The ThinkPad X9 15 Aura Edition is classified as a productivity laptop and carries a weight of 1,450 grams with a footprint of 339 x 228 mm and a thickness of just 17 mm, giving it a total volume of around 1,314 cm³. It comes with a backlit keyboard and is backed by a three-year warranty. The machine does not use a fanless design, nor does it feature a weather-sealed or rugged build.
The laptop features a 15.3″ OLED/AMOLED touch screen with a resolution of 2880 x 1800 pixels, translating to a pixel density of 221 ppi, and a smooth 120Hz refresh rate. Typical brightness is rated at 500 nits, though the panel does not include an anti-reflection coating. The system supports up to three displays simultaneously, making it suited for multi-monitor setups.
The laptop is powered by an 8-thread 64-bit processor built on a 3nm semiconductor, running at a base clock speed of 4 x 2.2 GHz across all cores with a turbo frequency reaching 4.8GHz, and it supports multithreading for handling parallel workloads. It comes equipped with 32GB of DDR5 RAM at 8,533 MHz — also the maximum supported — paired with a 1TB NVMe SSD connected over PCIe 4 for fast flash-based storage. The integrated GPU operates at a base clock of 600 MHz, boosting up to 1,950 MHz, and supports DirectX 12 Ultimate, though it does not include XeSS (XMX) acceleration.
In PassMark testing, the laptop achieves an overall score of 19,096, while its single-threaded PassMark result comes in at 4,038, reflecting the processor's per-core throughput capacity.
The laptop's wired port selection includes two Thunderbolt 4 ports alongside two USB 4 40Gbps ports and a single USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, while there are no USB 3.2 Gen 2, USB 4 20Gbps, DisplayPort, mini DisplayPort, VGA, or RJ45 connections on board. Video output is handled by one HDMI 2.1 port, and there is no external memory card slot. On the wireless side, the machine supports Wi-Fi 7 (backwards compatible through Wi-Fi 4) and Bluetooth 5.4, and it also includes AirPlay support.
The laptop is equipped with an 80 Wh battery. It does not include sleep-and-charge USB ports, nor does it use a MagSafe power adapter.
For audio, the laptop includes stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos support and a 3.5mm headset jack, while the four built-in microphones and voice command functionality round out the sound input options. Security and authentication are handled through a fingerprint scanner and 3D facial recognition. The front-facing 8MP camera is present, though no stylus is included in the box. The device does not support ray tracing, DLSS, or S/PDIF output, and it lacks an optical disc drive as well as sensors such as a gyroscope, GPS, accelerometer, and compass.
The laptop-class processor carries a clock multiplier of 22, a 12MB L3 cache, and a 17W TDP, with a maximum rated CPU temperature of 100°C. It uses big.LITTLE technology, supports NX bit, and has a locked multiplier. Supported instruction sets include MMX, F16C, FMA3, AES, AVX, AVX2, SSE 4.1, and SSE 4.2. The integrated Arc Graphics 140V GPU features 8 execution units and 1,024 shading units, with OpenCL 3 and OpenGL 4.6 support, while ECC memory is not supported. Memory runs across two channels with a maximum bandwidth of 136 GB/s and a top speed of 8,533 MHz. The overclocked PassMark result for this configuration is recorded at 20,403.
