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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

#351

Post by Shorel »

maccard wrote: post #148
bungle wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

> 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. Day to day that doesn't matter. I work on multiplayer games, and being able to run 8/12/16 clients on one machine at 10 fps at ultra low graphics is far more important than being able to run stupid resolution…

The 3090 is such an overpowered (and expensive) card, that another GPU doing half of what the 3090 can do is still damn right impressive. And in a Laptop!

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#352

Post by wyre »

cobaltoxide wrote: post #344
emptybottle wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's hilarious to me is that Apple considers their own computers of this era to be "vintage" No joke, that's the real term https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624 "About vintage products. -- Products are considered vintage when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago." Well, not much has changed on the intel side in that timeframe. My 2013 laptop is still getting OS updates a…

Planned obsolescence is Apple's bread and butter.

This sentiment is thrown out a lot but Apple has some of the best LTS on their hardware in the business. 6 year old iPhones are still getting updates. Someone in this thread mentioned their laptop that Apple describes as vintage is still getting updates. Apple is still selling a 4 year old smart watch as new.

I feel much better spending my money on Apple products trusting it will be supported for a long time than spending it on another device where I will be lucky to have support for more than 2 years.

I would say Apple’s bread and butter is creating an ecosystem of hardware and software that works so well together that choosing to leave their environment is such a hard decision that it is easier to stick with Apple.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#353

Post by smoldesu »

devwastaken wrote: post #318
MR4D wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Last January I converted my old (2012) quad-core Intel desktop and gave it to my son for gaming. The only thing I had to do was add a 1-TB SSD and put in an RTX-3060 Ti, and it runs every game (Fortnite, CoD, etc) at 100+ FPS without any issues. I'm still amazed that a simple GPU change and the machine keeps up with his friends brand-new AMD box (not sure what chip, just that it was new in 2021). When the 12th…

The Ryzen 5600X is the gaming CPU of this gen outside of the lower budget Intel chips. Ryzen didn't just win on core count they won in single thread too because competing Intel chips are 120W, which limits their performance on stock cooling. The 5600X is 76W actual.

There's also the slightly more relevant metrics like IPC which is much lower on Ryzen chips overall. Maybe their single-core speed is a little slower, but they make up for it with incredibly high-performance instruction optimization. 64-bit division on a Coffee Lake CPU is a 36-cycle instruction, with up to a hundred cycles of latency. The same instruction on a Zen3 CPU is no more than 17 cycles, with latency no lower than 12. That's a rather extreme example, but it definitely makes a difference.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#354

Post by gigel82 »

dijit wrote: post #347
terafo wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was. Now there's 12400F which offers just slightly lower performance(few percent slower) at almost half of the price. And there's 12600k which at the same price offers slightly better performance in gaming than 5600x, but in multithreaded workloads often outperforms 5800x.

that chip can suck down 150W of cooling (which is likely the cooling setup that benchmarks will be running with). Not going to argue semantics here, but the grandparents point was that cooling the intel chips tends to be where it falls down (thus, the real world may differ significantly), even if there are paper gains in game benchmarks. Offering a chip which takes double the cooling is just leaning into their point.

It's not just the cooling, it's power usage in general, that's how Intel moved ahead with this generation... 12600K is using 224W compared with 5600X's 134W during the same test (SuperPi stress test where 12600K scored worse at 389s vs. 5600X's 380s).

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that the competition is heating up again, that can only be good news for consumers. But sucking more power to deliver perf gains is totally the wrong direction for this.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#355

Post by amatecha »

harha wrote: post #192

Laptops in the early 2010s kind of reached a level of being adequate enough for most use-cases that it's hard to really justify an upgrade. I feel, as I write this on my late 2013 MacBook Pro, that it's powerful enough for most normal activities, read, browse, video calls, work on not too large data sets, etc. Anything that needs to run longer than I keep the laptop open can run on a different device, many programs a…

Yeah, I love my late 2013 MacBook Pro! I also recently purchased a bunch of ThinkPads (X230 and X220) to round out my options so I have these nice era of computers going forward for a long time, since I know they will become harder to find over time. Def agree about the "early 2010s" laptops hitting a good place, kind of optimal balance of features vs. simplicity IMO

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#356

Post by ryzvonusef »

I have two Thinkpad X230T 2nd Gen i5 (T stands for touchscreen, it has a swivel capacitive touchscreen and a stylus) They don't have webcams (they have space for it but these being refurbed office models they were probably sold without webcams installed. But I have a seperate 360p webcam in some drawer should the need arise.

