Hey guys, my old Thinkpad T420 is starting to bite the dust with chronic hardware issues with the motherboard / CPU and a failing battery. While I consider what to do with it, I've decided to look at something a bit more modern.
Budget: 2K AUD
So far I've narrowed it down to a Thinkpad T480 with an i5 8250, 8GB RAM and 1080p screen for 1,499 (on sale ATM), or a Dell XPS 13 9350 with a 7th gen i7, 8gb ram and 1440p for 2K.
This is where you guys come in, is the thinkpad a better buy than the XPS?
8GB isn't very much for that budget, I'd try to hunt down something with 16GB. Even medium Chrome usage can completely overwhelm 8GB.
As for which one, there are a lot of differences. The XPS has a much, MUCH nicer display, but it's much less serviceable. The ThinkPad has the best laptop keyboard and has extreme survivability and durability, and probably has better real-world battery life. It's a subjective choice, it depends on what's important to you.
It would really help if you could go into detail on what you will be using it for.
I think the T480 is a lot better suited for work and the XPS 13 for multimedia,
mostly because of the displays (size and resolution), chassis and input (tracknub lends itself better to one-handed use).
Keep in mind T480 memory is upgradable at a later date too.
Forgot to mention that, but I'll be mostly programming in visual studio, with the occasional light gaming during downtimes (nothing newer than '08, mainly emulated SNES / Mega Drive games that run fine on the T420).
Checking on dells website, there's almost a 1K jump to the model with 16GB, plus their configuration tool won't let me manually pick 16GB on any of the i5 models either.
Having to do development on an 8GB laptop in my first week of this job until the actual machines with 16 GB came in was terrible and I'd strongly suggest not doing that to yourself.
ThinkPads are famously good for productivity, I'd recommend that heavily.
8GB is OK if I only build old desktop windows apps, but yeah, I agree with it being pretty limiting on anything that uses the web, or if I fire up a VM to test builds in other OS's.
After reading some reviews, I'm leaning quite heavily towards the thinkpad at this point, since I can throw a bigger battery in the back and get a very good runtime out of it. The fact that it can be upgraded is really nice, compared to the dell's soldered and sealed approach. I'm willing to put up with the newer style keyboards on them as well, since I already happen to have a smaller thinkpad with one (a mini 10)
If I do end up going for the thinkpad, is there any significant difference at all between the i5 8250 and the 8350 apart from a slight boost in the CPU clockspeed? I don't think it's really worth the extra 100 bucks just for a slightly faster clock.
http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-8350U-vs-Intel-Core-i5-8250U/m388461vsm338266
Seems like about 11% difference, doesn't seem worth it to me.
Just checked out the difference between the 8250 and the i7 8550 (the top configuration) and it reckons there's only 3% difference, hardly worth extra at all. Only annoyance is that the i5 doesn't have the option for the MX 150 GPU, which might help a bit on more demanding games and game dev, if I ever do anything like that.
Literally don't bother, it's the mobile version of the GT 1030, a notoriously awful desktop card. You'll probably get just-as-good performance out of your integrated Intel graphics, and with much lower power consumption.
It can run minesweeper at 144 FPS just fine.
I have an XPS, absolutely love it. Might I suggest the XPS 15 though, bigger screen.
Amazingly well built, the screen is as sturdy as hell. (sturdiest one in any PC shop I've been to)
Benchmarks of a few modern games beg to disagree, it takes some games from ~30fps to 60.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRrheooAFUQ
Not a great benchmark since they're not the same computer, but still shows that there's quite a noticeable bump in performance. The NVS4200M in the T420 is far superior to the shithouse integrated on sandy bridge, and without it, I probably wouldn't be running recent indies on it.
I moved from Thinkpad SL510 that I was using for 6-7 years to XPS 9560 last year and I can say the display is , the computer is zippy but when it comes to keyboard and trackpad and ports etc... it is crap. That being said I am not sure if I would care about the modern Thinkpad keyboards either as my SL510 was proper scissor keys and not these crap low profile island or chiclet or whatever the hell they are called.
I have not gotten used to the keyboard at all (nowhere near my typing speed on the SL510. The trackpad is absolute crap compared to the customisable beauty that was SL510. Not having dedicated left/right mouse buttons annoys the shit out of me. But the computer is lightning fast and the display is absolutely incredible (that being said I had to get the screen replaced twice under warranty for weird light banding/bleeding issues, which have resolved now).
On the issue of serviceability, of course at least my thinkpad was much easier as the inside was quite roomy and I opened it up to service it quite a few times and replaced pretty much every part inside. On the other hand I have had to open up my 9560 a fair few times over the last year as well and it is not as horrible as you might think. Almost everything is removable, easily accessible with a regular screwdriver set with some torx heads to get through the outer case (everything inside is regular Phillips head screws) , you can replace the RAM, the M2SSD and even add another M2 if you replace the battery with a smaller one. In fact just yesterday I had to pretty much remove all the fans, the battery and quite a large part of the mainboard as I very stupidly spilled coffee and wanted to dry it out from inside out.
I am not going to lie I miss my thinkpad a lot, but I do not miss lugging around 1-2kg, the terrible battery life and inferior screen. If I could have the thinkpad keyboard and trackpad on my Dell I would pay anything.
Yeah, the XPS 15 does look nice and all, but down here in Aussie land, they start at 1900 AUD and are still 7th gen kaby lake CPUs. Definitely not a fan of the touchpad either, since I tried one that one of my mates has.
Right, so asking one of my mates that happened to have a similar configuration in another laptop, he reckons the MX150 isn't worth the extra cost of going up to an i7 considering how little benefit it makes overall. Since the T480 has a thunderbolt port on the side, we reckon it might be able to run an eGPU, which would render the MX150 pretty much useless.
With that out of the way, here's what I'm probably gonna be looking at grabbing hardware wise from the T480:
i5 8250
16GB RAM
1080p screen
256GB M.2 NVme SSD
6 cell extended rear battery (3 cell internal)
The 6 cell would probably add some extra heft to it, but I'm willing to put up with the extra weight for excellent battery life.
Ended up going with the above config, but thanks to Lenovo support I got the 4G module as well for free 👌
Congrats dude, that config should serve you really well.
I use a T480 for work everyday. I love them and would pick it over a Dell any day. The 8th gen CPU's are such a massive improvement over the T470.
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