Thinkpads Forum

I've been thinking about buying a new laptop, and I'm leaning towards a refurbished W520 as opposed to a newer high spec laptop, mostly because of the keyboard and lower price.

I'll want to upgrade to 16GB of RAM and a better drive, but I have several questions.

Is there any major difference between the i7-QM Quad-core and i7-XM Quad-core processors?
Is there any major difference between the Nvidia 1000M and 2000M, when both have 2GB VRAM?
Does a DVD bay adapter exist for a 3.5" form factor drive?

The i7-2860QM is the fastest "standard" quad core that runs at 2.5/3.6 turbo with a TDP of 45W. It was released in 9/11. Both the "extreme" quad cores have a TDP of 55W; the 2920XM was released in 1/11 and runs at 2.5/3.5 turbo and the 2960XM which came out at the same time as the 2860QM runs at 2.7/3.7 turbo.

The 2860QM will outperform the 2920XM due to the higher turbo clocking and also due to the lower TDP it is less likely to throttle back due to lack of cooling. The 2960XM would outperform the 2860QM slightly due to the higher base and turbo clocks but again, due to the higher TDP you are more likely to encounter throttling due to heat.

According to performance benchmarks seen at http://cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp ... &cmp[]=888 the single threaded performance of the 2860QM and 2960XM are identical and both better than the 2920XM. The multithreaded, overall performance of the 2920XM is the worst of the three; the 2960XM is the fastest overall.

As far as the GPUs - the 2000M is roughly 35% faster than the 1000M.

No ThinkPads can accept 3.5" drives. There are adapters for 2.5" drives for the UltraBay; there is also an mSATA slot under the keyboard.

Monkeyfume wrote:I've been thinking about buying a new laptop, and I'm leaning towards a refurbished W520 as opposed to a newer high spec laptop, mostly because of the keyboard and lower price.

I'll want to upgrade to 16GB of RAM and a better drive, but I have several questions.

Is there any major difference between the i7-QM Quad-core and i7-XM Quad-core processors?
Is there any major difference between the Nvidia 1000M and 2000M, when both have 2GB VRAM?
Does a DVD bay adapter exist for a 3.5" form factor drive?

As someone who as quite the affinity for the w520, I've used them for school, work, to pass my certifications, hobby video editing/3d printing etc. They are wonderful machines and the sandy bridge is so far ahead of it's time there is actually little difference between sandy bridges, ivy, haswell, broadwell in terms of performance.

The w520 was a big leap for the better from the w510 in terms of performance, heat, battery, msata option etc.

I've owned all the i7 2720qm 2760qm 2820qm 2860qm and xm.

To me the best was the 2860qm since it was 45w vs 55w of the xm I think. It was even better if you used the 55w cooler on the 45w cpu. Throttlestop and thinkpad fan control is the best at managing speeds/heat.

I've done simple video editing, and 3d printing. I didn't notice much if any speed improvement from the 2000m vs 1000m.

I run it with 3 drives, msata, regular 2.5 and one in the ultrabay. I also backup externally to 3.5 inch drives and 2.5 SSD via the esata. It's worlds better than usb 3.0 and it's a major reason I still keep a few w520. If you use a w530 without esata you can use a 4338 dock with esata connector (they come in usb 3.0 and esata).

Ram prices are so cheap you might as well go with 32gb ram it's like $100 for 4x8gb sodimms. It's a no brainer now, I paid like $500 for 32gb way back when and still consider it a good investment.

jedisurfer1 wrote:

Monkeyfume wrote:I've been thinking about buying a new laptop, and I'm leaning towards a refurbished W520 as opposed to a newer high spec laptop, mostly because of the keyboard and lower price.

I'll want to upgrade to 16GB of RAM and a better drive, but I have several questions.

Is there any major difference between the i7-QM Quad-core and i7-XM Quad-core processors?
Is there any major difference between the Nvidia 1000M and 2000M, when both have 2GB VRAM?
Does a DVD bay adapter exist for a 3.5" form factor drive?

