Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 review: Business laptop is better with AMD Zen4

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T14s-G4-review-Business-laptop-is-better-with-AMD-Zen4.763581.0.html

by sydney6 • 3 years ago

81 96 3 years ago

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wbeckler• 3 years ago

I feel like the MacBook is the elephant in the room here

MrRolleyes• 3 years ago

MacBook doesn't have an LTE modem.

scarface_742• 3 years ago

I have mixed feelings about the need for a cellular modem. I can already easily tether to either my iPhone or iPad without paying for a separate line.

Also as an x86 based anything, the battery life is already going to be poor and the fan is going to make noise. Using the modem is going to make it worse.

And it’s only LTE in 2023?

But on the other hand, I do always buy the cellular version of iPads even though I could just as easily tether those to my phone.

throw0101c• 3 years ago

What does an in-built modem give over a separate hotspot or smartphone tethering (which most people always have with them)?

JonChesterfield4• 3 years ago

Happy to see the refresh. These APU systems are great.

The alarmingly priced usb-c dock works. Three monitors around laptop, no problem. The LTE modem works out of the box on windows and works with some arguing on Linux (I built a driver from GitHub, but that's probably improved since).

An not-obvious benefit of the Lenovo ones is they're on the approved list for AMD's employees, so broken stuff is pretty immediately apparent to lots of people with internal paths for reporting bugs to Lenovo.

calvinmorrison2• 3 years ago

I love my Lenovo dock. Still itches my design scratch and is super reliable. Least reliable part is just the USB c cables as usual

JonChesterfield4• 3 years ago

I don't think I'd have bought one out of my own money. It was something like $500, rather close to the cost of a standalone computer. But it's now cable tied to the back of a monitor and the single usb cable to the laptop for power and everything else is aesthetically glorious.

john_miller• 3 years ago

What's the battery life like on linux?

0xbadcafebee2• 3 years ago

That's gonna depend on the distro and kernel, as different ones have different drivers, different power saving things, different apps. In general all modern distros should have decent support for power saving out of the box, but things like wifi cards typically have crap/buggy drivers when it comes to power saving (but again it depends on the hardware and driver)

That said, the spec sheet MobileMark benchmark says battery life is as good as 14.3 hrs in max battery setting on WUXGA Low Power (non-touch), Win 11, 52.5Wh battery, versus a performance mode getting 5.0 hrs on 2.8K OLED (non-touch), Win 11, 39.3 Wh battery. With 'local video playback' lasting longer. So I guess it's very hardware and use-case specific. (https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T...)

bee_rider5• 3 years ago

We’ve got another visitor running Linux on it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38098486

JonChesterfield4• 3 years ago

Eight or ten hours? I don't take a power cable with me for the day. Would probably be better if I worked out how to set any of the power saving things, this is Debian out of the box. That's mostly showing emacs, I expect it would be worse with a browser.

oaiey• 3 years ago

Framework should be a listed contender here. Same CPU but better maintainability.

bkovacev2• 3 years ago

I have two framework laptops with Intel CPU. I unfortunately would not recommend framework with Intel - they can't handle any development workload through docker without the risk of launching to the moon from the fans spinning. I hope that AMD ones are better.

ggpsv2• 3 years ago

As a counterpoint, I've had a 12-gen Framework (i7, 32GB RAM) for almost a year and half now. I use Docker on a daily basis (using Windows and WSL2) and it works fine for my development workloads.

Like other Intel laptops I've had, the fans do come on occasionally but not very often. I do have some qualms about this laptop but I'm happy with it and the tradeoffs I chose.

_a_a_a_4• 3 years ago

but the device failed to win us over in terms of multi-core performance

If a dev machine I'd get it, but biz users are email and a few small spreadsheets. I don't get why biz users need multicore anything.

JonChesterfield4• 3 years ago

Honestly the 8core ~15W things are alright for dev work. It seems to be game for giving all the power budget to one core. Runs a badly configured Emacs with misc c++ parsing nonsense without trouble, and I build llvm on one every few months without too much irritation.

_a_a_a_4• 3 years ago

I said biz not dev

caskstrength• 3 years ago

I don't get why biz users need multicore anything.

