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Comment by blackaspen | Hacker News Reader

I've got an X13 AMD with the 4750U and 32GB of RAM and it just dramatically outperforms anything else I've used. It's crazy. I bought it because I wanted a step-up from Intel CPUs that was worthwhile from a 7th gen i5, and this is over 5 times as fast and feels like it.

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I remember having a similar impression with the introduction of past CPUs like Pentium-M and Core 2, and even recently with a Ryzen 7 Pro 3700U.

A new laptop platform suddenly seems faster than a desktop of the prior generation (in practice, often 3+ years old at the point of comparison). This was true even compared to my Xeon workstations of those eras. I can remember saying to myself, why would I get another desktop when this little thing is so fast and low power? Eventually, I rediscover the ways in which the laptop is confining, and revert to the mindset that desktops have a place too. Whether it is upgrading storage, RAM, GPUs, or other accessories, there is a flexibility to the desktop chassis.

Depending on whether it is an employer budget or my personal funds, I find utility in workstation-class or commodity uATX desktops. I can reliably find a sweet-spot configuration to get a fully new platform on an appropriate interval and then trickle in small upgrades as needed during its service lifetime, due to the ease of replacing parts piecemeal.

I also tend to keep the same monitors for a long duration and just procure new, headless PCs for office upgrades. I only upgraded monitors for format changes like 1600x1200 CRT, 1600x1200 LCD, 1920x1200 LCD, and 4K LCD. I suppose you can do the same even with docked laptops, but I find you are paying quite a premium for the built-in display even if you only wanted to upgrade the CPU...

This causes me pain. I really, really want an AMD Thinkpad, but NONE of them has a 2k or 4k display. I tested the FHD ones and I just can't bare it/feel alright dropping 1.3k€ on FHD in 2020. No sure what to do now :(

I too want an AMD ThinkPad but none of the ones with the new Ryzens are 15". It sucks that they've decided to cripple their AMD line for no reason.

If you really want you can get the T14s and swap the panel, but it's expensive and a pain, especially on a brand new machine.

I keep an eye on that route. So far it hasn't been confirmed the AMD motherboards actually can connect to the high res displays.

I would love the X13 yoga 4k(?) oled version with AMD. That be my perfect machine as it has pen input too.

While I agree, one plus is that some of the FHD displays are now extremely low power, with about 1-2W lower idle power consumption.

But I'm not sure why Lenovo doesn't make the low power display the baseline like HP did with their Spectre line.

On this note, I got the 500nit e-privacy display and it's "fine". I don't love it, it's not quite as good as it sounds, but it's "fine". Viewing angle with the "privacy" part off is still pretty terrible.

A 15" 1080p panel has the same pixel density as a 32" 4K panel.

But you sit closer to it so it needs to be sharper. The issue with 1080p at 14 inch is that 150% scaling has blurriness issues with bitmap graphics and 100% scaling is a bit too small and 200% scaling is a little bit too big for most people. Linux is also terrible at 150% scaling across the board. 1440p is the perfect trade-off at 200% between crispness and battery life and well-supported in linux, and while 4k at 300% is very crisp it is a massive power drain.

Apple and microsoft consistently ship displays between 200 and 250 dpi, the sweet spot for 200% scaling. It is frustrating that nobody else does this. I’m on the fence between replacing my 1080p thinkpad with another thinkpad or a macbook pro, and this is a major advantage for the mbp.

Windows has 125% scaling. Linux vendors should look into adding that. :)

KDE does scaling at any 6.25% interval (for technical reasons), which hits 125%, 150%, 175%, 200% and so on.

The IdeaPad S540-13ARE is spec'ed with a 2560x1600 screen: https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/IdeaPad/IdeaPad_S54013ARE

But seems very hard to find a place that actually sells it around here (Norway).

Yeah, but IdeaPad is not ThinkPad... I would only do education offers and the non ThinkPads don't come with 3 years of onsite premium support. The IdeaPad does come edu discounted tho.

Do you know what's expandable in this machine? Below I see that some RAM is soldered onto the motherboard, so is there 1 DIMM slot available? What about the PCIe SSD - is that replaceable too?

In the X13 only the SSD is replaceable. I _think_ it has a slot for cellular too, but I'm unclear if you can use it for anything. Lenovo says that if you want cellular you have to specify at build because of antennas in the display.

The T14S has soldered memory and I think even the T14 does too now.

Thanks! I just looked up the T14 on the Crucial site [1] and it looks like there's a single DIMM on that machine as well as replaceable SSD. So nice to have options ...

[1] https://www.crucial.com/compatible-upgrade-for/lenovo/thinkp...

I tried to customize an X13 on their website and it wouldn't give me an option for 32GB. Did you have to do something else to get that configuration?

You have to choose the Ryzen 4750U first.

I wonder why they added this limitation. Does somebody know if there another explanation other than Lenovo trying to maximize profit by forcing every customer who wants to go for 32GB of memory to get the most expensive CPU as well?

It appears that half of the memory is soldered to the board. That was also the case on my laptop mentioned above. It came with 4GB soldered, and 4GB in a slot. Why? I don't know. I was able to swap the 4GB with an 8GB and somehow it's still running in Dual Channel mode per CPU-Z so I guess it's no big deal, but I also find it odd.

The Lenovo Thinkpad X13 Gen 1 (AMD) has all memory soldered and no SODIMM slots according to its specification: https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_X...

Probably the model built around the lower-specced CPU has a "lesser" motherboard + power supply, that might draw less power on idle (so, better battery life) and be smaller/ligher, but would render the motherboard unable to output the spike currents required for the higher-specced CPU, nor the sustained current required for DRAM refresh of that much memory.

The model with the better CPU necessarily has a more power-hungry motherboard feeding it, and so can also feed current to 32GB of DRAM; but this likely comes at the expense of on-idle battery life.

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