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I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

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Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#131

Post by evandrofisico »

einpoklum wrote: post #62
hddherman wrote: post #9

In case my internet connection fails, here's a Wayback Machine snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20220110074515/https://ounapuu.e... I really appreciate your feedback, thoughts and own experiences that relate to this post!

Is it possible to make the more tricky upgrades (CPU, display, fan) on similar models but from the X-series ? X201, X210, X220? I would love to do it on mine.

At least for the x220, there are display and fan upgrades (mine uses a x230 fan), you can max ram at 16Gb (the manual says 8Gb, but 16Gb works just fine), but the CPU is soldered, so no upgrades on that.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#132

Post by avidphantasm »

avidphantasm wrote: post #129

I know they are the opposite of upgradable, but the new MacBook Pros solve all of the author’s other problems (assuming they don’t have to run Windows).

And I should mention that I very much support repeatability and reuse. However, as a father of a young kid, I don’t have anywhere near the spare time to even contemplate doing something like this. Hence, I need my hardware to “just work” (for my use cases) with minimal annoyance. That’s what I value about the MacBook Pro M1 Pro.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#133

Post by numpad0 »

black_puppydog wrote: post #65

I find it funny how people seem to fixate so much on the fact that the author upgraded various components to say the title is misleading. As someone with apparently similar requirements, the take-away from this should be this: Even though significant work is required to keep these old machines working, some people prefer to do so. Crucially, they prefer it not because they love tinkering, but simply because the value…

Those upgrades are "period correct" parts though. The part about value propositions are right but it's not that he installed modern components like latest 12th-Gen CPU or NVMe SSD.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#135

Post by archi42 »

maccard wrote: post #28
bungle wrote: post #15

> The CPU innovation stagnation between 2012-2017 has resulted in 4 cores still being an acceptable low-end CPU in early 2022 I recently got M1 Max MacBook, and I was expecting a huge jump from my 2010 Mac Pro, but on my day-to-day work. It is barely noticeable, despite the raving reviews of M1. Perhaps for me it is not about things getting obsolete, but more of that my own needs on CPU/GPU performance were pretty mu…

> I am a programmer, so my needs are not that high This isn't true for all programmers. I'm a programmer, and until 3 years ago a good chunk of my day was spent waiting for compiles to finish. > Or perhaps it is that after 12 years, the laptops are now on bar with desktops. I think the biggest improvements for me in last 20 years have been the SSDs and then the NVMe. Not even remotely close. I have an AMD threadrippe…

Thanks for taking the stand here; generally new laptops are fast and especially the M10 max seems like a nice rig that beats some desktops for some programmer workloads. Maybe even many desktops for most programmer workloads, IDK. But besides not all programmer workloads being equal, desktops also compromise high end platforms like your sTRX4, and those are a little bit different.

Also, I'd like to add memory constraints as an example of workload inequality: The M10 max only seems to support 64GB. Good for many, but would be a huge draw back at my last dev job. The problem could inherently use huge amounts of memory, and exact memory usage was not always predictable. Especially for those colleagues which did a lot of work for customers, changing one parameter could mean coming back to a OOM after the program run for a night (or longer). Thanks to 128GB this became much rarer, but the for the type of program at some point the only viable option to safe memory is to accept a worse result.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#136

Post by Shakahs »

black_puppydog wrote: post #65

I find it funny how people seem to fixate so much on the fact that the author upgraded various components to say the title is misleading. As someone with apparently similar requirements, the take-away from this should be this: Even though significant work is required to keep these old machines working, some people prefer to do so. Crucially, they prefer it not because they love tinkering, but simply because the value…

The upgrades aren’t even substantial. The CPU, RAM, and fan are all original parts. You could’ve ordered this exact configuration from Lenovo. The only deviation from stock is the AC WiFi upgrade.