To run crapware/spyware installed by their corporate IT, of course! And I'm only half kidding since I distinctly remember how I couldn't even listen to Youtube Music without stuttering on my corporate Lenovo laptop on my previous job.

scarface_742• 3 years ago

In that case, why would biz users ever want this over a quieter, cooler, MacBook with better battery life since Office is available for Mac?

mschaef• 3 years ago

biz users are email and a few small spreadsheets. I don't get why biz users need multicore anything.

That's a fairly narrow view of what a business user might do. The spreadsheets aren't necessarily small, there's usually a messaging tool or two open, and several web browsers open to line of business apps, etc. (This is before even considering OS overhead and the like.)

terminous2• 3 years ago

biz users are email and a few small spreadsheets. I don't get why biz users need multicore anything.

Have you opened a Chrome or Electron app recently? And many biz users need to run those apps while on Zoom with a virtual background for the camera.

Based on your logic, all most biz users really need for email and spreadsheets can be done using Lotus Notes / 1-2-3 on a single-core IBM 5150 with 5 MHZ and 256KB of memory.

_a_a_a_4• 3 years ago

I'm not sure if this is a stupid attempt at a rebuttal, or if you've accidentally made a rather good point as well.

BTW My home machine is a decade-old dual core and it runs email, web and all of Libreofffice just fine, and with 90% of its mem unused.

supertrope• 3 years ago

Webapps like Salesforce, Gmail, Slack, Google Docs drink resources. They occasionally get stuck pegging an entire core indefinitely. Also Microsoft Teams.

When line of business apps like email use 1GB of memory each you need a faster machine than if you use mutt.

tivert4• 3 years ago

Glad to see it has a 16:10 screen. 16:9 is a curse.

dmbche2• 3 years ago

How come? Most video being 16:9 means you useball of the screen you have, 16:10 adds bars on one side doesn't it?

tivert4• 3 years ago

How come? Most video being 16:9 means you useball of the screen you have, 16:10 adds bars on one side doesn't it?

Do you use your laptop to work, or just watch video all the time?

Because if you actually do work, 16:10 or 3:2 is much better.

karmakaze• 3 years ago

Agreed. Even with my 24" a 16:10 is better. At 27"+ doesn't matter as much. Sadly to get high refresh rates I got a 34" 3440x1440 one for gaming and media viewing.

I was almost fooled by their 'Full HD' description, but glad to see 1920x1200 in the specs that followed.

soziawa• 3 years ago

Can you put linux on one of these without any issues?

tlhunter• 3 years ago

My AMD gen2 works like a dream

jefc1111• 3 years ago

I run Manjaro Linux with i3wm on a T14s gen3. I connect to two 2560x1440 external monitors via thunderbolt 3 dock.

I wish I could say it is 100% stable. It's close, and close enough for me to rely on it. Occasionally when I plug in to the dock the external monitors do not activate. Also if I plug in power while suspended, it powers on. I have face unlock working, which is nice. I have problems with connecting my Samsung bluetooth earbuds, but I haven't tried very hard to make that work well.

Idles at around 5 watts, which is nice. Real world use is around 6-8 hours battery, which is just about good enough for me. I had an X1 Extreme gen 3 before and it was the battery life that made me change. Before that a P51s which I do miss because of the clunky docking station and numeric keypad. It was too heavy though, and battery only just ok, even with two batteries including extended at the rear.

pizza234• 3 years ago

Shortly. T14s Gen 4 AMD are certified (you can check on the Canonical website), but (from official sourcec) Lenovo hasn't made available (due to internal testing) the Linux image yet.

How the image relates to upstream... I have no idea.

Aardwolf• 3 years ago

Does anyone know if it's possible to buy thinkpads with a US keyboard layout in Europe? Any thinkpad with a layout that's not the non-qwerty local variant of my country takes more than 6 weeks to deliver, and that is to get UK layout, not the US layout with different enter key, which I can't even find available at all

mikeweiss• 3 years ago

eBay

fweimer• 3 years ago

Isn't the English (EU) layout close enough? I think it's basically the US layout with a Euro sign somewhere, but the physical key layout should be the same as a regular US keyboard.

j7ake• 3 years ago

Definitely not close enough for a programmer who uses symbols and touch typing.

