Help me pick a Lenovo

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"premium" thin laptops

I guess thats the problem? Thin. Quiet. Cool. Currently engineering limits us to choosing two out of the three!

I haven't followed chip design for several years now. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel/AMD were building CPUs with a higher tolerance to heat build up than previous generations. An increasing demand for thin laptops is pushing design towards completely passive cooling or anaemic fans.


On a related note; if you aren't kind to where/how you use your machine, the cooling system can get clogged. The efficacy of the thermal compound also degrades. If you are running a five year old laptop, the thermal compound may not be doing much passive transfer to the heat sink. Although... after looking up the Dell 7300... it looks like a 2019 model?? So maybe they just cheaped out on thermal dissipation?


Lastly,


You seem like a pretty smart dude... so I am sure you mean idling when you say idling. For completeness, i'll say it anyway 😝 : make sure the machine is actually idling... that is, there aren't any rogue background process burning up CPU cycles.
 
the problem today is that all pro grade laptops are thin. there are no thick laptops today. my t400 from 2010 is i dont know 40mm thick. so it has space for a working cooling system. and a good fan. but today the pro grade laptops are 15-20mm.

i've been reading up on several computer forums now and almost all thinkpads also suffer from ****** cooling and very very high cpu/gpu/hd temps.
so its the same across the board.

a consequence of this is that none of the computers can utilize the cpus they have. because in like 2 seconds the cpus will shoot up to 100C and then they clock down to like 0,8-1ghz. WHILE AT THE SAME TIME the fans are running at full blast. now if that isn't an engineering fail of epic proportions i dont know what is.

so in effect that expensive i7 is just a waste of money. the i3 will perform just the same and it might even do it while not overheating the computer.
this is so sad. an entire industry totally incompetent.
 
The majority of office users don't need high performance machines by modern standards. Laptops are being designed to be as power efficient as possible with the capability to do bursts of activity when requested. That suits many people. People who do little more than check emails, write documents and surf the internet.

The last time I purchased a Lenovo (4 years ago) they were at a turning point in the ThinkPad line. Design-wise, the market had pretty mature ultrabook options. Clearly there was a competitive pressure towards thinner and lighter. The 14" format had been my goto (T14 and T4xx) for the preceding decade. They offered a range of very thin (e.g. X1), sort of thin (T4xxs) and normal (T4xx) options. From memory the number of designs with soldered components increased from their thinner models to more of their 'normal' models. Many of of these options also had scaled back CPUs (the low-powered versions).

I decided to purchase a 'P' series ThinkPad. It is currently idling at 55C. The fan is off. Not bad for a four year old laptop. It has a plastic bottom so it is only warm to touch. It is an expensive machine... but closer in philosophy to the older ThinkPads. If you need the power... consider this series. Other gaming laptops may be similar.
 
the problem today is that all pro grade laptops are thin. there are no thick laptops today. my t400 from 2010 is i dont know 40mm thick. so it has space for a working cooling system. and a good fan. but today the pro grade laptops are 15-20mm.

i've been reading up on several computer forums now and almost all thinkpads also suffer from ****** cooling and very very high cpu/gpu/hd temps.
so its the same across the board.

a consequence of this is that none of the computers can utilize the cpus they have. because in like 2 seconds the cpus will shoot up to 100C and then they clock down to like 0,8-1ghz. WHILE AT THE SAME TIME the fans are running at full blast. now if that isn't an engineering fail of epic proportions i dont know what is.

so in effect that expensive i7 is just a waste of money. the i3 will perform just the same and it might even do it while not overheating the computer.
this is so sad. an entire industry totally incompetent.
Look at something built on the thicker Clevo chassis's. They have designs that can handle desktop CPU's wattage. Not just the low power ones either.
 
I finally got a couple days with the laptop to have something to talk about. While I can't see it killing any bears, I'm really happy with it for what I need it for. Keep in mind that I'm moving from a nearly decade old HP so take my remarks with a grain of salt. Also I've never written a review before so don't expect coherent thoughts or well written descriptions.