I daily drive a T530, it was max spec already so I haven’t changed anything. It has more than enough power to do software dev.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#137

Post by bungle »

maccard wrote: post #28
bungle wrote: post #15

> The CPU innovation stagnation between 2012-2017 has resulted in 4 cores still being an acceptable low-end CPU in early 2022 I recently got M1 Max MacBook, and I was expecting a huge jump from my 2010 Mac Pro, but on my day-to-day work. It is barely noticeable, despite the raving reviews of M1. Perhaps for me it is not about things getting obsolete, but more of that my own needs on CPU/GPU performance were pretty mu…

> I am a programmer, so my needs are not that high This isn't true for all programmers. I'm a programmer, and until 3 years ago a good chunk of my day was spent waiting for compiles to finish. > Or perhaps it is that after 12 years, the laptops are now on bar with desktops. I think the biggest improvements for me in last 20 years have been the SSDs and then the NVMe. Not even remotely close. I have an AMD threadrippe…

Yes, definitely not true for all programmers. I guess with games, if you cannot get real time with instant compiles development experience with 120fps running 8k in debug mode, there is a room for improvement.

I compared highend 2010 desktop to highend 2021 laptop on my use case (which is arguably much lighter). And for my workloads, the laptop is no more a limiting factor (which is great, but not a leap from 2010 desktop). I can imagine todays desktops could be much better compared to todays highend laptops, but it feels like the most of what I do, there is little reasons to upgrade. Which is also great. With Macs the latest macOS support is removed usually from 5 years old machines, but that feels mostly baseless from technical perspective as with hacks you can still run the latest just fine.

Perhaps it is a nostalgia / romancy. Having a 12 years old machine as you daily workhorse where upgrade was not a leap. That is something I haven’t seen before, and I have been in this industry since 90ies and a PC user since 80ies.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#138

Post by imran0 »

bjarneh wrote: post #43

After upgrading the display, CPU, disk, RAM, fan, battery it's a bit click-baity to say you've gone back to a 2012 ThinkPad - but interesting read non the less. What surprised me the most is that Lenovo ships something as annoying as a loud fan (easily replaceable even for a home tinkerer). Of course they save a few pennies per laptop; but no laptop can ever be good if it's noisy. That was one of the main reasons why…

It should be noted that he didn't upgrade the parts to their 2020 equivalent or something, they are all original components. He could have bought it from Lenovo or order from ebay.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#139

Post by bradfa »

hddherman wrote: post #9

In case my internet connection fails, here's a Wayback Machine snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20220110074515/https://ounapuu.e... I really appreciate your feedback, thoughts and own experiences that relate to this post!

I still use my T420s as my daily driver laptop. I'd like to get something with a better screen and faster CPU but it's still reliable so it's hard to justify.

What batteries have you had good luck with? My main and ultrabay batteries are both down to around 50% of original new capacity now.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#140

Post by maccard »

jbverschoor wrote: post #124
maccard wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim was that laptops are on par with desktops, not that they're good replacement for many workflows. This is just flat out not true. > It's not portable has a TDP of 280W That doesn't bother me in the slightest for a workstation. > So yeah, maybe for rendering it's faster, but it won't be as snappy as the M1. Nobody who cares about performance is doing rendering on a CPU, it's all GPU accelerated. It's not abou…

> not that they're good replacement for many workflows. This is just flat out not true. it is a good replacement for many. It might not be the fastest of all, but that doesn't mean it's not a good replacement It's faster single threaded, and will be faster until you fully saturate more than around 14 threads. Couldn't find a linux compilation benchmark, but here a comparison with the M1 on compilation performance: ht…

It looks like this is basically a serial benchmark, so yeah of course the higher raw clock speed will win out. The run is also less than a minute, so most laptops will happily burst for that long, however what happens if you throw a 5/10/15 minute compile at it?

> Does It Scale Well With Increasing Cores?

> No, based on the automated analysis of the collected public benchmark data, this test / test settings does not generally scale well with increasing CPU core counts.

If your workload is compiling a single file serially, then sure this might be a great upgrade for you. I went through the copmpile benchmarks and the only other one that has an M1 mac and a 3970x on that site is build2 [0] which shows the m1 is 4x faster on a build that scales well with cores. FFMpeg [1] doesn't list the M1 in the test table, but it does have one benhmark [2] which is again quicker with the threadripper.

[0] https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build2

[1] https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-ffmpeg

[2] https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2201040-NE-FFMPEGBUI53

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