For starters the return key are different widths, which is a deal breaker if you’re a touchtyper used to wider return keys.

Programming also uses tilde and other symbols that are different between the two.

Overall they’re similar for typing alphabets, but symbols and enter key are different.

seego• 3 years ago

Yes - you want their "EU" layout. It's "US" with a € sign.

guappa3• 3 years ago

US keyboards have 1 key less, a bigger left shift key and a 1 row enter key. It's not simply a matter of putting the right stickers on them.

tallanvor2• 3 years ago

Yes, I've been able to get them. You should be able to find an International English or US English Euro layout. --This is the standard keyboard used in The Netherlands, by the way.

FirmwareBurner• 3 years ago

Does anyone know if it's possible to buy thinkpads with a US keyboard layout in Europe?

Order them from the Netherlands, Romania or other EU countries that use the US-INT layout.

edwcross2• 3 years ago

I'd much prefer if companies used the actual technical names for such layouts, i.e. ISO and ANSI. It's always hard to check the layout details to find out if what they call "English" means ANSI (US) or ISO (European).

m1ckey• 3 years ago

I would love to have a SD/microSD card reader option, then I would not need any dongle. Is anybody aware if you can repurpose the smart card reader slot on the T14 or T14s?

jpalomaki• 3 years ago

Nice that the sustained performance is much better than with the Intel model.

The i7-1355U version takes pretty big hit, starting from 1500 units going quickly down to 1000. Probably due to thermal throttling.

ndiddy2• 3 years ago

Frustrating that the laptop has 8 GB of RAM soldered, it means that no matter how much RAM you put in it, you'll only get 16 GB in dual channel.

0xbadcafebee2• 3 years ago

According to the spec sheet, they come in models up to 32GB soldered: https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T...

ndiddy2• 3 years ago

I'm sorry, I had the T14 up on Lenovo's site, not the T14s. It looks like the T14s has no RAM sockets, and they only sell it with 16 GB of soldered RAM (unless there's a way to special order it or something). https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...

pella2• 3 years ago

this is 32GB soldered : LPDDR5x-6400, Dual-Channel, onboard

aitchnyu2• 3 years ago

What are the workloads that become worse with unequal ram modules?

Const-me• 3 years ago

Examples include gaming using the integrated GPU and using software like whisper.cpp / llama.cpp.

They both handle gigabytes of data, and typically bottlenecked with memory throughput.

WarOnPrivacy• 3 years ago

Thinkpad shill here. Before buying Thinkpads, I recommend a quick search of threads about existing units (and immediate predecessors) for overheating issues. Lenovo prioritizes performance (good!) but in the past has overestimated the cooling/manufacture.

Lenovo learns tho; the trend is that issue-y lines are followed by stable lines. ex:Some early X1 gens had a small % with issues and later were fine. ex:We just redid the thermal compound on a 2yo P15 this week (thermal shutdowns). Ours seemed to be an outlier and was clean + lightly used.

Lenovo absolutely honors warranties tho and will even allow purchasing an extended after expiration (tho w/ a 30day 'cooling' period).

ww520• 3 years ago

The last AMD based Thinkpad T14 I got was horrible. It had great numbers on paper and benchmarks, but horrible performance in real usage. Switching between programs was very slow. Even switching between tabs in browser was slow. It tended to overheat which throttled down the cpu. It had really bad idle power management for background tasks. This had never happened before on any older T14’s with Intel cpu. I won’t get another laptop with AMD again.

Justin_K• 3 years ago

I had the same problems with Lenovo Intel chips. Constantly getting thermally throttled.

Switched to Dell and couldn't be happier.

guappa3• 3 years ago

I hate dells. Not being able to open the screen that much was a major annoyance.

I actually refused a new dell to remain with an older thinkpad just because how uncomfortable they are.

leononame• 3 years ago

I thought I was the only one. I was excited to get a Thinkpad because just about every nerd praises them all the time and I thought the AMD one would be a great experience, but it was terribly slow. Additionally, the trackpad, the screen and the camera broke independently of each other and needed to be replaced which makes me really doubt the build quality (though having a technician come to your home tk repair it is great).

