Ask HN: Shuold I buy a new ThinkPad E14 with soldered RAM or a used T480? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Shuold I buy a new ThinkPad E14 with soldered RAM or a used T480?

I was nearly up to buy a new Lenovo ThinkPad E14 G2 Ryzen 3 4300U 16GB RAM, when I noticed that it may have 8GB soldered RAM. It may be that only E14 or L14 with Intel CPU do not have any soldered RAM. I asked an acquaintance of an acquaintance in a local PC repair (a rather mediocre one) shop regarding how many times they had to deal with broken soldered RAMs in Thinkpads. He said sort of 0 with thinkpad's, but 2 with ASUS (during their whole practice). But in case of broken soldered RAM you'll most probably need to replace the whole system board.

Now there is an option to buy a used T480 with i5-8350U 4 cores, which may have a better casing material and better battery life, for just 50 euros less than the new E14, but with basically the same essential features.

Should I buy a new thinkpad E14 with soldered RAM or an older T480 used thinkpad?

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I have a t530 that I bought used in 2015 or so. With new RAM, an SSD, and Linux, it's an extremely capable machine. It's my daily driver.

I don't have any major complaints. The entire machine is pretty good from top to bottom. Easy to repair, good spill-resistant keyboard, decent screen, dedicated GPU, even a couple USB 3.0 ports. It's a thicc machine, but I like that. With the dock, it becomes an excellent portable workstation.

This little laptop has been around the planet with me and put up with a ton of abuse. I have never, ever thought "oh, I need to treat this thing gently in case it breaks" like I do with modern laptops. No, this bad boy gets thrown into bags and back seats with no fucks given. I've even sat on it once or twice.

Unless you need high performance for gaming or cpu intensive applications, you will not find better value for your money than a t-series. Mine has been my programming workhorse for nearly a decade, and I'd be surprised if it doesn't last at least another decade.

Get a t-series, then upgrade the bejeezus out of it. Max the RAM, get the best CPU it can support from eBay, get a new battery and a 90W+ power supply. Drop in a pci-e or sata SSD, and you'll be good for years.

Also of note: if you want to upgrade the wifi card, you need to hack the bios. It's very easy to do, just check the thinkpad wiki. If you don't upgrade the cpu, make sure you pull and clean the heatsinks and refresh the thermal paste.

I also like the T series more, and this renewed T480 would have approx. the same functionality. One issue is that is comes with Windows 10 and I should probably need to check the Windows itself that it's clean etc.

This is a completely unacceptable question to ask because even you must know that what you've described doesn't touch at all on what your specific requirements would be in the device.

Without knowing what your specific requirements and expectations are its impossible to provide targeted information to help you make an objective decision. Everyone else is selling something that may not even be applicable to you.

As for the soldered RAM, I've heard good arguments for and good arguments against it, dealing with security, or usability which are often trade-offs. An older model allows you to flash the BIOS with an open source alternative and to remove any backdoor functionality that may remain in Intel ME, AMT, or any of its related subsystems.

You also do not mention how old the T480 is, we can surmise based off its original manufacturer date that its older but components have limited life and part of the cost of buying something new is the guarantee it will continue working, and that its usable life has not been expended.

I've seen T480s that are running just as fast today as they were when they were brand new. The owners of these took extra steps to make that happen. Controlling heat play's a crucial factor, removing design defects are another. The pristine ones I've seen have fixed the fan failure by rewiring the fan power cables so they don't get routed over a heatsink (i.e. where IBM itself used kapton tape right on top of the heatsink), or replaced the low-grade CPU thermal paste with a more heat conducive binder.

The local vendor doesn't know how old these T480 are, it would be clear on place, upon order delivery. The supplier provides 2 year warranty for this refurbished Thinkpad T480 and a 6 month warranty for the battery. Given these warranties it seems not to be very old.

T480s were manufactured in 2018, any third-party (non-manufacturer) warranty is of limited value. So at best they may be 5 years old which is pretty decent.

The problem with warranties these days is they are setup to simply replace the hardware, and not provide quality hardware in the first place.