View attachment 91513

The laptop looks and feels fantastic. Extremely sturdy with little to no flex throughout. I didn't expect it to be this thin and light in hand. It might not be the thinnest laptop ever but compared to what I had it feels super super thin. With the X1 not having an AMD refresh, this is a very good option for a powerful thin and light.
The whole thing feels extremely well built and sturdy, it does have the metallic feel of the X series over the rubberized T series feel, but I like that (for the most part, but we'll get back to that).
The keyboard and touchpad are both great, what you'd expect from a thinkpad. The port selection is better than most laptops. The S model removes the Ethernet jack but a dongle is available. It also has no thunderbolt capabilities and no 4K screen options since it's the AMD model and those two are still Intel only perks. But the FHD 400 nitt screen I opted for looks fantastic IMO and as a student who doesn't do any editing it's more than enough. I also wouldn't use an external GPU so thunderbolt isn't that big of a deal.

View attachment 91518

For me the extra juice in the AMD model is more than worth the trade off. This thing is very, very powerful. Despite the CPU being capped at a lower wattage than other models with the same processor, it's still faster than anything Intel has to offer for the price, with much better integrated graphics. For me it's more than enough juice for anything I'd use it for, such as matlab and rstudio and other programs, as well as light gaming. If this seems like the sort of tasks you'd use it for then it's a fantastic laptop. I can't see it being used for video editing and 3D modeling but some Photoshop should be fine too. This machine is somewhere in the middle between size and power but the s model I have definitely leans towards the thin and light over too much power. There's also a 4750u model with more power but I'd get the regular T14 with that processor as I feel like this one won't be able to cool it properly.
Which leads us to the main and probably only issue I had with this thing. Thermals.

View attachment 91517

Under light loads the laptop is very quiet and cool. But cranking it to performance mode or doing something intensive really ramps it up. The exhaust port is on the right which many complained would bother mouse users, I found it to be more an issue for using it on your lap or just touching the right side, as it got uncomfortably hot at some points. I played some NFS (2015) as it was the only game I had. With the laptop on performance mode and graphics on high, the laptop ran very smoothly and the fans were barely audible. However, you could fry an egg on the right side of the laptop. It got very, very hot very quickly, and stayed that toasty for the whole session. It cooled down as soon as i went back to battery saving mode and went back to file sorting. So keep that in mind if you're using the laptop on your lap.

To summarize this terribly written post, I really like the laptop. It's very well built and feels very expensive. It's also fast and controls brilliantly.
It does however have mediocre thermals and gets very hot very fast. Many have issues with the bezels and the speakers but I found both to be fine. Coming from the oil tanker that is my old HP the bezels are okay and the speakers are more than adequate, a bit tinny but they sound full and clear.
This laptop is for anyone who wants something portable first but also packs a serious punch. I've only been using it for a couple of days but so far I'm very very happy with how it performs and feels.

it turns out i ended up with a t14s too. with 4750, 16 gigs and 1tb. it arrived in 30h after i ordered it from the site.

now i notice that my left speaker has a crackling sound when playing back windows sounds, especially the sound it makes when you adjust the sound level... and also at login. and even at 25% volume it sounds crackled. i find it kinda unlikely the driver is shot. or the amp. and to make it strange: i can't hear any distortion when i play back speech or music. even at max volume. dafuq.

do you get a crackling sound from the windows sounds?

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the display hinges seems crooked on mine. if i look at it from behind the hingest seems slightly bent. i investigated a bit and it seems like this is because the hinges are only supported on one side, there is no pin going through the whole hinge and into the display. its only one sided.

how does your hinges look?

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Bios. is there even a bios in there?? i find some basic settings but no real bios. i mean i can't even set display brightness in the bios. i also find a lot of cryptic crap in there that i have no idea what it does or if i even want. need a phd to figure out what all this crap even does.
trying to find some settings for the cpu. enabling cores/HT/turbo/sleep states etc. couldn't find jack chit about this in bios.

how does your bios look?

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other than that i kinda like it. its a bit crippled by a ****** bios the absolutely shittiest bios i have ever seen, that lets windows take control of everything.

its looks quite fragile, and at first it feels quite fragile too. but after some use i think it will hold up quite good. it wont last for 8 years, but maybe 3-4.

i will be forced to use win10 with for some time until i figure out what crap i need to disable to make linux work well with it. but win10 actually worked quite well with it so far. just tried it with a recent linux release and i got screen tearing, both touchpad buttons behaves like the left button somehow. and display is at full blast without any way to turn it down. not with the top row buttons or in the menus.
 
:(

Sorry to hear all that. Sounds like a bad experience.

how does your hinges look?

