My cursed Lenovo T480, is it the MB you think?

Hello, when I started a new job, my work bought me a brand new Lenovo T480 i7 with Nvidia dGPU.

Since then...
The OEM RAM died, The OEM SSD died, The upgraded 2242 size M2 Toshiba 240GB died, Seagate 2.5" 2TB Firecuda died which was replaced by Seagate 2.5" 2TB Barracuda replaced by WD Blue 2.5" 2TB died, screen randomly got a vertical line across the screen.

Each of the non OEM parts were replaced under RMA and while the laptop was under warranty, Lenovo replaced the screen, and the RAM for free but it is now out of warranty and the WD Blue 2.5" 2TB HDD just died. My work is now buying me a WD Red 2.5" 2TB SSD to replace it.

I am not abusing the computer... It has good thermal paste, regularly cleaned inside and out, always sits on a cooling pad. I run 4 OSes (3 Linux and W10) off of a WD blue 500GB PNY M2 2242 and it and uses an NTFS partition in the HDD to share data between OSes and W10 has a dedicated NTFS partition on the HDD and Linux share a parge ext4 partition. This laptop is primarily used for drafting C++ and CUDA codes to work with my full tower desktop and a server cluster but it does get regularly run some things over night at 100% CPU and GPU usage.

Now... I think this T480 is cursed! None of my other computers, not the work desktop, not my T430, W530 or AW15 had so many darn parts failed and replaced and they handled more intense jobs for longer times. The question now is... Is it the MB? Should I just salvage whatever good parts there are left and just migrate over to another computer or pretend that it's just bad luck? Of course the diagnostics software says everything other than failed components are perfect.

For the time being I switched to my W530 as the workhorse because even with the WD Red 2.5" 2TB SSD, I don't want to take a computer that may die while I am traveling for work.

 

Yeah, with all of those replacements and no MOBO swap it would lead me to believe it's a lemon. RAM / Drives / Screen.... Even just the multiple drives indicates an issue in that area of the MOBO or daughter board depending on how they laid things out. M2 / NVME should be direct to the board / CPU. SATA though could possibly be a PCH > CPU. HDD though is definitely PCH based though.

Is it worth throwing money at post warranty? Probably not. Could it be rebuilt? Probably.

 

Since my work ordered a 2TB WD Red, I will try that as a last resort because it's more premium than other drives that has gone in it. If it still has issues, I'll return the laptop to work and ask them to recycle the junk and keep the RAM and SSDs for the next laptop.

At this point, I don't even know what to buy. I had faith in Lenovo T series and T480 completely ruined my opinion about them. I don't even know what's a reliable brand anymore. I might do a super downgrade to Toughbook CF-31 and just settle for super reliable at the cost of portability and performance.

 

No need to be extreme in the pendulum swing on picking something different. You could probably do a direct swap and be fine. There may be some bad solder on the board causing it to fail frequently, it could be a bad chip from the run at that time when they made it, it could be a lot of things really that have since resolved on the MFG line.

 

and... the wlan card just went bust (on both Linux and W10, continuously works/not work) Today as I was backing up the dying HDD to a work server... I am going to try the Lenovo diagnostic from UEFI one last time, try the new WD Red then retire this laptop and let my work have it back. I am beyond frustrated with T480. It's literally crippling my work. It's going to take me another 30 hours before my backup W530 to be up and ready.

 

Personally.... I wouldn't put any more time into diagnosing the issue unless you're going to grab a new MOBO for it to see if it is the root cause. Considering the expense of the MOBO/CPU/GPU it's likely not worthwhile to investigate further. Can always take out the drive you're backing up and throw it into a dock/enclosure and speed things along considerably. Even moving it to another system internally would be even faster. With all of the replacement parts / drives and so on it should be decommissioned with a sledge hammer or thrown off a cliff.

 

I am going to give it one more try.... I will have a lot to explain to work if I decomission it with a sledge hammer.

