Anyone still have a T50?

[Medessec]

Hello everyone! It's probably been awhile since the T50 was mentioned on this forum... but I recently came into one myself and have had the chance to experience it and I gotta say. It's fantastic.

You can click on this photo to go to a bigger gallery of higher quality photos:


This one wasn't without problems... the board is covered in corrosion likely from repeated use in the hot, humid Chinese seaside climate. The big issue however was the little board capacitors around the CPU socket which were causing the motherboard to trip out with boost enabled (sometimes even without it enabled). Replacing those caps with the help of some online buddies actually seems to have completely fixed the issue, giving me the chance to play with it a bit and find out what it can do.

Core i7s quickly overwhelm the T4x's standard cooling, even the dGPU heatsink. The other big problem is that both the iGPU and dGPU heatsinks have fat upper coldplates which have really bad heat soak, so the laptop will initially display decent temps but as the T50 is on for longer- the coldplate becomes saturated with heat and average temps will rise into the high 70s and low 80s. No standard T4x cooling setup can sustain boost clock from even a Core i5, however after using it a bit I've kinda settled on the Core i5-560M as the most reasonable and stable option. Even then I'd want to look into a means of offering a T50 better cooling... if you dailied a T50 I'd figure the heat soak will just keep a jacket of warmth around the CPU and all nearby components, and average temps will just always be high which will stink for performance. When I was using it though, 1080p playback was perfectly smooth even with the CPU smashing into T-max a little bit. With an SSD, it boots up to Windows 10 in less than 15-20 seconds. DirectX 9 games run decently on it, DirectX 10 stuff of course will try to run but don't expect anything playable. Like anything else with iGPUs it's going to really only be suitable for light gaming at the time. But for basic multimedia such as animations and video playback, it's more than fine. The DDR3 RAM is pretty nice as it means 8GB is much more attainable, although 8GB is still the max with this gen.

So I'd like to kick off some discussion- is the T50 still a reasonable daily driver? What do you guys think? Anyone else out there who still has one of their own?

[RealBlackStuff]

I've never seen one, but...
First thing to swap would be thermal paste with a PTM7950 thermal pad.
An additional option for better cooling (while more space inside) might be an R52 case.

[dcfbf]

Never owned one, but if it is basically a xx10 ThinkPad, it should be mostly daily drivable. Heck I'm currently dailying a X61 due to my X220 bugging out.

[dr_st]

Hi Medessec, great to have you around.

Thank you for this write-up, and the more detailed description in the link. I remember the excitement when the T50 was announced. In a way it was a game changer. For the first time, there could be some limited production offering enthusiasts a chance for modern, flexible hardware, in their familiar classic Thinkpad shell.

I never jumped on this bandwagon, for a couple of reasons - not easy to get them where I am, and I don't like sacrificing some of the convenience features (most importantly, the docking port). Nowadays, it is less important, because everything is Thunderbolt/USB-C anyways, so the new customized "Thinkpads" are compatible with same docks as Lenovo's own offerings.

It is no surprise that the T50 is a huge boost in performance compared to the original T4x. Even today, a dual core 1st gen Core I can remain somewhat usable. Not as a daily driver, IMO, but as a simple multimedia system - perhaps (the single core Pentium M cannot deal with modern codecs in any reasonable way).