the old story? x4 vs x3

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pau · #1 Post by **pau** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 12:22 am

Hi,

I am about to buy a thinkpad. I am the owner of a FJS lifebook (1.5 kg, 1GB RAM, 1.2 GHz) and I am quite happy but since I got a thinkpad T43p from my institute I've been thinking that I'd like to have one similar but smaller: Item est, an x3something or an x4something.

Before I carry on, let me state what I need/ want (in terms of hardware) from the laptop. It should:

1- Be light
2- Be *silent* (the fans of the T43p are spinning basically all the time)
3- Have a *long* battery life (>3 hours)
3- At least meet the velocity/ capacity of the FJS

Now... I have decided it should be an x31 or x40, x41 (not tablet, which I find useless _and_ does not work with my OS of choice). x6 is out of question for me (price, lack of APM, buggy processor -I have reasons to make such a statement but it is out of subject now).

So I went to ebay and found nice things at a reasonable price. By now, my "top candidates" are:

1- an x31 of 1.4GHz, 1-1.5GB RAM, 160GB (5200 rpm), docking station and -of course- wlan

2- an x41 (not tablet) of 1.5GHz, 1-1.5GB RAM, 60GB (4200 rpm), docking station and wlan

Choice (2) is about 250 euros more expensive (~340$).

Why is that?? I mean... what are the advantages of the x4 series compared to the x3?

In general I have found that the prices are inflated when you step into the x4 series and _very_ usually the processors are slower; at least in terms of GHz (I don't understand the difference between a centrino bananas and a centrino pina colada, but the GHz is a physical unit which I understand)

Is it because the x4 have 8 cell batteries? The screen resolution (one of the weak points of all small thinkpads, btw) is the same one. The keyboard too. The hardware specs almost the same...

I even read a review on the x31 at notebookreview and it was described as one of the best thinkpads ever.

What has improved to the point of explaining such a difference in the price in the x4 series? I hope it's not just a matter of adding ten units to the name of the machine plus some redesign of its look.

I am just asking for advice. I am sure this is the right place to ask. Choice number 1 is very nice but I am afraid I may be completely missing the point of x4 series.

And should I decide to buy #1, do you think that a 160GB disc can drop the batery life? And would you buy a new battery for it? Do extended life batteries exist for the x31?

As you see, I am a perfect ignorant

Thanks in advance,

Pau

PS: Of course, I apologise for my outrageous English

#2 Post by **tomh009** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 4:25 am

The X4 series is slightly smaller and lighter, but then it is constrained by its unique 1.8" 4200 rpm hard disk, which cannot be upgraded to a fast or large one. As a result, there is a generally a preference for X31 over the X4 series.

X31 (on which I am typing this) is very well built, even by ThinkPad standards, and can easily do the three hours you are looking for on a decent battery by using the right power profile and slightly undervolting the CPU using NHC or RMClock.

There is an extended life battery for the X31 (part number 02K7041); it clamps onto the bottom (much like an Ultrabase) and, when used on a table, provides a nice typing angle. It nearly doubles the battery life of the X31 when used in combination with the standard battery, although with the cost of additional weight. Some people prefer to carry a spare standard battery instead.

jkahng · #3 Post by **jkahng** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 4:37 am

Tomh009,
How is the keyboard of the X4x compared to a X31?

It is notable that some X4x have the LV dothans compared to the banias cores of the X31. Double the L2 cache does give an advantage.

If SSDs start coming out in the unique 1.8" PATA format, the X4x series will be very good sub class notebook. But as of now, the HDD is way too slow.

Puppy · #4 Post by **Puppy** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 5:28 am

I bought refurbrished X31 2672-CXU (via usanotebooks) and I can not complain (except horrible display quality and resolution, but it is the same with X40). The fan never turns on unless you run something using 100% CPU for a long time. The battery has 90% of its original capacity and lasts for more than 4 hours, sometimes it reports even over 5 hours battery lifetime. Having non-low-voltage CPU the performance is very good for such notebook class. The 1.8" HDD is probably biggest disadvantage of X40 series but it is lighter than X31.

pau · #5 Post by **pau** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 5:54 am

tomh009 wrote:The X4 series is slightly smaller and lighter, but then it is constrained by its unique 1.8" 4200 rpm hard disk, which cannot be upgraded to a fast or large one. As a result, there is a generally a preference for X31 over the X4 series.