Aligned well. Pinned only on one side with cables being threaded through the other... I think. It is hard to see and I haven't done a tear down. 4-5 years later and they are still strong. They have not loosened significantly, if at all.... Plenty strong!

how does your bios look?

My bios is simple but comprehensive enough. It looks the same as the ones if you search "Thinkpad bios" and look at the images. Have they changed it recently?

figure out what crap i need to disable to make linux work well with it.

Depends what version of Linux and what is on your machine? Something popular like Ubuntu aught to offer you 90% functionality out of the box. A recent Ubuntu should play nice with the boot loader. If you choose a different flavour you might have to disable "secure boot" in your BIOS before installing Linux.

Linux always sucks for battery life and hardware that runs on proprietary drivers. The T14s looks like a pretty standard machine - it should be ok. Maybe the live session was just a bit buggy?
 
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:(

Sorry to hear all that. Sounds like a bad experience.



Aligned well. Pinned only on one side with cables being threaded through the other... I think. It is hard to see and I haven't done a tear down. 4-5 years later and they are still strong. They have not loosened significantly, if at all.... Plenty strong!



My bios is simple but comprehensive enough. It looks the same as the ones if you search "Thinkpad bios" and look at the images. Have they changed it recently?



Depends what version of Linux and what is on your machine? Something popular like Ubuntu aught to offer you 90% functionality out of the box. A recent Ubuntu should play nice with the boot loader. If you choose a different flavour you might have to disable "secure boot" in your BIOS before installing Linux.

Linux always sucks for battery life and hardware that runs on proprietary drivers. The T14s looks like a pretty standard machine - it should be ok. Maybe the live session was just a bit buggy?
Pretty much my impressions as well. The speakers don't crackle even on startup or adjusting the volume, the hinges are well aligned, they don't look bent to me, QC is mostly good with Lenovo but you might have been unlucky.
As for toughness, maybe the regular T14 would be better suited for you? I feel like this one is sturdy enough for my uses (I always have it in my back pack and I'm not too precious about it)
 
i investigated the left speak crackle problem further. i tried muting the left and right speaker on my job latitude and then raising the volume up and down so i could hear the system sound. and the result is that the latitude behaves exactly the same. left speaker crackles when playing back system sounds. and the odds of that happening is very low.

so its most likely a problem with the windows audio driver. not the hardware.

the reason i went for the t14s is that i didn't want a glass fiber "shell". i wanted the premium materials. heck even my old t400 is carbon/polycarbonate/magnesium.
 
:(



Depends what version of Linux and what is on your machine? Something popular like Ubuntu aught to offer you 90% functionality out of the box. A recent Ubuntu should play nice with the boot loader. If you choose a different flavour you might have to disable "secure boot" in your BIOS before installing Linux.

Linux always sucks for battery life and hardware that runs on proprietary drivers. The T14s looks like a pretty standard machine - it should be ok. Maybe the live session was just a bit buggy?

i think i will need to run one of the newest kernels because the hardware is so new. i saw someone posted on reddit that they tried kernel 5.8.0 or similar and then everything worked.

 
i dont think i will need to. basically music and vids and stuff sound completely undistorted. its just the system sounds somehow. and i will definitely turn off all system sounds. but i became unsure there for a while about what was going on. send it back or keep it. i think i'm keeping it.
 
allright thought i'd give a t14s amd update from bed. trying it out installed now.
i installed linux on the machine by shrinking the win partition in windows, then format the new one to whatever.

during install i noticed i had to set some pw for secure boot if i wanted the media codecs, weird. so i just turned it off in bios. linux would still boot with it turned on though from usb.

i made 2 partitions for linux from the new partition, one / and one /home. ext4. install. done. bootloader in the windows efi partition.

updated everything and installed kernel 5.8 something. and everything seems to work as far as i can tell.
except for one thing. the touchpad right button is acting as the left button and the left is also the left. the trackpoint buttons work as supposed though. this is no big problem since i just set the touchpad up to register 2 finger clicks as right clicks. no need to click anything at all anymore

scrolling works much better in linux. its night and day. its so good now i almost cream my pants. the whole touchpad works better.

i started to get really really tired and annoyed with win10 about 30 min in. why the fuk does it send me out on the internet when i want to change settings. yeah probably have to wipe it from the system. its such a ****** OS i'm surprised they dont get sued over it. for crimes against humanity.

allinall it was a good computer upgrade. feels really snappy and quick. everything is pretty much immediate. screen is very good (ips 400cd/m2). light weight. runs cool.

