X210Ai Info & Review Thread

[astral]

So, I bought the X210Ai way back in February, and today it has arrived! I'll be creating a longer review in the future, once I've been using it for a while, but here's my day 1 thoughts.

First, my specs:
- Core Ultra 7 165H
- 32GB Crucial DDR5-5600 RAM (2x16GB)
- 4TB Samsung 990 Evo Plus PCI Gen 5 SSD
- 13.4-inch 165hz IPS LCD @2560x1600
- New-old-Stock NMB keyboard
- OEM 9-cell extended battery, professionally rebuilt with Panasonic cells.
- Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021. It will soon be multi-booted with Kubuntu Linux and Windows 11 (in case I ever need it for something)

This thing certainly performs up to spec. It is extremely fast - keeping in mind, I was coming from a T480 and an 8th-gen ASUS gaming laptop. The ASUS still has the edge on graphics performance of course, but the CPU and general performance is much better on the X210Ai. That is, when I'm running on AC power. The current version of the X210Ai's EC has a number of known issues, mostly related to battery power management. It's by no means slow on battery, but it doesn't seem to be able to get above 25% or so utilization before hitting the TDP limit. This should be fixed once the updated EC firmware is out sometime soon. Other EC-related issues include that the browser forward/back keys do not work, the battery meter isn't fully accurate, and it doesn't like going into sleep mode. This again should be sorted out with the updated EC firmware, according to Franck at tpart.net. I can't say much on battery life yet as I haven't done a full rundown, but word is it will be 3-5 hours. I assume this will improve with the updated EC. This will also vary greatly depending on what battery you use, as aftermarket packs can be very inconsistent.

The display quality is excellent - love that high refresh rate, and the bezels are extremely thin with the 13.4-inch panel. I've heard reports that the TrackPoint can leave an imprint on the panel, that's probably unavoidable.

Overall fit and finish is fairly good, keeping in mind that it's built from used parts. All of the original Lenovo parts are in excellent condition with only very minor signs of wear. The keyboard it shipped with looked practically brand new (I just happened to have a NOS one to swap in anyway). It did ship with an NMB keyboard as well, not the Chicony. This will all vary order to order though. My order was placed pretty early on, so it may have gotten better condition parts than the later ones.
The worst wear area on my unit is around the custom port inserts - they actually CNC'd them out of spare display housings, rather than 3D printing, which is really cool. There's some roughness around the edges of them, but it's very minor.

Functionally, everything has been going well (knock on wood). The only problem I had was finding a functional UltraNav driver in order to get gestures and all that working. The winner ended up being the May 2021 Ultranav driver from Lenovo, which I had to force install in device manager. The procedure is the same as on the older X210/X2100: https://www.xyte.ch/support/51nb-x210-x ... e-support/


That's about all I have to say for day 1 - overall I am very very pleased! The team behind the X210Ai has really done a good job. I'll update this thread soon with photos.

[RealBlackStuff]

I've heard reports that the TrackPoint can leave an imprint on the panel, that's probably unavoidable.

Put some small rubber bumpers (2-3mm) along the front-top of the bezel.
(And don't put it in a backpack).

[astral]

The entire top of the bezel is slanted, so there really isn't a good way to do that. I'm going to be carrying it in a dedicated laptop bag, not a backpack, so that shouldn't be a worry

[ZaZ]

I'm not sure if the L14 is similar, but I bought some low profile slim soft rim caps off eBay last year and they do not touch the screen. I believe the seller said the were 3d printed.

[astral]

I don't think the newer low profile caps would work because the newer ThinkPads have the smaller plug style for the TrackPoint caps. I think I should be ok as long as I treat the laptop with good care. I'm probably also going to try out the other two cap types (classic dome and soft rim) on the laptop, to see which I prefer. That's another one of the things I love about this - I can still use the old cap types on a modern computer!

Still going strong on day 3. Here are a couple photos:



full-res:
https://embed.macdat.net/tpf/04.jpg
https://embed.macdat.net/tpf/05.jpg

Don't let the looks fool you, this is Windows 10 LTSC 2021. I've just themed it to look as close as possible to Windows 7

I'd say the biggest problem so far is that it doesn't like to start up again after I shut it down for a while. I'll have to pull the battery out to reset the CMOS and then wait a couple minutes for it to presumably do memory training again before it finally gets up and POSTs. I would assume that this will be taken care of with the updated EC firmware as well. While its running, stability has been fine. It has bluescreened exactly once - the Synaptics drivers decided to crash as I was unplugging an external mouse.

Oh, another thing. I was pleased to see that the tiny trackpad works a lot better under Windows 10 with the 2021 driver than the trackpad on my original X201 works under Windows 7. It's definitely usable. Of course, 90% of the time I use the TrackPoint so this doesn't matter much

[ekruges]

I got one from Jacky recently. What a beast! Thankfully I haven't encountered many issues, but a battery pull out always works like a charm...

[dcfbf]

Don't let the looks fool you, this is Windows 10 LTSC 2021. I've just themed it to look as close as possible to Windows 7

I cannot be fooled! I see discord on the taskbar

Opening up something like Firefox would have broken the illusion as well due to the lack of aero on the titlebar.

[astral]

Don't let the looks fool you, this is Windows 10 LTSC 2021. I've just themed it to look as close as possible to Windows 7

I cannot be fooled! I see discord on the taskbar

Opening up something like Firefox would have broken the illusion as well due to the lack of aero on the titlebar.

Last I checked, the last compatible version of the Discord client for Windows 7 still works, so that alone isn't a tell, but VMware Workstation is. It's been ages since it was compatible with Windows 7

[astral]

Another problem I've noticed - there doesn't seem to be any way to use the internal microphone with headphones connected to the jack. Windows sees it all as one device, so there's nothing to switch between. Tried two different versions of the Realtek drivers but no dice. Will have to see if I can do this under Linux, or if it's just a problem with how the BIOS is presenting the audio hardware to the operating system. Could be worse though, someone on r/thinkpad mentioned the microphone on their X210Ai wasn't working at all.