So you're saying that besides the difference on size and weight both models are similar if not the same... that's nice to hear. It's what I thought but I like to have it corroborated.

tomh009 wrote:X31 (on which I am typing this) is very well built, even by ThinkPad standards, and can easily do the three hours you are looking for on a decent battery by using the right power profile and slightly undervolting the CPU using NHC or RMClock.

Three hours out of a new battery or is it a used one?

tomh009 wrote:There is an extended life battery for the X31 (part number 02K7041); it clamps onto the bottom (much like an Ultrabase) and, when used on a table, provides a nice typing angle. It nearly doubles the battery life of the X31 when used in combination with the standard battery, although with the cost of additional weight. Some people prefer to carry a spare standard battery instead.

Doubles?? What's the exact weight of the extended life battery?

#6 Post by **tomh009** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 6:49 am

Jkahng, I have never spent a lot of time typing on an X40/X41 so I really can't pass a judgement on it, but for sure the X31, especially with the Thai NMB keyboard (which both of our X31s have), has excellent keyboard feel.

The SSDs could be very good for the X40/X41, but since the IBM/Hitachi drive form factor is different from other 1.8" drives, it's not certain that the future 1.8" SSDs will fit the X40/X41.

Now, pau was asking more about battery life.

My original battery has 806 (!) charge cycles on it, and about 31 Wh remaining of the original 47.52 Wh design capacity. I just unplugged my X31, and while I am typing this, on wireless, the system is predicting 2:55 of battery life. (This is with a Hitachi 7K100 7200 rpm drive and 1.3 GB of memory installed, both of which use a little bit of additional power.) With my newer battery the predicted time would be over four hours.

The extended battery ... it's at the office right now, but it has similar capacity to the standard battery (4800 mAh rated capacity), so depending on the age of each, it will approximately double your battery life. Due to the design, the weight is a bit more than a standard battery.

cmarti · #7 Post by **cmarti** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 8:15 am

tomh009 wrote:the system is predicting 2:55 of battery life. (This is with a Hitachi 7K100 7200 rpm drive and 1.3 GB of memory installed, both of which use a little bit of additional power.) With my newer battery the predicted time would be over four hours.

Are you saying that more rams lead to more battery consumption?

#8 Post by **tomh009** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 8:31 am

cmarti wrote:Are you saying that more rams lead to more battery consumption?

Absolutely, yes. It takes power to power on the memory, to refresh, to read and to write. The more heavily the system is used, the more power the memory draws (though if you have more memory, a greater percentage of it will be idle).

As a rough number, idle power consumption might be on the order of 0.5W per GB with DDR memory (as used in the X31). The newer DDR2 memory (used by the X60/X61) will actually use significantly less.

If you would like to read some tech details, you can find it all here:
http://www.micron.com/support/designsup ... rcalc.aspx

jkahng · #9 Post by **jkahng** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 8:31 am

Thank you tomh009,
I'll just have to wait and see how this ssd situation unfolds.
best regards,
John

bigtiger · #10 Post by **bigtiger** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 8:43 am

I have used X40,X41. I still currently own one X31 (my wife uses it). Personally, I think there is no big difference of typing between x41 and X31, while I do feel the keyboard of X31 feels a little bit better. By the way, all keyboards I used on X4 and X31 are NMB which are the best.

My X41 and X31 both boasts 1.6G CPU. While X41 does use Dothan, I think the performance on X31 is much better. I think the RPM restriction really drags down performance quite a bit.

pianowizard · #11 Post by **pianowizard** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 9:19 am

pau wrote:Choice (2) is about 250 euros more expensive (~340$). Why is that??

Mainly because the X41 is newer. Also because the 1.8" 60GB 4200rpm HDD is more expensive than the 2.5" 160GB 5400rpm HDD.

pau wrote:what are the advantages of the x4 series compared to the x3?

