Lenovo Workstations are painstakingly designed to get the highest performance out of every component. Whether it’s ensuring the highest air throughput to cool processors, or designing optimized circuit board layouts to get the highest PCIe performance; each detail is carefully considered by our hardware engineers.
As a software architect within our workstation business, it’s my job to constantly be looking for ways to ensure Lenovo customers are getting the most out of both their hardware and software investments. Dedication to this mission brings an updated software offering– Lenovo Performance Tuner (LPT) 2.0 — to enhance performance, increase productivity, and optimize manageability for Lenovo Workstations and the range of demanding software applications that run on them.
The ultimate goal with LPT is to provide our customers with an incredibly easy-to-use, packed-with-power software package, for free. For ease of use, LPT 2.0 offers pre-defined application profiles for many popular professional applications, helping to manage system resources required by those applications to run optimally. Users can even create custom profiles for specific applications to manage power, graphics, BIOS and affinity settings – so work goes uninterrupted while the software does the heavy lifting in the background.
Using Processor Affinity, LPT gives users the ability to designate an application to run on a specific core to improve system workload. To make it even easier to manage, Lenovo provides two, easy-to-understand presets called “Performance Enhanced” and “Background.” In Performance Enhanced mode, certain applications receive dedicated access to the first few CPU cores on a system, which allows them to run exclusively on those cores, regardless of what the rest of the system is doing, improving performance. The Background setting does the opposite; by reserving the first few cores of the system this prevents a specific application from consuming all of the resources, bogging down a system during heavy runs to increase productivity.
LPT 2.0 also offers multiple settings to customize existing application profiles. With this flexibility, users can do everything from adjust power settings to avoid CPU throttling or adjust visual settings to free up GPU resources. On top of this, Lenovo provides extensive help in LPT, so users can explore profiles with detailed information about what each setting does.
A big benefit of this 2.0 release is the addition of administrator controls over all aspects of LPT. If you are an IT administrator, LPT can now be fully customized by IT policy. You can control the set of profiles available, what profile settings are applied and more. The LPT help section will provide you with more details, and downloadable administrative templates to make policy settings even easier.
With this latest update, Lenovo is seeing healthy performance benefits for most ISV applications. For example, with LPT 2.0, testing is showing up to 73% improvement in performance and speed for AutoCAD 2017 while the system is under stress, using the PassMark CPUMark test.
Don’t just take our word for it, though. Our customers are seeing the benefits, too. The University of Wolverhampton Racing (UWR) – a trailblazing university program that’s putting Lenovo Workstation solutions to the test – is already reaping the benefits of LPT. The UWR team 3D prints and assembles many components of their Formula cars from scratch – essentially reinventing the process of car manufacturing and racing from the ground up. Before the vehicles come to life, the students design the automotive components with SOLIDWORKS and ANSYS and run multiple simulations to perfect their vehicle and design. To ensure they’re getting the most out of their hardware, UWR uses LPT throughout their entire process.
Matthew Fenton, race engineer for UWR told us: “Running all of the software we need to design competitive Formula 3 vehicles demands that our systems always run optimally. For the best results, we rely on the Lenovo Performance Tuner to optimize our performance tasking, so that we can concept, design and produce the best possible vehicle every time.”
The best thing of all: LPT is completely free. You can download the 2.0 release for your ThinkStation or ThinkPad P series tower and mobile workstations today and start getting even more from your system. Check out our LPT site to learn more and download today.
