this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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The old part really does a lot of work here. New ThinkPads are utter trash :-/
I got excited to get one for work (having heard about the old ones) and was sorely disappointed. It thermal throttles if you look at it wrong, it keeps having BIOS issues with Lenovo being no help and the USB-C display connection (To a Lenovo monitor with their inbuilt docking station!) is iffy.
Which series? T/P or one of the economy options? The T, X, W, and later on P series have been the only models people really like.
We have a few T series at work and they’re not bad. My T14 Gen. 1 doesn’t thermal throttle at all as long as its thermal paste isn’t toast. It will run at basically its full all core boost speeds all day long. The newer 12th Gen. machines dial their clocks back a smidge under full load, but that’s because they have 2x the cores of my measly 10th Gen. machine.
Also I have a T14s AMD and that thing is a BEAST for such a small machine. 35 watts out of an AMD 6 core is no slouch for something that small. And I easily get 7+ hours of battery life out of my abusive use.
Ah, T15 Gen1 with 48 GB RAM. The Intel CPU throttles hard unfortunately, I'd much rather switch to AMD (or a desktop..).
Fortunately the company has so many issues with Lenovo, they are switching to Dell now.
Change your thermal paste. These machines (as do all modern machines) run hot, and their paste doesn’t last long if you’re a heavy user. Find a thermal paste that’s thick in particular.
The pump out effect is really drastic on these modern CPUs if you’re constantly hitting 100% load.
Dude, I'm not opening up my work laptop. It's going to be replaced in a year anyway.
The thing has been a piece of shit when it was brand new, it's not the paste.
Are you on Windows or Linux? On windows 11 go to settings > power and battery > power mode and if you set it to high performance it almost doubles the TDP of the CPU. On windows 10 click the battery and drag the slider to high performance. If what I read online is correct the T14 and the T15 are the exact same heatsink and motherboard so unless the 1" gap from the end of the heatsink to the vent is that much of a problem they should perform exactly the same, just like the later T14 and T16 models. But 4 years is more than enough time for the thermal paste to be toast. My P1 ruined it's paste in less than 6 months, but that's also an i9.
But that's the world of modern Intel CPUs. Turbo boost as far as you possibly can until you can't turbo anymore. Then in 6 months when the thermal paste is ruined you're searching for a new machine.
Windows 11, but I already tested out every combination of settings. Windows settings and BIOS CPU settings. Most high performance settings make things just a tiny bit faster, while the laptop blasts the fan at full speed (the fan sucks too, it's too loud for what it does).
The cooling just sucks, the CPU boosts and then runs straight into thermal throttling and has to cut back. It has been like this since day 1, maybe it got worse in the past 2 years, but it was never good in the first place. Colleagues with the same model had plenty of issues too (and the lead sent it back to the IT department and demanded one model higher up with a beefier CPU, but he's also not happy with it).
It's a 3 year lease, the laptop will be gone in a year and then hopefully I can choose my next one. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like Dell is currently offering models with AMD CPUs..
I have two new P1 Gen 7's coming today, i hope they have fixed that
They didn’t. They did kinda change the goalpost though.
Which model did you get? The i7 or the i9? The i7 models have a minimum guaranteed TDP of 28 watts, while the i9 is at least 35. But 35 watts on such a high end CPU is dire. The Gen. 7 also killed their high end GPU options, but maybe that leaves more power headroom for the CPU.
That’s still better than my P1 Gen. 4 which throttles down to 25 watts. 25 watts on an 11th Gen. i9 is AWFUL performance.
i9 with the 4070 GPU
Let me know how the thermals are on that machine. I ended up paying out the ass for a refurbished gen 6 because it comes with the 4090 and a MUCH bigger heatsink. From what I saw initially in the reviews the performance is worse not just because the 100 series has worse IPC, but the machine doesn't actually boost as much since it's more thermally limited.
HOWEVER the machine gets a LOT better battery.
My gen 4 would get anywhere between 30 minutes and 2 hours of battery life unless I'm doing literally nothing on it. This gen 6 gets like 4 hours unless I'm heavily taxing it. But from people online I saw them say 7 hours is easily doable. And having a GPU that doesn't use 20 watts sitting idle sure helps.
Anything specific you'd like me to test?
The only thing I'm really curious about is how far back the CPU gets throttled with the dGPU active and busy.
On both of my machines when I render a video using my GPU the CPU is still the limiting factor because of the codec I chose. On my 11th gen machine it took like 5 minutes before it was power throttled down to 25 watts. My gen 6 takes longer to power throttle and only goes down to 35 watts, but either power level that sucks. I already know the gen 7 dials back the clock speeds, but I'm mostly curious how far it goes and how quickly?
The easiest way to test this is just open a video game that's taxing on the CPU and GPU, I don't think the CPU throttles with light loads like if you opened furmark. Maybe benchmarking software would cause it to throttle.
I was just blaming the usb-c connection to my monitor and throttling on a combo of windows and corporate bloatware, I guess I feel a bit better that I'm not the only one.
The connection to my monitor is the most frustrating, sometimes won't even recognise it, sometimes after blanking the display it'll come back with the wrong resolution but still display like it was the original, it's super bizarre. Literally never had an issue with my personal Asus zenbook in either Debian or w11.