Things I've noticed, most places which offer a third-party warranty will ensure the process for obtaining the warranty benefits is difficult and onerous, where it might take several months to get the replacement, and in the meantime you have no laptop, and then they only replace it with a like-model which may have the same problem, they'll do this multiple times for the length of the warranty, after which you'll almost certainly need to replace the device, while accounting for periods of time that you may not have the device. Unfortunately, many manufacturers have gone this route as well in recent years offering a 1 year manufacturers warranty and then 2-3 year support warranty. You used to be able to get business class laptops with a 3 year manufacturer warranty and it was manufactured so it wouldn't fail in that time (with quality components).

You'll have to decide what amount of risk you are willing to take. A new device is a lot easier argument to enforce a warranty, you'll still run into the issues with delays on the process if it fails, but there may be other tradeoffs for your use, you'll have to decide.

Coreboot also doesn't support the T480, looks like the T440P was the last model they support, but I could be wrong on that.As always do your due dilligence.

So I haven't had an e14, but I've had two P14's in the past year. One ryzen one intel. My only gripe is getting the power usage down while running linux took a few hours of fiddling.

I used to have a T480 that idled around 5 watts, I could get the newer laptops down to there but I had to make sure all the various devices didn't have power saving disabled. The thunderbolt pci devices were the big culprit which is unsurprising as I drive two 27" monitors via thunderbolt. The power usage is still a little "spiky". When the laptop comes online or out of hibernation it takes a few minutes for the fan to spin down but overall it's alright.

I guess personally I'd go for the newer laptop. But that's mostly because TB4 is a hard requirement for me at this point. It might take a little more fiddling with the power settings (linux or windows) to get it where you want it but lenovo is pretty good a polishing it's business laptops.

As for your original worry of soldered on RAM. I don't like it either and I try to avoid it, but it doesn't weigh heavy on my mind when choosing a laptop.

Edit; I don't know how to use commas I guess.

I am curious how you measure power usage and how to reduce it on Linux.

For measuring draw on the battery I have a status bar script that pulls

   /sys/class/power_supply/BAT?/power_now

As for reducing power usage that's always a game of whack a mole every time you get a new laptop.

  1. TLP is a great starting point - https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html
  2. Powertop can help pin down devices and the various settings to persist via udev rules - https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop
  3. The arch wiki is always a great resource - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management
  4. And naturally you'll have to fiddle with various bios settings.

It's a game of trial and error. Turn one thing on, measure, turn it off, measure. And of course some devices will go into powersaving mode, but wont come out of it so you'll blacklist those in udev powersaving rules.

What is wrong with the AMD L14 gen3?

It has socketed ram, 3 m.2 slots (although none are 2280, so your stuck with the 2242 NVMe drives, which limit the section a bit but there are still some solid choices), and the top end machine has a ryzen 7 pro (8 cores, 16 threads) wifi 6E and up to 64G ram.

Its a pretty decent range, has good reviews, the base model is fairly inexpensive, and the line scales up well, although it seems not all the options are actually available at any given time.

There seems to be various reports of it working well with linux, which is supported on lenovo's business range, of which the L14 is part.

Here is the tech doc:

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_L...

"Memory Slots Two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots, dual-channel capable"

There are a few options in the pdf, that aren't visible on the lenovo buy page where i'm at, including the 400 nits screen and 63Wh battery, but you can probably special order them if your willing to wait.

Here [1] is a more detailed description of the situation (post #23).

I'm like 98% oriented towards Thinkpad E14 gen2 AMD Ryzen3 4300U 4 cores (1, 2) due to backlit keyboard, aluminum casing (sort of mil-tested), IPS FHD display (which I hope to have at least 250 nits of brightness), no PWM flickering and USB-C charging port. 16GB RAM and 512gb or 1T SSD.

[1] https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2481902&page=3

My current budget is 650 euros (getting from suppliers in Baltic EU), gen 1 or 2 may fit, if other specs are ok.

512Gb SSD is preferrable if the thinkpad most probably comes with Windows, for dual booting with Ubuntu.