 

Okay... I've had enough. Now the diagnostic tools are telling me that the RAM is bad. Time to decomission this hell of expensive disappointment. I'm done buying Lenovo... I'm going back to W530 until

 

Lenovo (IBM) has its pros/cons like any other company and sometimes it's just a lemon. I've been in the "IT" business a couple of decades and Blue was the way to go. times change and companies combine into bigger ones. I had a Legion and it worked just fine and I've had other laptops that didn't. I was into Dell for 3-4 of them over the years and they were all fine. I've built a couple of Desktop's from scratch and if I could build a laptop I would rather do that than buy something off the shelf but, we're just not there yet.

With all of the issues you mentioned.... time to put it to sleep and go adopt a new one.

 

I am afraid of adopting a new one... I am downgrading to W530 for now and maybe someday I will find a modern 14" laptop but right now I need reliability and raw power more than battery life, lower power consumption and portability. T480 lacked the heat removal, reliability and raw power.

It's a shame, I even just freshly applied kryonaut when I was putting on the WD Red.

Ironically while testing T480 over the weekend, I was re-fitting my W530 from Legacy to UEFI. Maybe I should give it 32GB RAM too, it currently has 28GB mix matched.

 

Porting RAM shouldn't be an issue unless one's DDR4 and the other is DDR3 then it becomes an issue. I've been contemplating upgrading my "server" to 11th gen CPU / MOBO but, can't seem to bite the bullet on ~$750 for the pair. There's nothing wrong with the existing 8700K / MOBO it's just a bit of envy. I'm not jumping into the same with the laptop as 9750H is working just fine as well.

It might be time to stray into the Clevo realm though for you. Try something totally different that just works. There's very few things I don't like about this thing and most of it's OS related being that Windows does weird things when they release bad patches and drivers. I had a "power' issue where it would spontaneously reboot w/o any BSOD or the traditional markers. Turned out to be a driver issue from Intel causing the reboots. The only thing in the event viewer that showed up when it would reboot was a 'kernel power" message that coincided with a new power supply I had just started using around the same time. The only way to rule out the issue being the laptop / PS was running Linux for a few days and magically the power issue wasn't an issue.
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Maybe something you could try if these aren't confirmed deaths of the drives / ram / etc. IIRC I converted from a legacy >> UEFI and it was an easy change w/ a couple of reboots.

 

I tested the RAM and HDD on other machines. All fine. It's the T480. I'm returning it to my IT Today. I am cursing as I am moving things over to W530.

I am afraid of when I will have to upgrade this W530.

 

Good for the drives / RAM not being fired. Sounds like the MOBO has some bad solder points causing things to "fail" but not really. Tech gremlins are hard to pin down if you don't have the time or money to extinguish them.

 

Well, I kept the drives and I am selling off the RAMs, some of these parts I paid out of my own pocket you know...

I was sad to let it go but what choice is there? This laptop was like my marriage, it lasted 3 years out of stubbornness and blind optimism and I should have called it quits way earlier.

 

Accessories are nice to have when the main unit works well. 3 years is a good run but, sometimes it's best to cut ties and run.

I see a couple of carabiners in the pic... could always tie up the laptop like a pinata and have some smacks at it with a bat!

Tech + Loyalty = painful when you realize there's always something better coming along in due time

I say this as I was looking at Rocket Lake (11th) and discovered Alder Lake (12th) is right around the corner brining the enhancements I'm curious about vs not quite baked into the RL. I would have been seriously pissed blowing ~$800 on a CPU / MOBO to find in a couple of weeks AL being released with a totally different chip socket RL - LGA1200 / AL-LGA1700.

 

Is Intel still out of the game? I haven't used AMDs since 2010 and read some ugly things about Intel lately

 

They're both in the game. I use Intel and have used AMD back in the day.

Intel offers more tech than AMD at this point right now but, in 2022 AMD will be offering things like TB4/USB4 on their next redesign. For desktops Alder Lake released in a couple of weeks will blow away AMD's top offerings in benchmarks. AMD is having a bit of an issue with W11 until it gets patched. It's mostly just personal preference as to whcih one you go with.