Our primary overall benchmark, UL’s PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC’s storage throughput.
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive. Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the freeware video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Creators rates a PC’s image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations that it performs in Adobe Photoshop 25.
For everyday work, the ThinkPad X9 tips past the Acer Swift 16 AI and Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition in PCMark 10, but all of them are basically fine on that score; they all scored comfortably above the 4,000-point baseline that signals good business productivity. (MacBooks can’t run PCMark, so they weren’t included in this test.)
In Cinebench 2024, the MacBook Pro with its M4 Pro chip significantly outperformed the competition, as expected. The ThinkPad X9 delivered the lowest score in the group, but still a respectable one. The ThinkPad X9 was also the slowest in the Handbrake video-transcoding trial, taking more than seven minutes versus the five to six of most competitors here, and falling well behind the MacBook Pro and Asus ProArt.
Looking at Geekbench, the X9 is close to even with the Acer Swift 16 AI and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i; in the Photoshop trial, the X9 fared better, thanks to our configuration’s 32GB of RAM. It again trailed the premium MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, though, as well as the Asus ProArt P16.
In short, the ThinkPad X9 is a perfectly capable laptop for general office tasks. However, it’s not the fastest machine out there, and it gets outpaced by more elite, content-creation-focused systems with more powerful hardware. Keep it to the basics, and it should satisfy.
