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Comment by vesche | Hacker News Reader

I also use a T480 as my main laptop and love it. Here are my notes & dotfiles for running Arch Linux: https://github.com/vesche/t480

One big item (which you'll see at the bottom of my install notes) is that intel chips in these thinkpads have a throttling issue. There's a nice python program to fix that, I run it as a systemd service on boot: https://github.com/erpalma/throttled

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Awesome, thanks for sharing. I have my own notes as well for running under Ubuntu that I really should get around to polishing up and publishing as well. I second that throttled fix. I boosted single core performance by 34% and multi-core by 63%! (https://twitter.com/xan_nick/status/1199821047840817153)

I switched to a Thinkpad from Macbook and I'm really, really enjoying the keyboard. Easily the best typing experience I've had on a laptop. Nearly as good as the cherry red switches on my desktop keyboard.

I have a T490 and also run Arch, I believe for me there was a fix for the intel throttling in a firmware (BIOS) update. I don’t know if it was the same issue as the 480 but believe I saw it in the release notes for supported laptops.

FWIW, you can similarly fiddle with Intel HWP / performance <-> efficiency tradeoff on FreeBSD with the `dev.hwpstate_intel.0.epp=<0-100>` sysctl/tunable knob. We expose fewer of those other knobs, though.

Is it silent? I've found recent Thinkpads to be a hit and miss in terms of good thermal cooling and fan firmware.

Sadly fan speed is not adjustable by the user in the last few generations.

I'm also curious about their new AMD offerings.

Which models? Afaik you can adjust fan speed on most, probably all, laptops by directly changing the embedded controller values.

I have one at work and it's not, I ended up using my personal MBP13 instead.

Fan seems to struggle to dissipate even 25 watts of heat. Sometimes it would be sitting at 50+ degrees C, just idling.

I asked our IT guys if I can repaste it, but they told me it's still on warranty. It might help, but I'll never know I guess.

My T480 is fairly quiet unless it's under pretty heavy load. I do have the model with discrete graphics, which apparently has much better cooling (even when the discrete chip isn't being used).

All the laptops I've had over the years (HP, Dell, 2 Asus, now a Thinkpad, plus like 3 Dells at work) have idled at about 50 C. Is that not supposed to be normal?

Mine is quite silent I'd say. How I run my OS is very minimal so my CPU/RAM usage at rest is very light. I only hear the fans kick on loud when I run intense jobs. However, I'm also interested in AMD offerings- but more because of the intel chip vulnerabilities that have come to light over the past ~2 years (Spectre/Meltdown).

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