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Heh, there are quite a few people on /r/thinkpad who thinks "something about this machine that causes me to favor it" -- aye, there is, quite a lot in fact. And
by chx 8y ago
Heh, there are quite a few people on /r/thinkpad who thinks "something about this machine that causes me to favor it" -- aye, there is, quite a lot in fact. And yes, even the X61 is usable today and the Sandy Bridge based X220/T420/T420s being the last factory machines with the classic keyboard have something of a cult following. As I mentioned many a times before here, from Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake IPC have only grown 20% and while power efficiency has grown significantly it's been negated by switching to 15W CPUs instead of 35W so it's no wonder the performance is vaguely similar. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2520M-vs-Intel-Core-i5-7200U/m29vsm153577 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2520M-vs... Edit: and as a comment below notes, since ThinkPads are typically bought in fleets, any ThinkPad older than three years is typically very cheap on eBay. Buying cheap old ThinkPads instead of similarly priced new laptops at retail outlets is one of those "lifehacks" I suppose. Their ease of maintenance and parts availability combined with the stalled CPU speed growth makes this a very viable strategy.
The best ThinkPad of course is the 25th Anniversary Edition having 2017 hardware with the classic keyboard. That's what I am typing on right now. The next best is a hackfest: take a T430s with an i7 iGPU, for some demented reason Lenovo put a Thunderbolt 1 controller in those (also the S430 and then the next ThinkPad with Thunderbolt is the P50 w/ TB3 four years later). Now comes the hacking: add the classic keyboard and also the high quality full HD screen from the T440s using a Chinese converter kit -- the 30 series used LVDS, the panel uses eDP so you need a converter. I have a T420s with that hack. Thunderbolt 1 is obviously slower than Thunderbolt 3 but still, any TB3 eGPU enclosure will work. As the T430s can have two 2.5" SSDs and an mSATA SSD, you can add quite an amount of solid storage to this -- much more than the TP25, the TP25 maxes out at 2.5TB currently, while the T430s can do 9TB. The NVMe disks are of course faster in the TP25 (even though one is x2 the other is x1) but the feeling in everyday tasks is not going to be vastly different -- the big jump is in HDD to SSD. You are also limited to 16GB RAM vs the 32GB RAM in the TP25. And the CPUs are even closer: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-3520M-vs-Intel-Core-i7-7500U/m50vsm171274 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-3520M-vs... Your battery life won't be awesome, alas.
- i_am_proteus 8y agoGood point on power dissipation and efficiency-- a T480 might not be substantially faster than a T430, but it's half the size and the battery lasts longer.
- bluedino 8y agoThey're much faster. 50-60% on the single core stuff and 300% faster on multi-core tests. Not to mention they cruise along on things that use the newer extensions for things like video playback, plus the integrated graphics hardware is much much faster
- chx 8y ago> They're much faster. 50-60% on the single core stuff and 300% faster on multi-core tests. [citation needed] 50-60% is absurdly large for single core, the reality is 20%, and 300% is crazy. The T480 uses a 15W quad core on the same 14nm process as the 15W chip in the T470 and because it's slightly more power efficient there's a little gain, about 25-30%. So the difference between the Sandy Bridge T420 to Kaby Lake Refresh T480 is perhaps 50% in multi core. Here's my favorite Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake IPC benchmark collection: https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs_sandy_bridge_2600k_ipc_review/4 https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_v...
- bluedino 8y agoI'm just going on Cinebench scores I've done on my own machines. T480S i5 141 T460S i5 105 X220 i5 100 Not much of a jump in the 4 generations from the X220 to the T460S but quite a jump going to the T480S. Double the score of the X220 and quadruple the score of the T480 and you're going to end up about 575 to 205 for multicore, which is almost 3X as fast. This doesn't even bring GPU or SSD performance into the picture. Just raw CPU. I love my X220 but Windows 10 will regularly bring it to it's knees, even with an SSD and 8GB of RAM. And that's not even doing anything, I'm not sure if it's updating or what. Not to mention it's not exactly a thin machine, the 1366x768 screen is mediocre...The 1080/2K IPS screens coming to the Thinkpad line finally made them usable, IMO. Even the old IPS screens in the X220 tablets were still dim, low-resolution, etc.
- EamonnMR 8y agoI've got an X220 and it's fast enough for everything but gaming (which is to say I can run UDK and Godot on it, but the HDD is too small to justify installing any AAA titles), and rugged/cheap enough that I don't feel too bad putting it through the wringer. Old fleet machine, picked it up refurbished.
- magicnmonkey 8y agoIBM thinkpad looks like a laptop which mechanics or blue collar laborers would use. It makes no sense to use them for highly intellectual tasks like programming. For this you need Chromebook or MacBook to look hip and Wiz.
- tokai 8y agoI remember Lenovos marketing for the new keyboards. They were branded as a significant improvement for typing over the old ones. Bizarre.