Would you still buy a W520?

[Omineca]

Hi everyone,

I'm thinking about upgrading from my R500, and I want to stick with a classic ThinkPad. My wife has a 15" MacBook Pro with one of the same i7 Quad Cores that was used in the W520 (i7-2720QM), and it's still a snappy machine. I assume that the W520 is similarly quick. But a few months ago, the MacBook had to go into an apple service center for a motherboard replacement due to a very well known GPU failure problem.

That experience has left me wondering: are there any major issues with the W520? Is there anything I should be watching out for when searching for a used model? I've scoured the forums and have seen a few contested complaints about fan noise, screen quality (it has to be better than the R500 panel, right?), and the size of the power brick (which could apparently squish a small dog if it fell). But is there anything really serious to be watching for?

If it has any bearing, I'll be running Debian on it.

Thanks.

[Saucey]

I had one recently with a nVidia 1000m GPU and it did fine, granted I applied Artic Silver 5 thermal paste after buying it.
Supposedly the left speaker wire will melt from high temps of the CPU heat sink fan, I had rerouted it's path to the palmrest.
I bought it with the intention of reselling it, haven't had anything yet from the buyer so I presume its working good still.

[brchan]

There doesn't seem to be any hardware issues for W520 units. However, some have came with misaligned heatsinks?

Some people have run into a tiny portion of the bottom left corner of the palmrest cracking, and many W510 - W530 models (including T versions) run into 'sticky' left hinges, where the heat from the heatsink thins out the grease on the hinge, giving it a 'sticking' noise. It is harmless and does no damage (at least on my W530), and you can fix it very quickly by loosening hinge nut using a socket wrench.

These issues are very small, though.

[theterminator93]

Having recently just bought one? Absolutely.

For the best in future proof-ability, get one with a QC CPU (for the four RAM slots) nd the Quadro 2000m. FHD was available from the factory, and modding in an IPS FHD can be done for those with a little adventure in them...

[Omineca]

Thanks for the feedback!

Those do sound like minor issues. I think I'll pull the trigger when I see one that fits the bill.

[bit_twiddler]

I recently upgraded from a W510QC to a W520QC. Here are some issues that you might consider:

Pros:

Very low power consumption and about twice the computing speed of my W510.
You'll be amazed at how fast it is compared to whatever you have in your R500.

It takes 3 drives (main drive, ultrabay, and msata slot).

Amazing port selection (USB 3.0 AND esata-p).

Screen quality is pretty good, but you may want to calibrate it because it is a wide-gamut
panel, and the colors may be too vibrant for your eyes to handle unless you do that.
It's not a screen defect, it's true of any wide-gamut display. It's still a TN panel,
though, so probably not good enough to use for digital photographic work
with Photoshop.

The i7-2720QM is fairly common, but there are faster chips. The i7-2860QM
is a bit faster and is still a 45w TDP chip, and is actually somewhere between
the i7-2920XM and the i7-2960XM in performance for what I'm using the machine
for (software development).

Cons:

External displays are electrically connected to the Nvidia chip. So, if you
want to run your machine on a dock with some external displays,
you'll need to learn about some magic tools like bbswitch.

You'll probably want to learn about bumblebee, too.

I haven't bothered to do this yet, since I am planning on using my W520
as a portable machine, and turn the Nvidia graphics off, anyway.

Linux doesn't work out of the box with Nvidia optimus, but at least the
W520 comes with integrated graphics so that you can install Linux cleanly
by turning off the Nvidia chip in the BIOS, and fiddle with Nvidia options later.

There were some QA problems with some early units causing "sudden shutdown syndrome,"
but I don't know if it was due to faulty parts or whatever. If you get one with
a later model CPU you may have a lower likelihood of running into this problem
because the machine would have a later motherboard with which Lenovo has presumably
fixed the issue. But, I don't know much about prevalence of the problem,
and if you look at the thread on the Lenovo forum about the issue, you'll see
that a lot of people had bad ram, so it might not actually be an issue at all.