Read the pdf I posted. The base L14 models, at least here in the US seem to start about $700 (4 cores). Largely because there is a hefty discount that is applied all the time, how much the discount seems to swing +-15% on any given day, but 40% seems to be where its generally at.

And i'm not sure about the mil tested case, but there is an aluminum and carbon fiber+poly carbinate option. At some point though, your going to have to buck up and realize that some of these options cost more, and either bite the bullet or lower your requirements.

I would like to have a laptop with 16 cores, 64G ram, 4K screen and a battery that lasts for a week and costs $200 too, but I have to compromise on the battery life and the price.

I found the ThinkPad L14 G1 14 FHD 4650U 8GB 256SSD EN W10Pro at ~700$ locally, it's a bit less in memory to run dual boot. So there should be really good reasons to abandon soldered RAM in E14. I asked a person from a PC repair shop, whether he potentially could perform the same on system board, as this guy on DEll XPS from the link above. And he told, that theoretically it is possible to rewire the resistors on board so that BIOS won't detect soldered RAM and use only the insertable RAM, but there's the risk of overheating of the board and making the laptop not operational.

Though I can't see enough logic here for board overheating, if you leave the soldered RAM in the board and only resolder the Serial Prescence Detect module resistors in specific points on board. The board could overheat if you resolder the RAMs themsleves and not the small resistors.

According to [1], you need to resolder only 1 resistor to tell BIOS that the soldered RAM is 16GB upgraded (in this case of upgrading the 8GB of soldered RAM to 16 on a Dell XPS13). Can it be assumed in a similar vein, that if E14 soldered RAM fails sometime, and you may only want to block it from usage and leave in the system board, so you may only need to fiddle with resoldering some resistors? Thou it currently seems like no, as I suppose the system board won't work at all without any working soldered RAM. So there need to be a way to inform the system board to not use soldered RAM and use inserted RAM.

[1] https://hackaday.com/2021/11/24/you-cant-upgrade-soldered-on...

It may be possible to use conductive ink to place the necessary connective paths on the board to the inserted RAM.

This is a E series versus T series question.

If your care about quality at all, you should choose the T series.

Edit: for future reference

X > T > S/P > A > E > L

Excuse me, no representation for the W series???

What W series? I think you have been sold a fake Thinkpad ;)

https://gizmodo.com/lenovo-thinkpad-w700-has-a-built-in-waco...

They're basically the same as the T series, but weird. One model has a second screen that slides out from behind the primary screen.

Why E > L? E series with AMD CPU seems to come with partially soldered RAM, while L series with insertable only RAM.

These are just my opinions fwiw:

My strategy is to budget for more RAM than I need (16GB should be a minimum honestly for an x86 environment). For laptops I personally don't update the memory, so I feel that soldered memory is fine.

I would suspect the cracked solder joints would be due to people dropping their laptop (indeed there have been issues with manufacturing as well). If you have bad solder joints on memory due to poor manufacturing, how could you trust anything else on the main board?

I would avoid soldered SSDs though.

There are 8 GB soldered and 8 GB insertable on-slot in E14. The most idiotic thing is that if soldered RAM fails, the system board won't work, even if the other 8GB inserted RAM are fine and everything else on the board is fine.

I suspect that solder joints may also be affected by heat. Though, of course, I won't be checking it in a microwave oven.

Is it more or less suitable to suppose that if during the 2 year warranty for a new E14 thinkpad its soldered RAM works fine, so there are no essential manufacturing defects in it and it should be ok in the long run?

But I am also worried (as a theoretical possibility) whether somewhat above-the-normal external magnetic or electric fields won't affect the soldered RAM too adversely.

RAM pretty much never dies. It's either faulty on arrival or lasts the lifetime of the device. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/916373-pc/71723683

I don't know if I should care a lot about soldered RAM, there is 2 y guarantee from local suppliers on both new E14 and used T480. But it seems for a price under 600 euros I won't find +backlit keyboard, IPS FHD display, 4 cores, 16 GB RAM and 512GB/1Tb SSD.

You could also look at the 15+" devices there appear to be a couple lines that aren't soldered. The notebook selector page seems to be fairly accurately describing the memory type and how many channels are soldered.

