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Thinkpad X210

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Re: Thinkpad X210

#291

Post by CoolGuySteve »

ggreer wrote: post #207
saagarjha wrote: post #6

> Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh). Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible. > Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack. lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know…

I don't lie about battery life numbers. People like to say, "I get 9 hours of battery life." when they mean that they get 9 hours if they do doing nothing but let their computer idle with the brightness at minimum. 4 hours with a 55Wh battery is an average consumption of 13 watts. That's because my typical workflow involves running a VM containing cassandra & postrgres (among other services) and recompiling go and ja…

What kind of numbers do you see in powertop between high and low load? (After running powertop --auto-tune and powertop --calibrate of course).

I've noticed the i7-8550U in my HP Envy can easily drive consumption up to 22W during a parallel compile even though I spend most of my time idling between 5 and 7W while editing text. The extra cores seem to consume a lot of power compared to my older 5th-gen laptop with 2 physical cores.

I also wonder if mobile Ryzen behaves similarly or if Intel just trashed their power/thermals in order to compete on core count.

Unfortunately, it's really hard to find benchmarks with power vs load stats. Most of them seem to be like "7 hours watching a movie in Windows" when I'd rather see "Battery is 55 Wh but computer uses 22W when all cores are 100% and 35W at 100% CPU and GPU". You know, like actual facts about the hardware rather than subjective usage experiences.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#292

Post by hakfoo »

shasheene wrote: post #68
saagarjha wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is going to do this, because good components are a competitive advantage. I can’t see any good manufacturer wanting their good {trackpad, keyboard, case} either being put in a computer that undercuts them or being forced to dumb down their computer to fit the “lowest common denominator”.

To successfully define a laptop standard, it would have taken a consortium of companies. Likely companies which aren't necessarily in the business of selling integrated laptops themselves, but would benefit from the existence of a laptop standard. It's likely companies like Microsoft (pre-Surface), peripheral manufacturers (eg, Logitech) and motherboard manufacturers (eg, Gigabyte) would have gladly got on board in t…

As I understand it, only a handful of firms actually design their own laptops. Most of them buy from firms like Clevo or Quanta and maybe do final configuration (CPU/RAM/discs). So you'd really only need to convince them.

In a way, this is much like the situation with desktops-- Dell and HP was/is big enough to come up with their own custom mainboards and cases, but most smaller shops are going to go ATX.

I suspect part of the reason we didn't see much laptop standardization was that the second-tier manufacturers are weaker in the laptop sector than desktop, as well as being weaker as a whole than they were in 2000 when ATX was becoming a thing.

Outside of a few narrow gaming and workstation niches, there are few use cases where you can't find a suitable big-brand laptop, so the second-tier brands (and the manufacturers that supply them) are in a position of fighting for scraps, not one where they can start promoting the benefits of standardization.

This is likely worsened by the mindset that laptops are unupgradeable-- people bought ATX desktops figuring they'd buy new mainboards in 3 years, but generally assume the laptop is going to be stuck in place.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#293

Post by daveheq »

That is beautiful... I loved those old 4:3 high-res laptops with big arrow keys. Now standard laptops are small-screen low-res tiny-keys... pain in the ass.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#294

Post by spion »

You know you're doing something wrong when a company that sells alternative parts for your old products is doing better in the news.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#295

Post by ttsda »

manmal wrote: post #224
ggreer wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't lie about battery life numbers. People like to say, "I get 9 hours of battery life." when they mean that they get 9 hours if they do doing nothing but let their computer idle with the brightness at minimum. 4 hours with a 55Wh battery is an average consumption of 13 watts. That's because my typical workflow involves running a VM containing cassandra & postrgres (among other services) and recompiling go and ja…

Having a MacBook Pro Late 2016, I can only dream of 4h battery life with the workload you describe. It has a bigger screen though.

Try ditching chrome/ff for safari for most of your workload, I find that consistently gives me a few extra hours of battery, and I always have IntelliJ and VScode open and in use.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#296

Post by freehunter »

sosborn wrote: post #214
freehunter wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your machine spins up its fans for no discernible reason throughout the day, it's broken and you should fix it.

> no discernible reason What if the "no discernible reason" is just poorly coded software?

That's the definition of a discernible reason. If the CPU is being used hard enough to need more cooling, then the question is answered.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#297

Post by bubblethink »

archon810 wrote: post #249
saagarjha wrote: post #6

> Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh). Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible. > Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack. lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know…

Whatever you buy, don't buy the ThinkPad X1 Extreme. Its fans are on all. the. time, and the CPU goes into thermal throttling even when idle. https://www.google.com/search?q=x1+extreme+fans

At this point, the real P series (p52/72), which used to be w series, are probably the only thinkpads that don't throttle. And those have other problems like the inclusion of an nvidia card and off-center keyboards. They've also devalued the T series now.

Re: Thinkpad X210

#298

Post by freehunter »

kortilla wrote: post #213
freehunter wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your machine spins up its fans for no discernible reason throughout the day, it's broken and you should fix it.

It’s not. Using the cpu is a supported feature of normal computers.

If you can say "the fans are spinning up because this piece of software is using the CPU more" then it's not "no discernible reason".

Re: Thinkpad X210

#299

Post by [deleted] »

askafriend wrote: post #174
ekianjo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A standard form-factor means components would be re-usable between upgrades We don't even have to go that far. Just ensuring that laptops can be serviced by their own users would go a long way to reduce e-waste. i.e. not soldering RAM chips to the motherboard, making it feasible to remove every single part (not gluing the keyboard to the MB for example), etc... instead of pursuing an ever thinner laptop design, whi…

MacBook Pros not being user serviceable at every component level doesn’t mean they’re not environmentally friendly - not by a long shot. In fact, building a device like that might even shorten lifespan in a laptop form-factor, not to mention no one wants to carry around a heavy, clunky machine so it likely wouldn’t sell anyway. Here’s an example report that mostly has to do with the production and recycling aspects:…

[deleted]

Re: Thinkpad X210

#300

Post by blattimwind »

leiroigh wrote: post #222

I am a happy owner of an x62. This article almost convinced me to buy an x210 next. Minor gripes: (1) The dispayport-hdmi thing, (2) the mainboard is split (sound + rhs usb are on a separate board) and the small part has pretty flimsy attachement inside the case, (3) the CPU (i5 broadwell engineering sample) is pretty lackluster but perfect for development (no turbo, no throttling, no surprises), (4) finding an ok sc…

> the mainboard is split (sound + rhs usb are on a separate board) and the small part has pretty flimsy attachement inside the case

That's however the same with the stock design and I've never had an issue with that. IIRC there are a couple pins from the lower casting holding it in place and then it's sandwiched using IIRC two or three screws between the lower casting and the palmrest. That's pretty solid.

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