As someone who as quite the affinity for the w520, I've used them for school, work, to pass my certifications, hobby video editing/3d printing etc. They are wonderful machines and the sandy bridge is so far ahead of it's time there is actually little difference between sandy bridges, ivy, haswell, broadwell in terms of performance.

The w520 was a big leap for the better from the w510 in terms of performance, heat, battery, msata option etc.

I've owned all the i7 2720qm 2760qm 2820qm 2860qm and xm.

To me the best was the 2860qm since it was 45w vs 55w of the xm I think. It was even better if you used the 55w cooler on the 45w cpu. Throttlestop and thinkpad fan control is the best at managing speeds/heat.

I've done simple video editing, and 3d printing. I didn't notice much if any speed improvement from the 2000m vs 1000m.

I run it with 3 drives, msata, regular 2.5 and one in the ultrabay. I also backup externally to 3.5 inch drives and 2.5 SSD via the esata. It's worlds better than usb 3.0 and it's a major reason I still keep a few w520. If you use a w530 without esata you can use a 4338 dock with esata connector (they come in usb 3.0 and esata).

Ram prices are so cheap you might as well go with 32gb ram it's like $100 for 4x8gb sodimms. It's a no brainer now, I paid like $500 for 32gb way back when and still consider it a good investment.

Are these computers really so unreliable that you had to buy five of them?

Thanks for the 2860QM recommendation, people.
For RAM, I don't think I'll be doing anything intensive enough to need 32GB. That said, I will try to install 2x8GB so I can add 2 more later if I have a need.
For storage, I already have a 256GB Evo SSD in my current laptop, so I can repurpose that into the W520 and also add an additional 2TB hard drive in the Ultrabay, because those things are surprisingly cheap. I don't think I need to buy an additional mSATA drive... it is a slower SATA II speed and there are other devices that can plug into that use that port, correct?

The port itself could be used as the WWAN module or MSATA SSD. The MSATA slot is SATA II; UltraBay and primary HDD bay are SATA III.

Monkeyfume wrote:

jedisurfer1 wrote:
As someone who as quite the affinity for the w520, I've used them for school, work, to pass my certifications, hobby video editing/3d printing etc. They are wonderful machines and the sandy bridge is so far ahead of it's time there is actually little difference between sandy bridges, ivy, haswell, broadwell in terms of performance.

The w520 was a big leap for the better from the w510 in terms of performance, heat, battery, msata option etc.

I've owned all the i7 2720qm 2760qm 2820qm 2860qm and xm.

To me the best was the 2860qm since it was 45w vs 55w of the xm I think. It was even better if you used the 55w cooler on the 45w cpu. Throttlestop and thinkpad fan control is the best at managing speeds/heat.

I've done simple video editing, and 3d printing. I didn't notice much if any speed improvement from the 2000m vs 1000m.

I run it with 3 drives, msata, regular 2.5 and one in the ultrabay. I also backup externally to 3.5 inch drives and 2.5 SSD via the esata. It's worlds better than usb 3.0 and it's a major reason I still keep a few w520. If you use a w530 without esata you can use a 4338 dock with esata connector (they come in usb 3.0 and esata).

Ram prices are so cheap you might as well go with 32gb ram it's like $100 for 4x8gb sodimms. It's a no brainer now, I paid like $500 for 32gb way back when and still consider it a good investment.

Are these computers really so unreliable that you had to buy five of them?

Thanks for the 2860QM recommendation, people.
For RAM, I don't think I'll be doing anything intensive enough to need 32GB. That said, I will try to install 2x8GB so I can add 2 more later if I have a need.
For storage, I already have a 256GB Evo SSD in my current laptop, so I can repurpose that into the W520 and also add an additional 2TB hard drive in the Ultrabay, because those things are surprisingly cheap. I don't think I need to buy an additional mSATA drive... it is a slower SATA II speed and there are other devices that can plug into that use that port, correct?

