Lenovo's new ThinkBook 14+ 2024 laptop features Intel Core Ultra CPU, OCulink connector

Lenovo's new ThinkBook 14+ laptop has been teased, with a few nice tricks up its sleeve in the form of featuring Intel's new Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" CPU and its first laptop with an OCulink connector.

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The next-gen Lenovo ThinkBook 14+ laptop has shown up on multiple Chinese social media platforms, along with other laptops Lenovo has in the works that'll be unveiled at CES 2024 early next year; the ThinkBook 14+ is an interesting offering. We've seen gaming handhelds feature an OCulink connector, providing faster gaming performance through using an external GPU with more bandwidth over Thunderbolt 4 and USB4 connectivity.

OCulink is considered an external PCIe connector, meaning that it doesn't fight with the CPU overhead that Thunderbolt does. Thunderbolt has more functionality as an external connector, but it's slower than OCulink... OCulink is somewhere between 15% and 20% faster than using Thunderbolt 4 or USB4, with OCulink capable of delivering up to 63Gbps of bandwidth... much better than Thunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 4, and USB4, which are all limited to just 40Gbps.

Lenovo's new ThinkBook 14+ laptop and its new native OCulink connector will allow a discrete desktop graphics card to be connected, offering much more power for gamers who need more performance than what the integrated graphics inside can do. In this case, we're talking about the new Arc GPU tile that's built onto the new Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" CPU series.

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We will see Lenovo replacing the on-board USB connector with an OCulink connector, as it's super cheap for third-party companies to do so. These adapters cost around $20, but Lenovo is using a native OCulink connector without users -- or modders -- having to make any modifications at all.

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According to Chinese sources, Lenovo could make some last-minute changes to the design of the next-gen ThinkBook 14+ 2024 laptops. We could see some markets getting a slight design tweak, but we should expect Lenovo's new ThinkBook 14+ 2024 laptops to mostly look the same.

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Above is the PCIe Gen4x4 M.2 to OCulink for ThinkPad 16+ 2023 gaming laptops, which you can buy from AliExpress. It's good to see Lenovo including the faster OCulink connector, because gamers can have an awesome new, and thin laptop that has a super-fast external connectivity option for using an external desktop graphics card.