Lighter and newer (so that they usually have more warranty remaining).

pau · #12 Post by **pau** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 9:50 am

Thanks to all for the answers. Sometimes it's very difficult to find out what you're looking for and I've found excellent answers here.

Maybe you want to have a look at these sites to understand my first statement:

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article& ... 0628134608
http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article& ... 0630105416

Warning: You'll probably find it's a strong statement what's written in there but I am NOT a troll. I thought it would be fair to share the links with you.

The OpenBSD people have a good reputation in terms of good coding and security (seemingly the most secure OS in the world is OpenBSD, have a look in the wikipedia) and they (the "boss", Theo de Raadt) has rather strong statements against the Intel Core.

Just wanted to let you know. I hope you do not misunderstand me.

thanks again,

Pau

pau · #13 Post by **pau** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 10:04 am

What I meant is perfectly well described by Justin:

"Before anyone starts to hyperventilate, keep in mind: 1: this is a warning of potential problems, not an assessment of existing problems."

#14 Post by **tomh009** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 10:19 am

Thanks for the links, Pau.

New chips always have bugs and/or exploits. The question in my mind is twofold: (1) how much worse are these than the previous generation, and (2) how serious are the errata on AMD's list (could not find any specific issues on Opteron errata, for example).

I'll still get my Core 2 Duo ThinkPad, as the processor exploit potential is far from being the only one on a Windows-based laptop. Intelligent computing is called for, and it can mitigate (though not eliminate) a lot of the risks from the bugs and exploits, whether in CPUs, operating systems or apps.

But from a server perspective, it certainly gives me pause. Would I want to have a Core 2 Duo (or Xeon equivalent) server exposed to the Internet? Currently running Opterons for that ...

pau · #15 Post by **pau** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 10:43 am

Yes, you're perfectly right, tomh009...

My only problem is that I'm an OpenBSD user and, thus, a paranoid

(I am currently sending these posts from a thinkpad T43p with OpenBSD 4.1)

This is also the reason why I rule out the x6 series: There's still not full ACPI support in OpenBSD. They could just have taken over the code from netbsd, freebsd or even linux and adapt it but, being paranoids as they only can be, they are writing it from scratch (!!) to avoid potential security and robustness problems

Shortly: I need APM to suspend the laptop. And this is only to find in the thinkpads up to x41. From x6 onwards there's no APM

Now you're making me think... should I go for the x41?? My main two worries are

a) a quiet laptop
b) a long battery

How does an 8 cell battery on an x41 compare to a new 6 cell battery on an x31?? (the maximum the x31 can support, I think)

And how much more silent/ noisy is the x41/x31 ???

The price difference should not matter. Help me to make a decision, pleaaaaase!

I'm sure these questions must be somewhere in the forum, I just didn't find them...

Cheers,

Pau

pau · #16 Post by **pau** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 10:44 am

with "long battery" I mean a long lasting battery, of course, not a 200 meters long battery

#17 Post by **tomh009** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 11:05 am

Well, quiet you can get either way. The X31 fan rarely goes on unless I run some very CPU-intensive applications, so the only noise is from the hard disk (you could always get an SSD is you are looking for an absolutely silent system).

Battery life ... really the question here is how long do you need without plugging in? The 3-4 hours from my X31 has been great, and I can either run the extended battery or hibernate and switch primary batteries to get to around seven hours, or do both for 10 hours.

If you check the tawbook and ltwbook ...
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pcinstitu ... awbook.pdf
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pcinstitu ... twbook.pdf
you will see that the X31 is rated at 5.5-6h on the standard 6-cell, while the X41 was rated at 5.7h (the X40 had longer battery life), so I don't think you will see substantial differences in real-world battery life between the two.

P.S. I agree on the "ParanoidBSD".

I run FreeBSD on those Opteron servers (except one on Linux, to my frustration), switched from NetBSD maybe four years ago to get the better software support on FreeBSD.

pau · #18 Post by **pau** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 3:25 pm

Mmmh... now I've found an x41 with 1GB RAM and 60GB hard disk, 1.5GHz low voltage and the seller says this combination (60GB + low voltage) is ideal if you care about fan noise...

I must be boring you to death, but I want to make a good choice

Do you think that having a large disk (100GB, 120GB, 160GB) is a reason for the fans to spin more frequently?

