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Comment by kev009 | Hacker News Reader

If you are ever bored, maxing out a T440p, T430, or T480 is a fun exercise and not very difficult nor expensive. CPU, RAM, SSD, coreboot, modern LCD panel, Liteon keyboard. Load with Linux, BSD, OpenCore.

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Sadly the T440p (my main machine for several years) and T420 run insanely hot even with fresh paste and a cleaned fan, at least while docked and in continuous use. Could not for the life of me overcome it. Got a T14 Gen 5 and it's a solid 40 degrees cooler now on average. Big relief. I'm guessing T480 is decently cool but haven't daily driven one to be sure.

I had al of these. The CPU is the weakest component here, and only T480 supports 32 GB RAM.

(Typing this from a T14 gen 1.)

I've got a T480s that has 40GB of RAM (32GB SODIMM + 8GiB soldered). Works fine. Is the T480 different?

T480 has 2 RAM slots and can support 64Gb (32+32). The reason it's "unofficial" is that when they designed it (and wrote PSREF) the 32Gb RAM wasn't a thing.

My T480 running NetBSD: [ 1.000000] total memory = 65411 MB

T480 has 2 RAM slots and S has soldered RAM and 1 slot.

OTOH unofficially T480 (not S) can work with two 32 GB SODIMMs. I did not try that.

(I wish the AMD-based thinkpads supported ECC RAM. Ryzen 7 mobile CPUs technically allow for that.)

The T480 i7 with 64GB RAM is still a very decent machine in 2026 even when used by a browser tab messy with a bunch of electron apps opened all the time.

> nor expensive

With OpenAI completely destroying the component supply chain in 2026 I think this requires citations

DDR3 was not so much affected as DDR4 or DDR5.

I have a hard time finding a good battery.

I bought an internal and external battery and the external one quickly started bloating.

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