpad is huge for a 14-inch laptop, providing your fingers with oodles of real estate for navigation and gesture commands, being a haptic choice and all. Being glass also means action is smooth, and does so without being skittish.

Display and Sound

• Excellent detail and sharpness
• Impeccable colour accuracy, blacks and contrast
• Speakers are reasonable, but nothing special

Unlike the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, this X9 model comes with a high-res OLED screen that’s more befitting of its similar price tag.

The 14-inch model I have here comes with a 2880×1800, or 3K, resolution screen for excellent detail, while a 120Hz refresh rate keeps things responsive, and a 16:10 aspect ratio provides a touch more vertical space to help it suit modern workloads. It is also touch-enabled and tracks well, if you need that as part of your use case.

Being an OLED means we’re getting impeccable colour accuracy, with this screen measuring 100% coverage of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts, alongside 94% of the traditionally more difficult Adobe RGB space. This makes this screen ideal for both productivity workloads with mainstream colours, and more colour-sensitive tasks such as video or photo editing.

In addition, it also comes with the deep, inky blacks that OLEDs have become known for, as demonstrated by the 0.01 level recorded on my colorimeter, as well as sublime contrast and dynamic range thanks to a 34580:1 measured contrast ratio. The 6400K white point also means the colour temperature is bang-on, too.

Where OLEDs can typically fall over is with their brightness, as they aren’t able to get as vibrant as their Mini LED counterparts, for instance. With this in mind, this X9 Aura Edition hits a peak SDR brightness of 474.5 nits, giving it decent brightness for both indoor and outdoor workloads.

Its speakers are solid too, with okay overall definition and audio that’s reasonable for any casual listening or viewing you may wish to undertake. They also have Dolby Atmos capabilities for more immersive sound. However, you are wise to utilise the laptop’s 3.5mm jack or Bluetooth capabilities for better audio from a set of headphones or headset.

Performance

• Intel Core Ultra 7 258V offers solid performance
• Decent 3D performance, too
• Solid RAM and SSD combo

Inside, this ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition comes with one of Intel’s Lunar Lake 200V laptop chips for solid power and efficiency – ideal for a work laptop.

This model I have has the eight core (split between four Performance and 4 Low-Power Efficiency cores) and eight thread Core Ultra 7 258V, which is a potent chip for both productivity and slightly more intensive multi-threaded tasks.

It’s a very similar processor you’ll find in one of this laptop’s key rivals, the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro, making it surprising to no one that both laptops perform roughly identically in our suite of tests. Nonetheless, the single-core results in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 prove the potency of this chip against rival AMD chips found in the MSI Prestige A16 AI+ and Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024).

However, it’s in multi-threaded workloads where those two options pull ahead of the ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition due to the Ryzen AI 9 365 and AI 9 HX 370 chips inside having more cores and more threads to take advantage of.

The Intel Arc 140V integrated graphics allow for decent performance in our 3DMark Time Spy test, proving this laptop’s suitability for lighter gaming and graphically-intensive tasks such as video editing or rendering.

It’s similar in power to the Radeon 890M found inside the Ryzen chips, and also a lot stronger than the similarly-priced Arm-based Windows ultrabooks with the Snapdragon X Plus and Elite chips inside.

This specific ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition also comes with 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM to give you enough headroom for multi-tasking and those tougher tasks, while the 1TB SSD gives you a decent amount of space for storing important apps, media, and more. It’s also quite quick storage, with measured read and write speeds of 5280.54MB/s and 4947.06MB/s respectively.

Software

• Full Copilot+PC AI functionality is here
• Reasonably clean Windows 11 install
• Some Lenovo-specific software present

This ThinkPad is also pushed as a Copilot+ PC, having the necessary AI horsepower for that designation with up to 48 TOPs of power. This means you get more than just the customary Copilot key on the bottom row of the keyboard for waking Microsoft’s AI assistant, and have some usable AI features.

There are generative AI features bundled into the Photos and Paint apps, working in the former to add filters to photos or an interesting background, as well as to generate an image based on a prompt with reasonable accuracy. With Paint, you can use the CoCreator tab to do the same thing, and even add detail to images to turn it into everything from an oil painting to pixel art.

The webcam here has Windows Studio effects that can keep you in frame automatically. Plus convenient features such as background blur, which works a treat for conference calls. There are also useful extras including a way of adding live captions to videos directly within Windows, which is handy.

This ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition also comes with a reasonably clean Windows 11 install. As for Lenovo-specific apps, there’s Lenovo Commercial Vantage which allows you do to everything from check on system utilisation to fiddling with power and battery settings. Otherwise, you also have access to Lenovo AI Now, which opens the brand’s own AI assistant – Local Chat – and you ask it questions about files on your PC or to turn on settings such as the battery saver or a different performance mode.

As an x86-based system, this Lenovo laptop also doesn’t run into the same compatibility issues as Arm-based systems do, which is a definite win.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 12 hours 40 minutes
• Capable of lasting for between one and two working days

The ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition also provides solid endurance, with it being able to last for 12 hours and 40 minutes in the customary PCMark 10 battery test with brightness at 150 nits and the keyboard backlighting at its default level.

This means you’ll comfortably be able to get a working day out of this laptop while being away from the mains, although get to a second day and you might want to reach for a charger to replenish the 55Whr cell. The result here is well among its competitors, with the likes of the Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) and MSI Prestige A16 AI+ posting results that sit within a couple of hours of Lenovo’s option. The Arm-based Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 still remains the endurance king though, with around 10 hours more runtime than the ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition.

A 65W power brick with USB-C connectivity takes care of charging duties, and offers rather brisk speeds. Going from a dead state to a half charge took just 40 minutes, while going from zero to full took 85, meaning you’ll be up and running again in little time.

Should you buy it?