#19 Post by **tomh009** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 4:49 pm

None of the X3/X4 models should normally have a fan on; as I said, on the X31 it's only once the CPU has been maxed out for 30-60 seconds. X40/X41 should just as good -- but there, too, I'm sure the fan will come on once the CPU heats up from high load. Otherwise they'll be near-silent, bar the disk spinning/seeking noise.

The disk really won't make much difference to the system fan usage. Now, both the disk noise and heat you can determine easily from the Hitachi/Seagate/etc data sheets once you determine what type of drive it is.

pau · #20 Post by **pau** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 12:29 am

Thanks, tomh009

You wrote:

switched from NetBSD maybe four years ago to get the better software support on FreeBSD.

I'd be careful. Are you running the 6x or the 5x series of FreeBSD? I wouldn't even bother to consider netbsd, they were as morons (sorry) as to "fire" Theo de Raadt, who is -by far- the best one. That was a big mistake.

Anyway, as I was saying, FreeBSD is trying to run not cutting but bleeding edge software and it's buggy as hell. At least when compared to OpenBSD. In the last OS you'll virtually never have a problem. The system never hangs, and I really mean never. Not even X (but I guess you do not need X).

FreeBSD is trying to reach linux in terms of popularity and there's a price to pay for that: instability.

I come from a linux world but have switched... I do everything with OpenBSD and I am not missing any special feature in terms of software.

A significant part of ACPI missing is sure a pain, but this only means that the obsd guys are on the way to the best coded ACPI in the world ever, once they're done...

All those suspend ACPI-based software packages of linux (and freebsd) cannot be trusted. I don't want to make anybody nervous here, but in the last years (starting from the 2.6 kernel series), linux is on the way of becoming as buggy and instable as windows is (prior versions to Vista, which do not even deserve to be mentioned... actually MS Vista will be the best friend ever of free OS's, it's making people wonder whether they actually could install one of those *nix or *bsd on their machines)

Cheers,

Pau

qviri · #21 Post by **qviri** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 1:11 am

pau wrote:I do everything with OpenBSD and I am not missing any special feature in terms of software.

A significant part of ACPI missing is sure a pain

Uhhh....

pau · #22 Post by **pau** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 5:28 am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acpi#Criticism

* ACPI is a complex specification (over 600 pages long) that contains multiple components, including declarative tables, an imperative bytecode, and specific hardware components. Concerns have been repeatedly raised [3] that an implementation of ACPI has to run complex, untrusted and potentially buggy bytecode with full privileges, thus potentially making any system that implements ACPI unstable and/or insecure.

* Where hardware is non-conforming to ACPI, but claims to be, the software interoperating with that hardware is faced with a dilemma: Either it can be written to be ACPI-compliant, thus risking problems with the not-entirely-compliant hardware, or it can deviate from the ACPI standard to accommodate the hardware quirks. That, however, is generally seen as undesirable from a software-engineering point of view, since the software would potentially have to be adapted for and tested with arbitrarily large numbers of hardware devices, which is precisely what standards such as ACPI are intended to avoid. Additionally, availability of compatible software does not provide the hardware manufacturer with an incentive to repair their compliance. This is a constant debate between "standards purists" and advocates of software that "simply works" with as much hardware as possible.

You can make it compile and run, sure. But it'll break. you can bet.

Theo is, fortunately, one of those standards purists.

But the obsd team is "just" writing it from scratch (600 pages long?!?!)

I bet that when they're done everybody will be adapting their code to the obsd implementation. It wouldn't be the first time.

#23 Post by **tomh009** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 7:33 am

pau wrote:I'd be careful. Are you running the 6x or the 5x series of FreeBSD? I wouldn't even bother to consider netbsd, they were as morons (sorry) as to "fire" Theo de Raadt, who is -by far- the best one. That was a big mistake.

Anyway, as I was saying, FreeBSD is trying to run not cutting but bleeding edge software and it's buggy as hell. At least when compared to OpenBSD. In the last OS you'll virtually never have a problem. The system never hangs, and I really mean never. Not even X (but I guess you do not need X).

