Battery Life and Pricing
Given the lack of performance tuning we saw with our CPU benchmarks, we didn't have high expectations for the battery life of the X210
Equipped with the largest available battery, (85Wh) the X210 was still unable to crack the 6-hour battery life mark. This has to be the worst battery efficiency of any non-gaming notebook we've taken a look at. It's possible that this could improve with undervolting, and some other adjustments, but it seems unlikely to make a dramatic improvement.
Pricing
At just under $1000 for the barebones notebook, the X210 is in a tough place. One one hand, $1000 for an obscure, bespoke computer like this is a fair price. On the other hand, you could buy a lot of notebook for $1000. The XPS 13 9370 is better in almost every way, and in a similar price range.
The 51nb X210 next to Ryan's original Lenovo X201 from 2010.
My time with the X210 has been interesting. After first hearing about these strange, modified notebooks, I knew I had to check them out. Frankly, it's incredible that there is a community out there able to accomplish this sort of work in "restoring" and upgrading older PCs.
For diehard ThinkPad fans, I think it's a fun project. If you are the type of person who would like to have a notebook for convenience around the house but aren't too concerned about taking it to others places, the battery life could be overlooked.
However, for me, as someone who is looking for the best balance between performance, battery life, and size, the X210 doesn't quite hit the marks. While I'm not going to keep my X210, I enjoyed every minute I've had with this strange, strange PC.
that’s pretty cool! its
that’s pretty cool! its missing RGB lighting though…and wheres the fire wire?
Might just be my opinion here
Might just be my opinion here but I doubt most people doing this mod are interested in RGB lighting.
That’s pretty cool. I’ve been
That’s pretty cool. I’ve been carrying around my t510 (not quite as old, but still has most of the good stuff) and am really feeling the first gen core i5 at this point… It would be amazing to get a motherboard to upgrade the USB to USB3 and a modern cpu and ram (maybe even replace the charger with a USB type C port…. I tried something like similar by putting a raspberry pi in an old thinkpad chassis once, but I never managed to get the screen working so it was mostly just for fun.
Is it likely that heat and
Is it likely that heat and thermal issues are due to the Engineering Sample or is it more likely that a stock chip would still behave the same? The stock X201s could be configured with a 25W i7-640LM. I’d be guessing that the cooling solution in this custom laptop could properly dissipate heat generated by the i5-8250U because of it’s thicker design and more robust cooling.
I don’t think that’s the
I don't think that's the case, it would be problematic for the design process if the engineering sample chips handled very differently thermally than the retail parts.
However, I do echo your confusion about the seeming lack of cooling ability from the stock heatsink configuration.
I have an Acer laptop with an
I have an Acer laptop with an i5-8250U, which has a 1.8 base and 3.4 turbo speeds, and what I see with handbrake encoding is the exact same curve as the first one, only 100MHz lower.
That–and the TIM change–suggests to me it’s not the Lenovo that’s holding the CPU back here. (I see mention that undervolting produced a good-sized speed boost but I can’t see that chart, just a temperature chart–is the speed one missing?) In any event it makes me want to try out the XTU on my own machine.
Does the ES processor support
Does the ES processor support the meltdown/spectre patches?
That was brilliant.
That was brilliant. Pointless, but fascinating.
Thanks for the review Ken! I
Thanks for the review Ken! I was really waiting for this article ever since you mentioned something in a podcast. It’s a very interesting project. I still use almost daily my X200 configured with a 25W C2D P8600, 4GB DDR2 and an OCZ Agility3 that works like a train despite all the internet is saying. Thermally, the stock cooling solution is borderline for the 25W CPU; I have to re-paste the CPU HSF every few years as any degradation in the contact patch pushes temps high above 80C – yes I had it long enough to do it more than once.
Otherwise from a 90Wh battery it gets 5+ hours, same ballpark as you; it could the components (sans CPU) are not really low power: RAM, SSD (and its lack of LP state) and display.
My base X200 could be more usable if it had more RAM, which your mod achieves (and more). I’ll use your article as a reference point. I’m more inclined to go the “buy motherboard and mod your own laptop” route.
Cool story
I guess everything comes down
I guess everything comes down to it being an engineering sample? Mine reaches 3.39Ghz and it peaks around 80c. Really loving it.
Interesting to hear! Do you
Interesting to hear! Do you know if yours was in the first or the second batch? Maybe there's some deviation on the firmwares. Did you mod it yourself or order the machine from lcdfans?
I bought the second batch.
I bought the second batch. Yup, only the board and put everything else together. One thing that they mentioned is the stock cooler will require a piece of thin metal to make better contact with the processor.
Great story. It’s tragic that
Great story. It’s tragic that we cannot do this in the US. We have 330 million people, but the tinkering instinct seems to have fled. Even RadioShack is gone.
HAHA! I can update my T61p,
HAHA! I can update my T61p, the best notebook ever built.
Can confirm. They should have
Can confirm. They should have just kept producing updates to T61 series. No significant improvements have been made outside of performance/efficiency/weight advances. The T61 had the best usability and ergonomics of all.
Great article! (reading from
Great article! (reading from an X210 :P)
Can I ask where did you find the power manager program that makes a little green battery icon on the lower right corner on the screen?
I think battery life is less
I think battery life is less significant an issue given that the 9-cell can be swapped out, and that the NVME power-saving management (ASPM) has not yet been enabled in the BIOS. Apparently, this will come in a future firmware release.