Thinkpads Forum

I'm thinking that it's getting to be time up upgrade my T60 for music-production purposes: It's limited to 3 GB of RAM and software is starting to come out that recommends 4GB as a minimum.

It seems that one of the T520 or W520 models makes the most sense, at least in the Thinkpad line, in the hope that a larger disk will be available before long than the 500GB that's currently there.

I've been looking at the various options available and find them confusing. Can someone tell me what the essential differences are between the two product lines? So far, I have found at least that the W has a faster graphics card, can be expanded beyond 8 GB, and supports USB 3 in addition to USB 2, which might be important for fast external disk storage (music production tends to use lots of space for samples!)

Are there other essential differences? The two product lines appear to be about the same size and the W520 is only a little heavier.

The separate production lines are a pure marketing thing. Other than the things you mentioned, it's the same laptop.

ark wrote:I have found at least that the W....can be expanded beyond 8 GB, and supports USB 3 in addition to USB 2

The T520 can do 2x8GB, but 8GB sticks are expensive right now. That will change. You can buy a ExpressCard USB 3.0 for the T520.

Hmmm. First I see that they're the same laptop, then I see that the T520 can do 2x8GB.

But I believe the W520 can handle 4 memory cards. So is that another essential difference between the models?

The dual core W520 models two memory slots, while the quad core models have four. I'd say that, the GPU and the USB 3 are the main differences.

Any suggestions for evaluating GPUs? I'm not into videogames, but do use Photoshop and MAX/MSP, both of which offload some computations onto the GPU.