Crazy Market Prices, Over 10,000 for a 5060: ThinkBook 16+ 2026 Discrete GPU Edition Unboxing

Introduction

Affected by AI crowding out production capacity for NAND, chips, and the like, laptop prices have gone crazy this year, and from the looks of it we’re far from the peak.

Buying a computer right now really means landing in a very bad era. Of course, it might not even be the worst yet 😂, because rumor has it things will get even more absurd.

This shopping journey was extremely rocky. If I have time I can put together another buying-guide post, but laptop prices change every day — by the time I finish and publish it, it probably won’t mean anything anymore…

Anyway, briefly: I started out looking at performance laptops (gaming laptops), and checked these:

That’s enough — I won’t list that many.

Looking through them, either the build and quality were nothing to write home about, or they were just bulky, black, and crude with zero sense of refinement.

Later the budget kept climbing and climbing, somehow all the way to 12,500 yuan, and I picked up this ThinkBook 16+ 2026 discrete GPU edition.

Not long after I bought it, this laptop went up by 1,000 yuan. Now even the government subsidy is gone, and the price has hit 14,999 😂. Although I missed the 10,000-yuan launch low price, I’m still glad I didn’t buy too late, and got it at a price that’s still somewhat acceptable.

Packaging

I didn’t photograph the outer box. This laptop was a government-subsidy product, so at delivery the courier required me to unbox and photograph it on the spot.

So I’ll just photograph the laptop itself.

The whale on the packaging bag is pretty cute.

The Laptop

The build quality looks pretty decent.

I have to complain: there are way too many stickers on this laptop!

PS: The lighting was pretty dim the day I took the photos, and I didn’t set up the lights well. Luckily there’s the almighty GPT Image.

Opening It Up

There’s a protective film on the C-side, similar to the TB14+ I bought before, except this one is a bit wrinkled…

Continuing with the C-side keyboard

Sides

It’s quite thin, and the ports are plentiful too.

PS: When GPT Image processed this, it redrew the USB-A port as Type-C. AI still isn’t always reliable.

Webcam

The bump at the top of the screen integrates a bunch of sensors. It looks a bit ugly at first glance; after a while you get used to it.

Hardware Specs

After unboxing and checking that the laptop’s exterior was fine, the next thing to do was power it on and test.

The config I bought is: Ultra 7 356H, 32G+1TB, 5060. In the current magical market environment, with the price over 10,000 yuan, it already has nothing to do with value.

I still remember saying last year that the Tianxuan 6 Pro at over 8,000 after the government subsidy wasn’t that great value. I never expected today’s prices to be even more unbelievable.

Storage Info

This ThinkBook 16+ 2026 comes with a Union Memory next-gen AM6D1 PCIe 5.0 SSD, 2242 form factor, 3D TLC NAND.

Union Memory’s official specs for the AM6D1 1TB are:

• Sequential read: 10,700MB/s
• Sequential write: 10,600MB/s
• 4K random read: 1.5 million IOPS
• 4K random write: 1.15 million IOPS
• MTBF: 2 million hours
• Supports end-to-end data protection, SRAM ECC, and CPU ECC

Storage Benchmark

Real-world speeds are decent enough. As long as it’s TLC, the difference in actual use should be about the same.

Display

The TB16+ screen is indeed a bit better than an ordinary laptop: 3200x2000 resolution, 100% DCI-P3 color gamut, officially rated 500 nits brightness, 30-165Hz variable refresh rate.

Here’s the color gamut test.

CPU-Z

GPU-Z

The iGPU is fairly new; the GPU-Z I installed still can’t identify it, so I’ll just screenshot the 5060 info.

Stress Tests

Performance Mode

Before stress testing, let’s first adjust the performance mode.

Lenovo’s business laptops are weird: the control panel for adjusting laptop features is buried in a second-level menu of some junk software called Baiying. As for Lenovo’s bundled software, I could write a whole separate post later just to roast it — it’s genuinely infuriating.

The default plugged-in state is Performance mode, and there’s a higher Geek mode. We’ll stress-test each of them.