So far, after running my machine pretty heavily over a month, I haven't seen the
problem.

The weight of the unit is a little less than your R500 (15.4"?) but the power supply
of course weighs more, so the overall weight is about the same or perhaps just
a little more. If you have a backpack with good padding it's probably a non-issue,
but don't expect to put it in a little backpack meant to carry a macbook air
and feel comfortable. But, you already knew this because you schlepp your R500
around, right?

[MisterB]

I have Ubuntu 14.04 with Bumblebee installed on my W520. It multiboots with Windows 7, 10 and Qubes. There is no need to disable the Nvidia GPU in the BIOS to install Linux. It requires proprietary drivers that aren't installed by default and the default open source drivers will use the Intel Graphics. Bumblebee was more than a bit tricky to install but well worth the effort. I actually like the way it works much better than the Windows Optimus drivers. With Bumblebee, the control over which apps use the Nvidia GPU is much clearer and easier to configure.

The power consumption of the W520 is pretty amazing. I get the best power saving and battery life with Windows 7 but Ubuntu isn't that bad. Windows 7 can go as low as 17 watts at idle and does around 25-35 watts on a light load. Ubuntu does a steady 35 watts on a light load.

I don't use any of the larger Thinkpads for portable use and the W520 stays at home. I have lighter and slimmer Thinkpads to carry with me.

[Omineca]

Thanks for all the info bit_twiddler and MisterB. I have done a little looking into bumblebee, and it's in the repos for Debian Jessie. MisterB, since you have both Windows and Linux installed, do you notice any degradation of quality in Linux? I've had the odd laptop over the years that renders video less well on Linux. Thanks for the feedback on power consumption too. It's been my experience that Linux is never quite as good at achieving low power consumption, and I kind of expected what you've reported.

I won't be backpacking the W520 bit_twiddler! It will stay in my living room for the most part. I have a T430 at work, and I take my X120e when I travel, both for the lightweight package and the HDMI port. It's got a very slow AMD processor, but the graphics capability is fine, the keyboard is good, and it handles MS Office well enough. If I can write and watch Netflix, my life is complete

I also won't be using it for any meaningful graphics work. All I want is wider viewing angles than the R500, which has the worst screen I've used on any device since my Jornada 680, and that's going back a while! I read a little about the LCD on this model, and a guy on the Lenovo forums posted a color profile for one of the LCD versions that might be of interest to you: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-P ... d-p/739831 Several people on that forum were really pleased with the results.

[bit_twiddler]

I get about 15W at idle on Linux (LM 17.3 Mate) with only the integrated graphics
enabled - which may mean that you have to actually unload the nouveau driver
to actually turn the Nvidia chip off.

I'd be interested if you and MisterB could point me to a link on how to get bumblebee to do the right thing,
along with some notes on what else you had to do to get it to work. Although, if you're just going to be
using it in your living room, you might as well just use the Nvidia GPU for everything. So what if it uses
a lot of power? Your neighbor's lights may dim, but you could just explain that the local
prison was testing its electric chair or something.

Oh, and about directionality, it's pretty good for a TN screen.

[MisterB]

It is a good idea to run at the lowest power level possible whether on batteries or not. It keeps the heat down inside the chassis and that makes for a longer life for the machine. Besides, the lack of fan noise is nice.

I haven't had any graphics degradation at all compared to Windows in either Ubuntu or Qubes. I have had some glitches in the GUI on updating Ubuntu with the Xorg driver and have had to restore the system from the image and do the update again after updating the repositories. Since the Bumblebee install, I've had no display issues at all and the display quality is just gorgeous.

The best reference I found on installing Bumblebee is this:

http://rajat-osgyan.blogspot.in/2015/10 ... atest.html

I basically followed these procedures with some adaptations. The main points I can emphasize are to completely purge any Nvidia drivers you might have previously installed and then do a thorough update of your system before the Bumblebee install, make sure you have the ppa:graphics-drivers repository set up correctly and to do the blacklist of Nvidia driver. If this last step is not done correctly, you will reboot into a black screen.

