Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

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.

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