All in all, it was a bad experience and didn't even last 2 years for me. I don't think I'll be buying another Thinkpad soon.

cptnapalm• 3 years ago

I have an AMD L14. The damn keyboard has a hardware fault. I have to close and open the lid so it suspends then wakes up to get it working again. Not a great experience, obviously.

The Thinkpad I had previously had some wonky wifi chipset. Got it working, but it was a pain.

I'm not buying anything else from Lenovo.

scrlk2• 3 years ago

ThinkPads are coasting off the reputation that was built up under IBM ownership. If you're not married to the trackpoint, then a Dell Latitude/Precision or HP EliteBook/ZBook is equally as good.

Lenovo went down the route of trying to chase the MacBook Pro crowd and ended up compromising on durability, repairability (soldered components) and keyboard quality (traditionally the USP of ThinkPads).

magnio• 3 years ago

TLDR (though do try to read the review: Notebookcheck is one of the most trustworthy and methodical tech review sites)

The main competitors here is the HP EliteBook 845 G10 and the MacBook Pro 14 M2 Pro.

- Design: classic ThinkPad look, a bit brutalist. Lighter than MacBook Pro 14 since it uses carbon fiber instead of metal.

- Networking, keyboard: great

- Display: 16:10 Full HD IPS, 400 nits with very good contrast ratio 1800:1, though the MacBook Pro and laptop with OLED screens will still have the edge here

- Performance: Ryzen 7 7840U is currently the flagship low-power laptop CPU from AMD. Comparable to the i7-1370P and the M2 Pro 12-core, especially in terms of multi-core and efficiency. It completely slaughters any U-variant from Intel. The iGPU Radeon 780M is currently the fastest iGPU in the x86 world, leading Intel's Iris Xe Graphics G7 by around 50% in most games and tests.

- Emission: fan noise and heat are no issue, around the same as MacBook Pro 14.

- Battery: same as MacBook Pro 14, i.e., really good.

In short, a true Windows alternative to the MacBook Pro. The main factor for this is the stellar Ryzen 7 7840U and its Radeon 780M. Ever since it appears in Windows handheld gaming consoles, it has shown to be a capable balance between performance and power consumption, asymptomatic to the M2 Pro. The only problem is AMD not making it available widely enough, with laptop options trickling down quite slowly compared to Intel. (There was rumor laptop makers have to restrict the use of the 7840U since its iGPU means a cut to their gaming segment.)

I used a ThinkPad X1 Carbon G9 before, and while it's great, the Intel CPU really handicapped it. Now I'm on a MacBook Air M1, but damn the Windows offerings are more and more attractive now (thanks to macOS ruining an otherwise good laptop).

gramakri22• 3 years ago

Seems like I lost access to my old account, so had to create a new one.

I just bought this a couple of days ago. I went with the ryzen, OLED version and 32GB RAM. I ordered without an OS and run Ubuntu on it. The decision was between T14 , the carbon x1 and the framework.

My previous laptop was a x1 gen 3. The laptop hinge broke :/ I absolute love this machine.

Impressions so far:

* Ubuntu 23.04 and Gnome runs so good that we even setup a donation on behalf of our company to the Gnome foundation. Ubuntu 22 will keep locking up.

* Everything works - camera, video recording, qualcomm wifi, all function keys etc. Even fingerprint login works!

* Gnome tweak tool is your friend. Especially to adjust those font sizes. I switched to noto from the default ubuntu.

* Keyboard is great but x1 carbon is still the best :-)

* Maybe my eyesight is failing me but I find no great difference between the FHD of x1 carbon gen 3 and OLED with 3 times more resolution.

* Batter is like 5 hours of so when I am working full time. I suspect OLED has something to do with this low battery life.

* Love that the camera has a physical switch

Some other tips:

* When you order be sure to not order the computer vision camera. This doesn't work on linux and there is a post on LKML saying it won't work for the next 2 years atleast.

* I am based in berlin, so ordered from Germany. You can order the "Beleuchtete Tastatur, schwarz – Englisch (EU)" keyboard for the US keyboard. Only practical change is euro sign instead of dollar in number 4 key.

* In the penultimate order screen, lenovo will sneak in a support option. But there's actually a basic support option which will save you some money. I think only difference is you might have to mail in your laptop for fixes, not sure.