I found WWAN option pretty much useless as I tether through my phone if I need that option. I didn't notice any speed difference in real world use from using the msata slot and the regular bay. They were so reliable they replaced my entire blade system my dad handed down to me to learn stuff. Pretty much ran enterprise test and development stuff flawlessly and it let me virtualize any environment for 1/30th the cost. And more importantly 1/10th the space and with non of the noise of enterprise stuff.

I would not worry about the SATA II versus SATA III difference for mSATA drive unless you are doing lots of multi-gigabyte time-sensitive file transfers to or from it (as otherwise the rest of the time you won't get close to the the ~300 MB/s limit of SATA II).

I also agree that WWAN seems a bit redundant now there's mobile/cell phone tethering.

In terms of mSATA versus 2.5" SATA, if you have an existing SSD then might as well stick with that. The mSATA drives are a bit lighter in weight and tend to have lower idle power usage, in a W520 those two considerations are probably irrelevant.

As for RAM, 4x4 GB used DIMMs used to cost around half the price of 2x8 GB new DIMMs, but the 8 GB DIMM price has fallen in the last few months. I know the Intel graphics like 2x DIMMs for better performance, I don't know (suspect not) that there is any performance gain from having 4 DIMMs versus 2 of same total capacity. 16 GB would seem plenty to me unless you are going to run multiple concurrent large VMs.

rjwilmsi wrote:As for RAM, 4x4 GB used DIMMs used to cost around half the price of 2x8 GB new DIMMs, but the 8 GB DIMM price has fallen in the last few months. I know the Intel graphics like 2x DIMMs for better performance, I don't know (suspect not) that there is any performance gain from having 4 DIMMs versus 2 of same total capacity. 16 GB would seem plenty to me unless you are going to run multiple concurrent large VMs.

Seems many of these W520 units came with 2 x 4GB RAM.

For that config, is there any problem to simply adding one 8GB stick? That's cheaper than another 2 x 4GB, and it leaves one ram slot available for future expansion.

W520 with quad CPU have 4 RAM-slots.
Here's advice to fill the slots in a W510, I presume the same applies to a W520: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-P ... a-p/249257

RealBlackStuff wrote:W520 with quad CPU have 4 RAM-slots.
Here's advice to fill the slots in a W510, I presume the same applies to a W520: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-P ... a-p/249257

Super find, thank you. I wonder why they recommend putting the largest capacity ram stick under the keyboard. For convenience, I might just insert the new ram stick into the more accessible empty slot located on the backside, as it's the same speed ram as the existing ram.

RealBlackStuff wrote:W520 with quad CPU have 4 RAM-slots.
Here's advice to fill the slots in a W510, I presume the same applies to a W520: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-P ... a-p/249257

The assumption is corroborated by a couple of posts on the Lenovo forum.

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-P ... d-p/438611

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-P ... d-p/560091

I happened to read this as I was heading to the Post Office to pick up 2 8gb modules for my W520. I wasn't 100% sure of this because the W520 is quite different on the inside compared to the W510 but the memory layout is the same.

MisterB wrote:

RealBlackStuff wrote: I happened to read this as I was heading to the Post Office to pick up 2 8gb modules for my W520. I wasn't 100% sure of this because the W520 is quite different on the inside compared to the W510 but the memory layout is the same.

Good to know. What is your before & after memory size, and is it making a noticeable difference?
I've always had the original 8GB and figured any more would be overkill because I only use 2GB-5GB of it.
(I know some people use more memory for ram-intensive apps, or an SSD cache, but I don't.)

SkiBunny wrote:

MisterB wrote:

Good to know. What is your before & after memory size, and is it making a noticeable difference?
I've always had the original 8GB and figured any more would be overkill because I only use 2GB-5GB of it.
(I know some people use more memory for ram-intensive apps, or an SSD cache, but I don't.)

It's still 16gb. I put the 4gb modules it came with in in my X201T and W500. It is now ready for 16gb more if I ever need it. I do a lot of VM work with the W520 but even so, I don't need more memory as of yet.