After Bumblebee is working, the Bumblebee GUI can be installed with the following I took from the ask ubuntu Bumblebee instructions.

Code: Select all

Now you have to install Bumblebee GUI to manage apps to be opened using nVidia. Here is the instructions:

Install Python App Indicator: 
sudo apt-get install python-appindicator

Install Git: 
sudo apt-get install git

Make a directory for git:
mkdir git && cd git

Check out the repository:
git clone https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/bumblebee-ui.git
cd bumblebee-ui
sudo ./INSTALL

Go to Startup Applications and add bumblebee-indicator

Now reboot.

A lot of the instructions in that page didn't work for me and it took me three tries before I was successful. There was one set of instructions in the comments that was basically the same procedure I used but the graphics-drivers repository link didn't work. When I did the install, the latest version of the Nvidia driver was nvidia-363 and the correct repository will have that version and any newer versions.

[bit_twiddler]

MisterB, have you had any problems restoring from hibernation with the Nvidia driver on your W520?
I have installed the 331 driver, and it seems to be having problems with that.

[MisterB]

MisterB, have you had any problems restoring from hibernation with the Nvidia driver on your W520?
I have installed the 331 driver, and it seems to be having problems with that.

None that I recall but I haven't used hibernation much in Ubuntu and I might not have had the Nvidia driver installed the last time I hibernated the system. I will test it tomorrow.

[hatman]

I purchased a W520 last May, replacing my W510.

It has the 2.4GHz 2760QM, which is plenty adequate for me.

What makes this machine sing for my relatively modest writing needs is the 16GB of RAM and the 500 SSD HD.

Cool, quiet -- and my favorite keyboard.

I look at Macs every time I needed a laptop. Beautiful but I hate the keyboards.

If anything should happen to my W520, I'd try to replace it with the same configuration.

I hope this helps.

[Omineca]

Thanks for the info hatman. Cool and quiet would be nice.

I don't particularly want a Mac, but every once in a while my eye wanders to the new Dell XPS series, which is definitely in "Mac knockoff" territory. But I wonder about the keyboards on anything that thin. It has to be hard to get proper key travel. I don't think I'd be happy with a poor keyboard AND a new keyboard layout. So I started looking for the biggest, baddest classic ThinkPad I could find.

[MisterB]

Hibernation is working find. When I set up the system, I had to manually enable hibernation and to get it to work I had to change the default kernel hibernation mode to uswsusp s2disk.

[bit_twiddler]

Thanks for checking, MisterB. I'm going to look into using uswsusp, perhaps
it does some additional stuff for video cards that the default kernel method does not.

[ianb527]

I just did to replace a T61p that finally died.
Why? Part of it for me is having fairly easy upgradability - hatches for dram, hard drive, ultrabay, mSATA, etc... I also got a pretty good price on ebay.
The first thing I did, was open it up and clean out the thermal compound on the GPU and CPU and put down IC Diamond (which I've had pretty good luck with). The temperatures went down significantly.
Pros: display is really good.
old style keyboard
easy to upgrade

Cons: a bit power hungry (ok if you use it mainly as a desktop replacement as I do on line power).

One other thing: I put the SSD that I had been using in the T61p in it, powered it up, and it just worked. I haven't found anything yet that is broken.

[MikalE]

Darn right I would. If I could find one I could afford. Seems I'm stuck in 'T' land though. I find some pretty darn good T systems too. i7 cores, decent memory and decent displays.

I'm a processor/cache, memory guy. Displays aren't all that important if I can get a T with a decent processor and enough RAM.

I would certainly take a W over T with money no object.

[jcvjcvjcvjcv]

The W520 is bugged with total number of external displays limited to two. The T520 apparently can drive three external screens.