AMA.

bee_rider5• 3 years ago

What kind of programs do you use? I can get ~20 hours on a zenbook flip with OLED, because I use mostly terminal programs (black background, so most of the pixels are off).

Have you tried running powertop for a bit? It would be interesting to see if the screen was consuming most of the power, or if the draw can be attributed to a particular device (maybe it is something useless like a Bluetooth radio that you can shut off!)

I wonder, if you can’t see the difference, maybe try halving the screen resolution? No reason to render all those extra pixels if you don’t need them, right? Plus, I guess it is rare in 2023, but any UI elements that are badly coded and not scalable would be sort of “normal sized.”

jauntywundrkind• 3 years ago

Also the power tuning in power top can be amazingly helpful sometimes. powertop --auto-tune is usually fine!

Thankfully modern kernels have turned a bunch of settings on by default. But for a while a bunch of pretty simple power saving measures like iirc the sata link wouldn't go into low power states by default.

gramakri22• 3 years ago

Mostly just web development stuff - firefox, terminal, vs code, thundebird, background music etc. I am hardly ever without power so I haven't really spent much time on this. But thanks for the suggestion, will look into powertop. I assume this means that you use linux on zenbook flip ? Which distro do you use?

As for resolution, I wanted to try to run it lower res but Ubuntu crashes in lower res :/ Will have more time on the weekend to investigate.

reacharavindh• 3 years ago

What is the hardware decoding/acceleration scene with Linux on modern laptops such as this?

1. Can you expect to watch Netflix, fandom video services like F1tv without tinkering with some tunables in the OS?

2. What is the sleep/wakeup situation like? Can it do MacBook style - shut your lid when you go away from desk for a coffee and come back and open the lid for instant ON(back to work)? Reliably?

3. Also, does x86 laptops have the sane sleep state back? Or does it still keep sipping power and heat up while stashed in the backpack?

_d3Xt3r_2• 3 years ago

Not OP, but I have an older generation Ryzen Thinkpad (Z13 with an AMD 6000 series APU). I also use Nobara Linux, which is based on Fedora, but has all the proprietary codecs etc out-of-the-box. I also use TLP (instead of my DE's power management tools), which is the de-facto recommended power management tool for Thinkpads (and other laptops too).

1. I no longer watch Netflix, but AFAIA, 1080p/4k is still a no go, as that requires proprietary DRM which isn't present in Linux/Linux browsers (Widevine L1 and PlayReady). But you can still watch Netflix in "SD", if you're okay with that. Not sure about fandom services, but if they don't use DRM it should be fine, for instance, YouTube 4K plays without any issues, and so do other sites like Piped/Invidious etc.

2. Sleep/wakeup works fine on AMD, MacBook style. I also use an M1 MBA, so when I say that the resume speeds are identical, I mean it. The default sleep mode btw is suspend-to-idle, which resumes instantly compared to the old method (S3/suspend-to-RAM).

3. By "sane" did you mean S3? If so, at least on AMD laptops and Linux, you can pass `mem_sleep_default=deep` to the kernel and it'll use S3 mode instead of s2idle. However, a couple of things: at least on my setup, s2idle drains very little battery and doesn't cause your backpack to heat up. But if you're still concerned about battery drain over longer periods of time, you could enable the suspend-then-hibernate option, which will cause your laptop to automatically hibernate after it's been in standby for a while (exact timeout period is configurable). So IMO, there's no need to use S3/deep standby.

wutwutwat• 3 years ago

Rocking a dual core thinkpad x270 running macOS ventura and it's not bad, though a bit slow. Thinkpad's have lasting value

chx• 3 years ago

Note my writeup re TB4 vs USB4 in ThinkPads (and in general PCs): there's no difference in practice. https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/16mpz2q/on_usb4_v...

aitchnyu2• 3 years ago

Tangential, what are the options for an AMD to drive a 5k screen? I chose an Intel laptop and then Mac with Thunderbolt. Seems AMD laptops with Thunderbolt are rare but exist, and upcoming USB standards could drive 5k.

dhruvdh• 3 years ago

These AMD chips support DP2.1, USB4 which should do 8K60Hz HDR. That is what you should look for instead of thunderbolt.

coin• 3 years ago

The trackpad looks off center

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G4 review: Business laptop is better with AMD Zen4

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