I googled a bit, and [1] shows that: Here are all the current models without soldered RAM: • E14 / E15 Gen 2 (1x SO-DIMM, Intel only) • L14 / L15 Gen 2 (2x SO-DIMM) • T15p / P15v Gen 2 (2x SO-DIMM) • X1 Extreme / P1 Gen 3 (2x SO-DIMM) • P15 / T15g / P17 Gen 1 (4x SO-DIMM) All other models have completely or partially soldered RAM. Partially soldered are: • T14 / T15 Gen 2 (1x SO-DIMM, 8 to 16 GB on-board) • P14s / P15s Gen 2 (1x SO-DIMM, 8 to 16 GB on-board) • E14 / E15 Gen 2 (1x SO-DIMM, 8 GB on-board, AMD only)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/md59tv/newer_thin...

If I had to have a machine with soldered RAM, I would insist on at least 32G, for a longer useful life and greater capability (more and bigger VMs, larger projects).

Is a Framework or HP Dev One (or other Linux laptop) not an option?

The Framework Laptop is promising, but it lacks the TrackPoint, which is the ThinkPad's most distinguishing feature. The HP Dev One has a pointing stick, but it botched the implementation by omitting the middle mouse button that, when pressed down, would allow you to scroll with the pointing stick.

Many TrackPoint users are frustrated with Lenovo's decision to solder RAM in ThinkPads, but are also frustrated with the lack of ThinkPad alternatives that include a full TrackPoint replacement.

>> Many TrackPoint users are frustrated with Lenovo's decision to solder RAM in ThinkPads

It would be useful to see some statistics about how many soldered RAM actually malfunction due to manufacture defect. As I mentioned, a person from a PC repair shop told he didn't encounter any issues with soldered RAM on Lenovo Thinkpad's specifically.

It's difficult to replace soldered RAM when it malfunctions, but that's not the only drawback. The most immediate problem with soldered RAM is that it cannot be upgraded like a standard SO-DIMM stick. Even when a laptop with partially soldered RAM has one free SO-DIMM slot, the soldered RAM limits the amount of total RAM that can run in dual channel mode. Manufacturers including Lenovo also charge much more for soldered RAM upgrades than aftermarket SO-DIMM prices, which is price gouging.

>>the soldered RAM limits the amount of total RAM that can run in dual channel mode

Can it affect running 3d modelling software, like CADs or Blender, on an integrated graphics card with shared (dynamic) memory?

As mentioned here [1], at least on a Dell XPS laptop while diy upgrading soldered RAM, it is necessary to resolder a resistor from 1 to 0 position on the board to tell BIOS what RAM to expect.

Maybe for E14 thinkpads it is also possible to perform a similar thing, to diy rewire the board to ignore the malfunctioning soldered RAM and use the socketed RAM instead. But how to get all the original thinkpad system board schematics?

[1] https://gregdavill.com/posts/dell-xps13-ram-upgrade/

RAM in dual channel mode performs better than RAM in single channel mode, but you would have to run benchmarks to measure the impact. I'm not sure about the extent of the difference in the 3D modeling software scenario.

I remember seeing that article when it was posted on HN. The stencil alignment looks very intimidating and the entire process is obviously much more difficult than a SO-DIMM replacement, but it's good to know that upgrading soldered RAM may be possible in some cases for those willing to take on the challenge.

I've just seen on google (on askubuntu) that it can be possible to make Ubuntu ignore soldered RAM and use the socketed RAM instead.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1428808/can-i-disable-one-sl...

"There isn't anyway to disable RAM as far as I know, but there is a way to have Ubuntu ignore the bad RAM, but you need to know the addresses of the RAM in question."

Can someone evaluate the plausibility of this?

I asked a person from a PC repair shop regarding diy rewiring the board in E14 to ignore the soldered RAM, and he told that it is theoretically possible, but there the risk of overheating the board.

On the other hand, basing on this Dell laptop diy rewiring case, if soldering all Serial Prescence Detect module resistors to position 0 can make BIOS to expect zero soldered RAM and switch to socketed RAM , such soldering seems doable moderately easily by yourself.

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