Hi all, new poster here.

I recently by chance purchased a Lenovo T60 laptop for work purposes last week without researching the history of the brand. As an experienced PC user, I can't believe I overlooked ThinkPads until now. The specs are puny, but it is very good for what it is. I just love the keyboard and the screen.

Now, I want to buy a ThinkPad for personal/work purposes, but as I work in the architecture industry, I need a fairly high spec laptop, that will handle 3DS Max, GIMP, Photoshop, and multiple instances of these programs.

Furthermore, my desktop PC has the following specs; i7 2600K @ 4.5Ghz, 16GB RAM, 256GB Samsung SSD, 500GB Samsung F1 HDD, 1TB Hitachi external, Radeon HD6950 2GB, and 2x NEC Multisync EA232WMi.

I know that I won't be able to find a laptop within my ~£550 budget unless I go for a used one, so I would like a laptop that will be as close in performance to my desktop as possible.

The ThinkPad that I am interested in is the W510 (4389),
15.6" HD+ screen (1600x900)
i7-720QM 1.6Ghz
128GB SSD
1GB Quadro FX880M.

I have managed to find this for a price in between £375 - £550 (fairly new, which is incredible)

However, I have done (a lot) of research, and I keep seeing issues related to the W510; CPU whine, heat issues, USB problems etc. Can someone enlighten me on how common this is?

The other I have looked at is the T420, but the problem here is that the one I have seen for £495 only has an Intel HD 3000, (which I know straight away will be pants with 3DSMax) and those with discrete chips are significantly more expensive.

So is the W510 worth a punt? The W520 I acknowledge is much improved over the W510, but I really can't stretch my budget to that.

Regards in advance.

Right off realize - you will not get performance anywhere close to the desktop system than you mentioned above from the W510.

If it were me, i'd tread water a bit, save some more coin and watch the Lenovo outlet like a hawk for W520's with 1920x1080 resolutions and a 2.4ghz quad core processor. There were some there yesterday for $1022 USD (if I use $1 to 0.64 pound in conversion, your 550 pounds is about $860 USD - nearly enough for the W520).

I think you'll be much happier with the W520 vs. the W510. I have a W520 from work and it's a nice machine. Best of luck.

Thanks for the (quick!!) reply.

I do realise that I won't be able to match my desktop, but at least something that will reduce the feeling that the machine is slow - maybe an SSD upgrade in the laptop would produce a placebo effect.

In the UK, looking at the W520's -- most are going above £1000/$1564!! Well out of my price range.

I want to avoid the W510, but if the price of it is so low as it is, I am willing to take the risk on it. Any opinions of the model?

EDIT:

I have found a W520 (4282-W5W) with the following specs:

i7 2960XM 2.7Ghz
8GB RAM
500GB HDD
Quadro 1000M 2GB
15.6" FHD IPS (1920x1080)

Brand new sealed and boxed for, £590/$922.... I am definitely going to snap that up as soon as I can, more later...

Regards

It is not IPS panel but ordinary TN one.

Oh my that's a very nice machine even without the IPS panel. Good get and congrats! I'm sure you'll enjoy that machine and you should get good service from it for a while.

Take a look at this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=90854

If you go for a W510 you might have to go through all that trouble, to get it stable under heavy loads.

Yep, thanks for that link. That as well as so many other threads is seriously putting me off. I am still waiting for a response to my enquiry to the seller of the W520.

My backup plan is to go for a T420, but I am unsure of how well it would perform with 3dsMax, to be honest. HD3000 or NVM will be junk. Dealing with 2 million polygons on screen will be a stretch for those two. The W series is where it's at for me...

More later....

I have the W510 and am reasonably happy with it. However, I have the FHD screen and I definitely think this would be a worthwhile upgrade.

- CPU Whine: yep, I have that. However, I had that on my T60 as well, and my T410s also has it. I've never owned another brand of laptop, so I have nothing to compare to.

- Overheating: It sometimes overheats if the GPU is heavily loaded. However, it never overheats under CPU load. I've run it fully loaded (CPU) for several days at a time. The GPU overheating is pretty rare - it seems to only happen in certain games that really tax the GPU. My work does not require a GPU, but I doubt that most 3d applications would cause much of a problem.

- Reliability: Pretty good except for the keyboard. The keyboard is my only complaint actually: it's inferior to the T60 (us english) and the T410s (french) keyboard, and I'm already on my third (us english) one. Maybe there are several different manufacturers/sku's, and I've just always ended up with the bad one?

- Screen: awesome screen, the best matte screen I've seen on a laptop. Wish it was 1920x1200 though, as I'm not a fan of the 16:9 aspect ratio.

- Expansion: One of the few laptops that has four dimm slots - a huge plus for me. However, the ultrabay hard drive expansion is inferior to the T60 and T410s, as it doesn't fit in snugly and leaves a large gap. I also frequently had buzzing from my second (5400rpm) hard drive because of the poor fit. I corrected it by folding up a static bag and wedging it in.

- Sound: not great. It's OK if you just want to listen some music through headphones I suppose. Speakers are terrible, like all laptops. It also lacks the 'stereo mix' feature. Not sure how common this is on other laptops. http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/General-Dis ... /m-p/10258

- Battery life: Not great - I got maybe 2 or 3 hours when it was new. Now I might get 1. I almost never use the battery, so it's not an issue for me.


I do like it *much* better than my old T60. The screen is way better, it doesn't have an annoying (and unadvertised!) 3GB upper limit on ram, and of course it's faster.