Idle Power Draw

This Intel Ultra 7 356H is said to be a very low-power CPU. Before the stress test, idle power draw here is 9W.

Performance Mode: CPU-Only Stress Test

This time I checked stress CPU, stress FPU, stress cache, and stress system memory.

Right after starting the stress test, CPU power was 60W.

After 10 minutes, CPU power was 64W, temperature at 70°C — still fairly conservative.

Geek Mode

Let’s see how Geek mode handles the stress test.

All subsequent stress tests will be done in Geek mode.

CPU-Only Stress Test

Right from the start it jumped to 84W, temperature 90°C. Sure enough, Performance mode was too conservative.

After 5 minutes of CPU-only stress, power was at 77W, temperature 89°C.

Let it cool down a bit, then continue testing the GPU.

GPU-Only Stress Test

It pulled 100W right from the start.

After 5 minutes, it held at 110W, temperature 78°C.

Combined Stress Test

With the GPU already under stress for 5 minutes, I started stress FPU.

After 5 minutes of combined stress, the CPU overheated and downclocked, while the GPU actually climbed to 114W.

After 10 minutes of combined stress, it still held a stable 54W + 112W = 166W, basically reaching the officially advertised 170W power limit.

This year’s new ThinkBook 16+ chassis is pretty good. I remember the previous generation only had 130W.

Benchmarks

Next, let’s look at the scores.

CPU-Z

This time I added a CPU-Z benchmark.

This CPU is said to have very strong on-battery performance. Let’s see if that’s actually the case.

This benchmark is referenced against the desktop i5-14600K. In plugged-in mode, there’s still a noticeable gap versus the desktop 14th-gen i5.

In the following on-battery tests, the Baiying control panel was all set to Performance mode.

For a clearer view, I had Grandpa LLM turn the results into a table so we can compare.

The conclusion: the Ultra 7 356H’s on-battery performance is indeed very strong, especially in Performance mode — it’s basically full-power performance.

Compared to plugged-in use, single-core only dropped 0.2%, multi-core only dropped 1.7%.

That margin can already be considered around the margin of error.

Balanced mode is also quite strong. Compared to plugged-in: single-core dropped about 22%, multi-core only dropped about 12%, this strategy prioritizes sacrificing high-frequency single-core Turbo, trying to preserve multi-core throughput, which is well suited to mobile office scenarios.

3DMark

Time was limited, so I only tested TimeSpy.

Geek mode, with GPU overclocking off. The score is 11775.

After enabling the default overclock settings, it reached 12140, matching the officially advertised performance.

iGPU Benchmark

Let’s also look at the iGPU score. Compared to the 358H, this Ultra 7 356H CPU has its iGPU cut down to only 4 cores.

Still, the score reaches the 3000-point level, already catching up to the 8845HS’s 780M. Pretty good indeed.

Entertainment Master

Finally, the Entertainment Master score, for reference only.

Gaming Tests

Bringing out the old regular, Horizon Zero Dawn.

At 1080p, with DLSS on and max settings, it can reach 118 FPS.

At native 3200x2000 with the same settings, it can run at 87 FPS. If you’re just playing AAA games, that’s enough.

Wrap-up

When I was buying it I was still hesitating over whether a 2kg laptop would be too heavy. After actually using it, I found it’s acceptable. After trimming some stuff in my backpack, the feel isn’t that different from a 1.4kg thin-and-light.

On the display side, the biggest difference is what the 16-inch screen brings. The Jige and MacBook Pro I used before were both 14-inch. Suddenly switching to a 16-inch screen is a real upgrade — the field of view is much larger.

Another thing is the performance experience. The upgrade from the 5060 discrete GPU is very obvious. For light entertainment or dual-screen use (streaming video + apps), compared to Jige’s 780M iGPU, it’s a complete crushing advantage.

That’s about it. I haven’t used it much yet, and a lot of data is still being organized and migrated. When I have time later I’ll continue sharing my brand-new Windows development setup.