👏👏:p
 
i started to get really really tired and annoyed with win10 about 30 min in. why the fuk does it send me out on the internet when i want to change settings. yeah probably have to wipe it from the system. its such a ****** OS i'm surprised they dont get sued over it. for crimes against humanity.
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
 
yeah for example i wanted to make some type of backup usb or file incase my install would ruin something. typed recov, for recovery, in the search bar inside windows. one of the suggestions was "how to make a recovery disc" or whatever it said. i clicked on it and it turns out its ****ing internet link. is this for real?? really??

if i wanted to read about how to make one i would have looked it up on the internet. now i just wanted to make one, thats why i searched for it inside the os. and then when i actually found the setting, inside the actual os this time, it couldn't even make any recovery usb. what a ****ing joke.
 
So you'd rather have space taken up to store the answer to every question you, little Billy next door and Karen might have?

Or just open control panel, type in "recovery" in the search bar? 🤷‍♂️
 
So you'd rather have space taken up to store the answer to every question you, little Billy next door and Karen might have?

Or just open control panel, type in "recovery" in the search bar? 🤷‍♂️

no not at all. i just wanted to get to the settings page for that function straight away. but it kinda mixes settings with internet searches. and i dont think even karen nor billy likes that.
 
just ordered an i7 thinkbook T15 for my GF, the alu frame vs a magnesium frame is not likely a big difference
 
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Inferno - Do you know of a way to toggle the touch pad on/off. I'm a long time mouse user and not likely to change. The touchpad senses any palm contact, and thumb contact and sometimes even breathing hard. I would like to disable it but be able to bring it back in event I don't have the mouse available.

Thinkpad.
 
there is probably some setting that turns off the touchpad while you write stuff. both in linux and windows i guess. fairly certain of this.

otherwise you might want to look in the "bios" (tap f12 or whatever during startup and then select the setup menu) to see if you can turn off the touchpad completely, but you might not be able too since then you wouldn't be able to do anything with the computer without a mouse. maybe not even navigate the bios.
 
I had a job interview once where I had to demonstrate a spreadsheet I had built for the interview. They had disabled the touchpad, on a ThinkPad, to see if I could do it without using a mouse (and probably also to see if I would complain about it)
 
Inferno - Do you know of a way to toggle the touch pad on/off. I'm a long time mouse user and not likely to change. The touchpad senses any palm contact, and thumb contact and sometimes even breathing hard. I would like to disable it but be able to bring it back in event I don't have the mouse available.

Thinkpad.
The last thinkpad I had I could disable the touchpad in the bios permenantely. I couldn't disable only the touchpad and leave the little red button mouse working in the bios though. If you're in linux, you can do it pretty easily with xorg settings. It takes a little trial and error but its not bad. I don't remember if I could disable and re-enable without restarting xorg. Probably not.

Can't help if you're on windows. Haven't used windows on a laptop for a decade.
 
Inferno - Do you know of a way to toggle the touch pad on/off. I'm a long time mouse user and not likely to change. The touchpad senses any palm contact, and thumb contact and sometimes even breathing hard. I would like to disable it but be able to bring it back in event I don't have the mouse available.

Thinkpad.

I haven't read everything prior, but ensure that you get the proper Synaptics driver for you box from Lenovo - under the mouse settings you should be able to disable the Touchpad and just leave the pointer stick working. Been doing that for years as I've been a long time Thinkpad user and hate touchpads. I would check now, but I'm on a work issued Macbook.
 
The last thinkpad I had I could disable the touchpad in the bios permenantely. I couldn't disable only the touchpad and leave the little red button mouse working in the bios though. If you're in linux, you can do it pretty easily with xorg settings. It takes a little trial and error but its not bad. I don't remember if I could disable and re-enable without restarting xorg. Probably not.

Can't help if you're on windows. Haven't used windows on a laptop for a decade.

Hehe... I think i understand your user name now... unless it is pure coincidence...
 
under the mouse settings you should be able to disable the Touchpad and just leave the pointer stick working. Been doing that for years as I've been a long time Thinkpad user and hate touchpads. I would check now, but I'm on a work issued Macbook.

FTW! I didn't even think about mouse settings. Certainly didn't expect it to be easy. I hate the touchpad but can use it in a pinch. There's a nagging thought in the back of my head that now if I'm without a mouse, I'm effectively without a computer (but I think I can live with that).
 
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