Apparently, I'm a ninja.

[wolfwings]

Remember how I've raved about my Thinkpad T61p?

Apparently Lenovo's been having such a hard time sourcing the video card modules used in it due to the NVidia headaches with their 8-series chips that they've discontinued it entirely. And none of the replacements are anywhere near the performance for the price/battery life yet. =O.o=

Upside though, their new replacement models are all running Intel integrated and ATI dedicated video chipsets again, so apparently I got a quirky, one-off monstrosity of a workstation/gaming laptop with my T61p.

Comments

[ruggels.livejournal.com]

What did that cost yyou? I will need to get a laptop on a month or so. I need a decent machine that can hanlde ophotoshop and SL.

Scott

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Cost about $2600, including the 4-year, next-business-day on-site service warranty. 4GB of RAM, 80GB hard drive I replaced with a 250GB Seagate Momentus 5400.11 drive for $100, Bluetooth 2.1, Intel 802.11 a/b/g/pre-n, etc, etc, and an NVidia Quadro (yes, Quadro) FX 570M card w/ 256MB of RAM on-board, and the largest battery they offer, a 9-cell, and the Core 2 Duo T9500 CPU option.

They offer the same machine sans Quadro still, the normal T61 series. But yeah, this Quadro is very much a beast of a graphics card.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

That's one thing I loathe about Lenovo laptops: the ATI cards.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Yeah... ATI opened their drivers at least though, but having a Quadro really is a noticable step up compared to dealing with ATI's stuff in the past in overall horsepower.

[pathia.livejournal.com]

I fucking hate t61p's, they're the source of half the work I have at work lately. The chips fail in bizzare ways and you can't tell if its drivers, or heat, or what, AUGH

Yeah... I'm dreading when/if my laptop starts flaking out.

[(Anonymous)]

So far it's been ten times as stable and durable as my HP/Compaq v2000z LiveStrong edition though, I've yet to have it overheat yet unless I do something stupid like leave it directly on a couch in a heavy 3D game with the lid closed. I use it on my lap all the time, no tray or anything, even running 3D stuff that pegs the video-card and CPU well like BioShock or the like. At least, since I ditched the built-in throttling profile and switched to RMClock, the built-in profile doesn't use half the steppings actually available on the CPU and blows goat chunks. Barely got 3 hours battery out of it before, now I'll routinely get 4 hours.

Though since I'm running 4GB of RAM (soon to upgrade to 8GB now that the price of RAM is dropping noticably) I'm 'stuck' running 64-bit operating systems, so I had to source third-party monitoring apps for the system for things like heat and what-not. Doubly-quirky since I'm not running Vista for the Windows side of my dual-boot. Upside: I have good logs of the system's temperature on a 1-week log rotation under Windows and Linux both, and since I ditched the Lenovo drivers for NVidia native ones, once again I have better support for things now I'm finding. Only feature I've yet to ressurect is live brightness-adjustments under Windows.

Though if I ever have to have someone from Lenovo come out to take a look, since I swapped hard-drives to a better model I can just stick the original one back in with the restore-partition, so they'll have all their apps they want there when they come to look at things.

Re: Yeah... I'm dreading when/if my laptop starts flaking out.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

That was me, logged out. :-P