The one I'm using right now has windows 10 (no W11 support ;p), the other has chrome OS. (but only one charger sadly, original battery and charger are a pain in the butt for me to find).

These are perfect for my casual needs, and If I need anything extra, I have a refurbed Thinkstation S30 with a quaint Quadro 2000 card (no prefix). (It has no w11 support either, heh)

My real issue is battery (even the chrome OS one has ~2 hrs battery, I really thought the lightweight OS would help but hasn't) and inability to play x265 codec files. Backlit keyboard would have been nice but eh.

But with an SSD and and 8gb ram upgrade, it's a dream to use, it's a nice compact size, the keyboard is amazing, and it has decent port selection. I don't game or edit videos or whatever, and I'm never far from a charging point (the charger is a slim tube thing, so takes barely any bulk) so I'm not sure why I would need more for quite some time, as long as nothing is physically wrong with it.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#357

Post by MR4D »

terminalcommand wrote: post #285
MR4D wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Last January I converted my old (2012) quad-core Intel desktop and gave it to my son for gaming. The only thing I had to do was add a 1-TB SSD and put in an RTX-3060 Ti, and it runs every game (Fortnite, CoD, etc) at 100+ FPS without any issues. I'm still amazed that a simple GPU change and the machine keeps up with his friends brand-new AMD box (not sure what chip, just that it was new in 2021). When the 12th…

Was it a Xeon processor :)?

Ha - it actually is!!!!

This is too funny - I was about to reply to you, and then decided to check my files. Lo and behold, I found that when I bought the components in March 2012, I bought an Intel E5-2609 (which is indeed a Xeon!) for $299. Had I not looked, I never would have guessed.

Thinking about it now (and I might be wrong), the machine has 32GB of RAM, so I might have bought the Xeon to go above 16GB. Can anyone confirm if that would have made sense at the time (or if my memory is just fuzzy?) ?

Chip details here: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/64588/i...

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#358

Post by Stratoscope »

ryzvonusef wrote: post #356

I have two Thinkpad X230T 2nd Gen i5 (T stands for touchscreen, it has a swivel capacitive touchscreen and a stylus) They don't have webcams (they have space for it but these being refurbed office models they were probably sold without webcams installed. But I have a seperate 360p webcam in some drawer should the need arise. The one I'm using right now has windows 10 (no W11 support ;p), the other has chrome OS. (but…

At the risk of nitpicking, the T stands for Tablet, not touchscreen. The full product name is ThinkPad X230 Tablet, which is often shortened to ThinkPad X230t or ThinkPad X230T.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#359

Post by xondono »

einr wrote: post #26
xondono wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the hardcore guys have literally ripped out the motherboard and installed a completely different motherboard with a modern i7 CPU. So, a CPU upgrade? How is that not what OP mentions? The LCD upgrade is also on the wishlist..

> So, a CPU upgrade? How is that not what OP mentions? Are you asking how replacing the motherboard in a laptop with a custom third party hobbyist replacement is different from putting a faster CPU in a CPU socket?

I had confused the model with a non socketed one

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#360

Post by amatecha »

haha, the similarities to my recent experiences are funny. I also recently have started using an X230 (same era as T430) and an X220, also running open source OSes and I used Hugo to publish my personal site, using the same theme as the article author. Today, these machines are so affordable and still offer excellent computation power and acceptable power efficiency. Not mind-blowing, but still fine. The repairability is a major plus, one of the best in a laptop I've thus far seen.
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