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Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

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Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#81

Post by karussell »

eltoozero wrote: post #73
cel1ne wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it curious that you care about boot-times. I use macbooks and just close and reopen the lid. Waking from this sleep takes less than a second usually. My average uptime is about 22 days until I reboot for an update or something. I used Linux for years, and I understood that in 2008 sleep/resume on notebooks didn't properly work, but now we have 2017 - 9 years later!

Mac is my daily driver for this very reason, I'm a consultant and I need to frequently grab and go. I've had Linux on mobile for ages and have yet to have reliable sleep/wake behavior on a dozen machines over the years. Sleep on Linux works reliably if you run it inside a Mac VM though, FWIW! ;)

Important difference: sleep usually works and is fast. What often does not work is hibernation (recover from disc)

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#84

Post by mlvljr »

karussell wrote: post #17
tuananh wrote: post #13

despite so many problems that OP stated, he's still recommending it!

Please let me know which part of the post was misleading. All major problems, I was able to fix. And the other stuff I can easily live with.

"liar" :)

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#85

Post by dom0 »

eltoozero wrote: post #69

The x201 is a 12" ThinkPad model with i5 2.5 ghz, unfortunately only DDR2 but jam in an SSD and it's a crazy bargain for ~$100 on eBay. Coreboot support too if that's your kind of thing. Stay away from the tablet x201, forget that noise.

X20x: make sure to get a Panasonic cooling unit; Toshiba's is awful. Apart from the noise they are built differently (so easy to tell apart), the coldplate on the Panasonic is split into the actual coldplate and a silver aluminimum piece that holds it down, while on the Toshiba the coldplate is copper all the way to the screws. But you only see that if you flip the system board over.

... and at something like 1.3-1.5 kg they aren't really heavier than more modern laptops anyway, just thicker.

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#86

Post by [deleted] »

2bluesc wrote: post #76
kogepathic wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in the firmware Dell is shipping, but the CPUs are identical in their feature set as per the ark links I supplied. The only difference in the processors is the Xeon supports ECC, while the Core i7 doesn't. But Dell isn't shipping the laptop with ECC anyway. The specifications don't even list support for ECC RAM! [0] [0] http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheet...

> The only difference in the processors is the Xeon supports ECC, while the Core i7 doesn't. But Dell isn't shipping the laptop with ECC anyway. The clock is faster, try the compare link[0]. And since I originally bought a XPS 15 with the i7-6700HQ then scored a deal on a Precision E3-1505M motherboard and frankensteined my laptop, I spent 30 seconds doing a benchmark[1]. The tl;dr is that for 6% faster clock, you ac…

[deleted]

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#87

Post by dom0 »

yuhong wrote: post #70
eltoozero wrote: post #69

The x201 is a 12" ThinkPad model with i5 2.5 ghz, unfortunately only DDR2 but jam in an SSD and it's a crazy bargain for ~$100 on eBay. Coreboot support too if that's your kind of thing. Stay away from the tablet x201, forget that noise.

Core i5 would not be DDR2.

Correct, all three-figure models are at least DDR3. The X20x support up to 8 GB (2x 4 GB).

Edit: And no, they really don't support more. The memory controller only supports 2 Gb chips, so with two ranks per channel you only get 2x 4 GB. (Intel i7-600, i5-500 series processor datasheet, section 2.1.1).

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#88

Post by karussell »

aceperry wrote: post #64

I love these linux on laptop articles. I've used linux since Redhat 5.0 and have almost always had to configure things to get everything to work. Nowadays, I don't really have the time to dick around, I used Gentoo for a long time, so I rely on Ubuntu to make it a simple plug and play install. Even with most of today's laptops, ubuntu seems to play well compared to the bad old days. I find I can throw Ubuntu on any l…

Have the same experience but I'm pretty sure many people do not know this so I wrote a quick and hopefully honest blog post about this :)

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#89

Post by [deleted] »

dom0 wrote: post #87
yuhong wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Core i5 would not be DDR2.

Correct, all three-figure models are at least DDR3. The X20x support up to 8 GB (2x 4 GB). Edit: And no, they really don't support more. The memory controller only supports 2 Gb chips, so with two ranks per channel you only get 2x 4 GB. (Intel i7-600, i5-500 series processor datasheet, section 2.1.1).

[deleted]

Re: Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development

#90

Post by 2bluesc »

dom0 wrote: post #78
2bluesc wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only difference in the processors is the Xeon supports ECC, while the Core i7 doesn't. But Dell isn't shipping the laptop with ECC anyway. The clock is faster, try the compare link[0]. And since I originally bought a XPS 15 with the i7-6700HQ then scored a deal on a Precision E3-1505M motherboard and frankensteined my laptop, I spent 30 seconds doing a benchmark[1]. The tl;dr is that for 6% faster clock, you ac…

> The clock is faster, try the compare link[0]. Now the interesting question is of course whether that 3 % difference holds up when these are used in an actual laptop, ie. does it make a difference before all of them throttle anyway?

> does it make a difference before all of them throttle anyway?

I thought this as well, figured the i7-6700HQ was popular because it maxed out the thermal design, but haven't observed this.

Mine didn't throttle at all. Test setup was on a desk plugged in to the 130W power adapter, nothing special. The benchmark ran for 10 minutes without throttling, note that Github tests show that the first pass was just as fast as the last.

If anyone is really interested, I can run the tests again, but I expected it would throttle after a few minutes of the fans roaring and hence why I ran a few tests back to back and averaged them. Also, I cut the test short because I wanted to swap the motherboards and get on with life. :)

It may throttle if the Nvidia GPUs were enabled and working at full load, but they weren't as this is how I normally work and what I bought the laptop to do.

Update: Ran CPU Burn's `burnmmx` x 8 for 20 minutes and monitored it with i7z, and the cores remained at 3.3GHz the entire time with the cores ranging from 60C - 70C. Recorded it with asciinema, but apparently it doesn't play nice with tmux so it's not really readable.

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