Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Can Work Well As A Solid Linux Laptop
Across that range of 200+ benchmarks the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition with Intel Core Ultra 7 258V delivered performance comparable overall to the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U and AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition performance was very comparable to the Lunar Lake powered ASUS Zenbook S14. The higher-end AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptops meanwhile delivered much greater performance overall thanks to the higher core/thread counts, AVX-512 support for some workloads, and other advantages.
The Core Ultra 7 258V within the X1 Carbon Gen 13 was pulling 20 Watts on average across this large swath of benchmarks that took 33 hours to complete. During that intense 33 hours of benchmarking, the Core Ultra 7 258V saw a peak power consumption in the X1 Carbon Gen 13 of 37 Watts -- these numbers were quite similar to the ASUS Zenbook S14 and much better than prior generation Intel laptop SoCs. Lunar Lake does very well from a power efficiency perspective.
When looking at the CPU core temperature from the 33 hours it took to run the 200+ benchmarks on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13, it was at 66 degrees on average -- below the 77 degree average for the Core Ultra 7 256V found within the ASUS Zenbook S14. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 was also cooler than the Framework 13 laptops and other recent laptop models.
👁 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 running Linux
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition with the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V "Lunar Lake" lost to the upper-tier AMD Ryzen AI 300 series in many of the demanding benchmarks, but did perform very well in web browser workloads under both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The single-threaded performance was also great for Python and PHP scripting, Node.js, cryptography tasks, and various other workloads as shown. And the Core Ultra 7 258V was very power efficient in those tasks if you are most often just using a web browser, mail client, and office suite / IDE compared to multi-threaded creator workloads, code compilation, and other more intense workloads best left with the Ryzen AI 300 series.
If your laptop needs align with those workloads where Lunar Lake was performing very well under Linux, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition is a great contender for a premium laptop that is built very well and backed by a solid warranty and robust hardware availability. The X1 Carbon Gen 13 build quality is solid, the 2.8K OLED display with HDR display is beautiful and can now enjoy working high dynamic range under Linux with modern desktops, and all-around a solid option for a business laptop if battery life / power efficiency is important.
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition does work well under Linux if using a new distribution like Ubuntu 25.04 or Fedora Workstation 42 for having to be less concerned about any Lunar Lake graphics issues, better suspend/resume handling, and other improvements. The one major headache is if hitting the 400MHz CPU issue for very low performance that can be worked around by changing the platform profile or Lenovo will soon be issuing a new BIOS/EC firmware to address that bug. And that's a great reminder as well that Lenovo does support LVFS/Fwupd for firmware updating to further provide a nice well-rounded Linux experience for the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition. Pricing on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition with Core Ultra 7 258V and 2.8K OLED display can be high at $2400~2500 USD but there have been sales putting it more in the $1800~1900 space that in turn places it more comparable to the Framework Laptop pricing and other premium laptops.
There will be some more follow-up benchmarks with the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 on Linux so stay tuned to Phoronix.
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