Holy CRAP this laptop's fast...

[wolfwings]

...at least, once I cleaned all the scummware off the thing. Geezus... 1920x1200 City of Heroes... ALL the graphics options pegged, all the way up, 60fps. The ONLY thing I could do was turn the particle-count all the way up to 50k+, then turn on a specific 'prestige sprint' effect that uses all unaccounted for particles to leave a massive, constant 'speed line' effect behind you in additive white. THAT managed to get my framerate down to 20, when I was zoomed way in so it was doing a couple dozen layers of blending over top of each other.

But geezus... this laptop is officially insane. I'm UBER happy with it. =^.^= Built like a brick, too, but hey, it's a ThinkPad. I do love that the screen folds flat open though, as odd as that may sound it's useful. And sturdy enough I feel comfortable handing it to someone just holding one edge or corner. =O.o=

Comments

[shabm.livejournal.com]

And where can this awesomeness be obtained?

Direct from Lenovo...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...for just under $2400 after tax, but including the 4-year, next-business-day 'they bring the part to you' on-site repair warranty w/ accidental-damage protection. =^.^=

[catwoman69y2k.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

Upgrade or new?

New!

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

After all the problems with my HP, I bought a Thinkpad. It was either this, or a Dell, and Lenovo had a better sale going on. :-)

Re: New!

[catwoman69y2k.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

I been shopping around for a new laptop myself. Mine is just slightly subpar to run Portal and some of the newer games. Pity since my laptop is only 1.5 years old at best.

Re: New!

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Quite random, but right-click on Portal or the other Steam games, and set the following 'launch option' for anything Half-Life-2 based from the Orange Box to get it to run a LOT faster on mildly underpowered hardware:

-dxlevel 80

Just says use DirectX 8.0 and below abilities, which most laptop cards can pull off handilly. You can try 81, and 90 in sequence, find your performance/pretty sweet-spot.

Re: New!

[catwoman69y2k.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

I had tried this very thing months ago but no dice. I would get 1 frame a minute at best.

Re: New!

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

*nods* Then yeah, way underpowered video card on your laptop. *hugs* Sorry, kat.

Re: New!

[catwoman69y2k.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

Yup. Not so sure what a new laptop that could run something like Portal would cost. I wish laptop vid cards could be traded out but I guess that is the price you pay for mobility.

[lionman.livejournal.com]

And there we go...another satisfied customer. ;-)

Glad you like it! I'm happy with mine.

Heh, yeah.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Gotta give credit where credit is due... wow, these things are built like a tank! And it supports the 'whack a mole' desktop changer thanks to it's shock-sensor. =^.^=

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I have the T60p Widescreen, and yeah, they are über wonderful fast machines. I remember it taking three days to install Gentoo on the T42; it took maybe two hours on the T60. And the widescreen is wide enough to hold two documents side-by-side, draw with my Wacom pad, and with USB2 it does the iPod right. Very sweet machine. I got the lower twin 1.63 CPUs, which cut the price a LOT, but it's got the full 3GB of ram, the 120GB drive which totally makes me squee, 82011b/g, bluetooth, and all the rest.

I'm a total Thinkpad bigot, though. Nothing else is good enough. Not even close.

I almost got a T42 before...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...but I took a gamble on HP's ad-copy for their LiveStrong series right after Lance won 'yet again' and they had a massive sale. I've regretted it every day after for the last 3 years.

Never again, ThinkPad's all the way for the indefinate future. Got the 15.4" widescreen here, it's a hair 'larger' but actually more comfortable in my lap than my old HP. And after trying it, yeah, this box makes viewing dual-page PDF's a joy compared to most machines I've tried it on.

And oddly enough the 2.5Ghz CPU option I took was about $250 below the top 2.6Ghz option, but it's one of the 6MB L2 Cache new T9x00 series chips, which I think was why they were having the ludicrous sale they were. Only features I 'splurged' on were the ram (full 4GB limit), opting for the 'Certified Wireless USB' in case that takes off later, and grabbing the Quadro FX570M option. That last bit caused me minor nightmares because it's such a new video card the 'nv' driver won't load on it but most of the LiveCD's I have tried anyway so I got to cold-boot it a few times until I figured that out.

Re: I almost got a T42 before...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I bought an HP once from Best Buy on the salesgeek's assurance that it would run Linux. I had to take it back (thank the gods they took it back) because it didn't run X! This was 1998 or so. That's when I bought my Thinkpad 600E and never looked back.

My only bitch about the T60 is the ATI driver is proprietary and poorly exposed to the hibernate functionality. Under some circumstances, it won't hibernate and has to be rebooted. It reboots so damn fast, though, that it's not much of a burden, especially not when KDE supports session restore.

Re: I almost got a T42 before...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

*nods* Yeah, mine's pure nVidia (though the 'nv' driver simply doesn't support my card, it's too new, so stuck in propietary-driver-land also) which I'm a little wary about since up until now I've never had experience to speak of with their cards under Linux. ATI? Check. Matrox? Double-check. S3? Oh yeah, check. Intel? Still a check.

And I got burned on Hibernate ages back, but mostly because I always WAY over-spec the ram on my boxes both so I can disable virtual memory and so (at least under Windows) it takes longer to hibernate than to cold-boot the machine. When I tried it a few years back it wasn't much better under Linux, or do they finally do one better and only save out 'used' ram instead of 'all' ram like Windows does?

Re: I almost got a T42 before...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It saves only the used ram, but when it's dealing with proprietary drivers it treats the memory allocated as "of a piece" and attempts to negotiate with the driver to just write that out atomically. It doesn't always work, especially if you've been doing heavy-duty 3D work recently or have a 3D app up and running when you try it.

On the other hand, when I'm just word processing it's typically got a footprint under 1GB and goes down and comes up pretty darn fast.

Re: I almost got a T42 before...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Ick... yeah, probably won't work on my T61p either since I'll be stuck running the propietary nVidia driver to get any 3D working. Sadly I've moved away from ATI just after they finally docuemented their 3D hardware enough the open-source driver is starting to make real progress.

Will definately take a look into it though, and give it another go when I get Gentoo running on the box some time later this week. I'll have to go dig into your older laptop-related posts as well, I'd imagine.