W530 Impressions

[Djembe]

@Ivan, I haven't used a Nehalem CPU and thus don't have personal experience about noticeable differences between that and Ivy Bridge. Still, my post was not intended to say that there were no or little differences, but instead that you really cannot use the WEI as a comparative tool. You need to look at other benchmarks.

[Jimbo]

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dterza01 wrote:

Most of the high end video cards you mention are available on 17" laptops and they are very power hungry 100W or more...

...including some of the heavy 17" gear you mentioned that costs $3200+. 

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That's correct, except for the abovementioned NP9150. To get away with the extra heat dissipation, it uses a dual-fan cooling system in conjunction with Optimus, in a 15" chassis (also, some of the 17" machines are available with 680M + SSD for under 2K, if you don't go crazy with options).

Dual-fan cooling like that is something Lenovo might consider for the W540, perhaps coupled with an OLED-based display. That would give customers a choice of the fastest graphics processors, and provide a wide-gamut display for publishing/photographic work, with IPS-like viewing angles, plus the high brightness and 120Hz refresh rate required for 3D, all in ONE built-in display. That would be a killer machine, brilliant for business demos to small groups, and would make the Retina MacBook Pro look like a dirty dishrag.

We may see OLED-based displays introduced in laptops sometime this year [1, 2 (see the Lenovo quote at the end)].

And a dual-fan/OLED W5XX would address every issue that high-end users have with the W530 (well, except for the keyboard).

[thinkpadthink]

I got a 5.3 windows experience reading for my K2000M. That seems super low! What gives?

Nevermind, that was the Intel 4000 score. 6.9 for the Quadro.

Btw. Does anyone know where I can buy a replacement keyboard? I got mine through Amazon, it was a best seller model and I did not have a chance to customize, so I did not get the backlit keyboard. I am also very ticked that a $1600+ laptop has the backlight as an option. I am not happy about the chiclet keyboard, the spacing is crap and never liked them. They remove the best keyboard ever in hopes of keeping up with the times and then the backlight is an option!!! Is it really too much to ask for the backlight to be standard? THis is not how you follow up the award winning keyboard in the w520!!!

End of rant. So anyone know where I can pick up a backlit keyboard?

I also turned on turbo boost for 10 secs and my battery life went from 8:48 to 3:25? Now way it used up that much battery. The only thing running was one chrome window. What is up with that?

[Djembe]

Lenovo Power Manager takes the wattage used at any given time to estimate battery life. When you turned on Turbo Boost, it had a quick spike in power usage, and if you were consistently using that much power, you would have 3 and a half hours of battery life. The battery life estimate changes according to power use at that moment. If you leave Turbo Boost on for a while, you'll have a much better idea of battery life since just turning it on creates a short spike in power draw and then it evens out to a more typical baseline.

Regarding the keyboard, you should be able to get it by going to Lenovo's web site and looking under accessories for your model number (mine is 2436).

[thinkpadthink]

Thanks a lot for your response Djembe. I have owned this machine for about 5 hours now, so I was just being impatient I,guess. I noticed that the battery time fluctuated and,actually changed the neter to percentage remaining as the time indicator seemed kind of,useless.

I tried searching lenovo for part, but had little luck. I will call customer support tomorrow and inquire further. I also heard that this fall we might see a non chiclet keyboard replacement become available for the w530.

[Djembe]

A third-party application called Battery Bar estimates battery life based on your previous usage and isn't as wildly swayed as Lenovo's tool. After you've used the system on battery a few times, it will have a fairly accurate and more consistent battery life figure relating to your average power usage while on battery. So if you want something less swayed by the moment, you can try that.

[jayheyl]

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ivanz wrote:
Nice review, thanks. I am a developer too and I wonder if there will be a noticable performance improvement coming compared to the W510 (.NET develop to be more specific) - my existing system is already SSD + 16gb ram and the CPU Index in Windows experience is 7.1 - I wonder if those 0.6 are noticable at all?

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I can't address your question directly, but perhaps this will help. I'm moving from a W700 (Q9000 2GHz) to a W530 (i7-3820QM 2.7GHz). I tricked out the W530 with Samsung 256GB SSD and 32GB RAM. I set Windows up in what I gather is the most aggressive caching mode. Also set up a small RAM disk to use for temp files. My compile times went from 3 minutes down to about 1 minute. My guess would be that about half that improvement is from the SSD vs the HDD in the W700. 

[gridstop]

Thanks for that review, dterza.

Would you (or anyone with a W530) consider running CUDA-Z, and reporting back on the Single and Double Precision MFLOPS numbers on the Performance tab? (Or screenshot the whole tab I suppose). It just takes a few seconds to run (with the laptop plugged in, if possible). And it would greatly help me out in choosing a CUDA development laptop.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cuda-z/files/cuda-z/0.5/CUDA-Z-0.5.95.exe/download

Thanks greatly. Can't wait to get my first new thinkpad finally.

UPDATE: Well, I did get numbers for a K2000M, of 333,000 MLFOPS single precision, and 23,825 MFLOPS double precision. If anyone has a K1000M, I'd still love to see those numbers too.

[harrisb]

Here's the 2000M for comparison:

[gridstop]

Thanks Harris!