We originally used NetBSD to get DEC Alpha support. When we switched to x64, we went with FreeBSD (avoiding the bleeding-edge releases). As you surmise, we don't run X -- but FreeBSD's ports collection made it easy to get our server applications and content management tools going. And the result? Knock wood, but I don't recall any non-hardware related crashes or hangs in the past couple years. Typical uptime is 6+ months, with long power outages or planned maintenance being the primary reboot reasons.

pau · #24 Post by **pau** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 9:13 am

Hi tomh009,

I don't think you'll ever have a problem!

I was meaning that it's very likely to crash every now and then (at least X) if you want to run it on your laptop and use it on a daily basis...

I have another question, this time related to thinkpad

What's that story that IBM has locked what?? I was looking forward to change the wlan card with a Ralink Technology IEEE 802.11a/b/g

Do I have to do anything special for that? Can you elaborate a bit on this?

Thanks for all answers until now!

Pau

pau · #25 Post by **pau** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 9:14 am

... looking forward to changing

#26 Post by **tomh009** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 11:06 am

The X31 BIOS checks the wireless network card at boot time, and if the card ID does not match the tested/approved list, it displays error code 1802 instead of booting.

The no-1802 CD or floppy sets a bit in the CMOS that disables the check. You can find the details (including source code, should you prefer to build it yourself on OpenBSD) in this recent thread:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=44451

pau · #27 Post by **pau** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 2:32 am

Here I am again...

So.. my x31 arrived and I liked it a LOT. It's amazingly silent, very fast and feels very comfortable. The bad thing is that a couple of things were broken! I told the ebay person I had bought it from and I got the money back; now I have to send it back.

That's the first bad news. The second is that the resolution is ugly, ugly, ugly... I am used to a FJS with 1280x768 in 10.2" and in comparison the x31 resolution was looking cheap.

It's a pity, because otherwise I think it would be my ideal laptop

Anyway, I have to send it back.

Now I still want a thinkpad, but I need your help. I cannot stand the 1024x768 resolution. It hurts... It all can be sumarised in one single question:

Which thinkpad has a decent resolution without being too heavy (say 14" or similar for the screen maximum) and has APM support?

This is crucial for me because of my OS, as I told you.

I have looked at the R60, which is looking fine but I think that since lenovo is producing the thinkpads they have dropped APM support.

What was the IBM-Lenovo model "in the past" with 14" screen?

I know that IBM was supporting APM, so that I would have to look for a second-hand thinkpad, but I don't mind, they are cheaper and it's a matter of trying 1-2 times until you find one which is fine

But really, I am amazed by the quality of the thinkpad. The x31 was soooo quit and soooo fast (compared to this FJS)

#28 Post by **tomh009** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 3:07 am

Your best bet would probably be a T41 or T42 with SXGA+ (1400x1050) resolution. 14.1" display, 5.0 lbs with a 6-cell battery (a bit less if you take out the optical UltraBay drive and put in a travel spacer).

T43 is a bit special with its checks for hard disks etc. but a T41/T42 have the Pentium M already and support 2 GB of memory. Now, you really should check in the T4x forums for best choices (probably Radeon 7500 graphics) for low heat/fan noise ... personally I would guess at a T41 with the Banias CPU, which you might be able to nicely undervolt to further reduce heat.

pau · #29 Post by **pau** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 3:37 am

Hey, tomh009...

you are of big help! Thanks a lot. I already found a nice offer in ebay and it's looking promising. I do not know whether I may post links here, feel free to remove it, since you're a moderator (you must have the rights to delete entries, don't you?). In any case, I'm talking of this:

http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie ... Track=true

I will ask in the T forums. Thanks.

By the way, I find the T43p very noisy... I have one from my institute but it is out of question. It's too noisy and too heavy...

Thanks a lot again!

Pau

#30 Post by **tomh009** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 7:34 am

Links are OK -- but the system you found is XGA, so it's not what you are looking for.

A T41/T42 won't be much lighter than a T43p, even with the optical drive removed, but at least you should be able to find a quiet one.

the old story? x4 vs x3

the old story? x4 vs x3

Re: the old story? x4 vs x3

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