Lenovo ThinkPad T14 & T14s Owners Thread

It will definitely be faster in the T14 as the T14 allows 22w to the cpu whereas the T14s is 19w. I expect the ryzen 7 will be about 20% faster than the 5 in the t14 but from other users I have spoken to it runs hot whereas my ryzen 5 runs really cool

 

So it really seems better to me Ryzen 5. I don't always want to be afraid of overheating ... To be afraid to do anything on the laptop at all. It is a real pity...
Could I ask what SSD NWME Lenovo uses in this T14 laptop with AMD? The point is that I have the opportunity to get this laptop for a student price, but only with a 512 GB SSD. I wonder if it's good. I would like to upgrade the SSD to 1 TB, but I do not know which SSD to choose to match the speed of the supplied SSDs from Lenovo and at the same time not to be so expensive. Lenovo offers many types of SSDs (I'm looking at the e-shop: "lapstars.de") and I don't know what to choose. Is it worth buying your own SSD and which ones?

 

@Mithrand buying your own SSD (and RAM when it is upgradeable) always makes much more sense financially. Sadly I can't provide an NVME drive recommendation.

 

You can't say outright the R7 runs hot. There are plenty of reviews out there, for example the one on notebookcheck.com where the R7 even runs perfectly fine in the T14s. Of COURSE such powerful CPUs cannot run full power on all cores for long, only for seconds, before throttling down. But this is the case with all high powered ultra books. Also, those few seconds usually are enough to get any task done. If you're throwing a workload at the R7 that would demand permanent 100% cpu load to complete, an ultrabook probably isn't the right choice anyways.

In my experience the R7 IS faster than the R5 but not by much. In my T14s I scored around 2900ish in Cinebench on the R7, in my T14 with R5 I get around 2500ish. In normal day-to-day use I don't see any performance, but during benchmarking (which is NOT a normal everyday load) I saw the R7 only go up to about 2,9 GHz (of the 4,2 max) whereas the R5 goes up to 3,5 GHz but on 2 fewer cores.

What this means is: The R5 is still plenty powerful, what would have been considered professional workstation class performance just last year. Even this year there isn't much Intel has to offer to even beat the R5. It's a perfectly fine processor. Don't get obsessed with benchmarking numbers and showing your proverbial pee pee around comparing it to others. Think of what you need and then get what comes closest.

If you get a R7 in a T14 chassis, I feel like the cooling on the T14 is slightly better than the T14s and your R7 might run slightly cooler and thus better than in an T14s. I've seen benchmarking videos of the T14 with R7 reaching 3.200ish in Cinebench compared to the 2900ish in the T14s, suggesting the T14 runs cooler.

But again. You could also end up getting an overheating R5 in a T14. It's really luck of the draw at this point but yes it appears that the "risk" of having an overheating processor is slightly bigger with the R7, which doesn't mean it's outright bad all over. It's not. It's a beast of a processor.

I hope this confusing piece helps.

Outside of benchmarking and shoveling aroudn TERRABYTES of data each day I don't think anyone would notice performance differences between anything that's faster than 1000 MB/s. It's like with everyting PC, enthusiasts will salivate over more BITS and BOBS here and there but during normal day-to-day use the differences in most statistics regarding NVMe drives are just too subtle. I rather go with less power draw and less heat than more MB/s. I usually work with indesign, photoshop and illustrator files, usually max 50 MB in size. That's just a "blip" on any average or better NVMe these days. Also booting up, I don't mind if it's 12 seconds on my WD blue or 10 seconds on a 970, if the WD can keep my laptop running on battery about half an hour longer, sometimes more!

Both my T14s and my T14 came with the WD SN730 which is a reasonable efficient and quite fast SSD. I benchmarked it around 2800 read / 2500 write, which is plenty fast. Again, in normal life you won't notice a speed difference to the 3000+ MB/s of the Samsung drives. Also the SN730 uses hardware encryption. I don't use it but if you have a need for it, be aware when you're buying your own SSD.

I have two recommendations for you
WD Blue SN550 - available in 256, 512 and 1TB - performance around 2800 read, 2200 write, no DRAM cache (meaning it will slow down to 480 MB/s if you regularly transfer HUGE amounts of data, like 250 GB a pop and such). But the best things are it's price (slightly over 100 $ if you're lucky) and it's powerdraw. It runs really really really cool and you will gain a bit of battery life from it. Very slim and tiny too. Nice blue PCB, fits nicely the insides of your T14 (even if you'll never see it again) haha.
Kingston A2000 - available in 256, 512 and 1TB - performance slightly better than the WD, but also draws a bit more power and runs a bit hotter, but also price is VERY attractive AND it has hardware encryption if you need that.

Yes the Samsung 970 drives will be faster than those two, but you most likely won't notice a difference, it's much more expensive, draws much more power and produces a lot of heat. In a portable computer I'd always sacrifice a bit of performance to keep the thing cool and living longer on battery. But that's just me!

It's the same experience I've made mate. Also if one wants to, they can also fiddle with Ryzen Control to play with the power draw in boost, etc...
Also I figure you could always, no matter if your processor already runs cool, get around 5 degrees cooler with a high quality thermal paste and proper application.

Too bad there's no way to undervolt the Ryzen mobiles processors yet.

I guess to sum it up, the Ryzen 5 is just LESS "gimped" than the Ryzen 7. I can only imagine if you use the Ryzen 7 in a properly cooled situation, that it could go even further in performance. Imagine this thing running on all 8 cores in turbo without thermal throttling. Scary! But really hard to do in the thin and light form factor.

 

I haven’t had any luck with ryzen control so far. I have tried a few different versions but not got it to consistently work. Have you tried it yet? I am completely new to ryzen after having countless intel laptops so this is still a learning curve to me, I am used to using throttlestop and the like to improve performance

 

Well I didn't have time yet to look into it, just picked up on it in several forums and on some Youtube vids. I'm currently writing up my comparison of the T14 with R5 vs the T14s with R7 I had on medium. After that I hope to finally find time to play around a bit.

Wish RyzenMaster or whatever it's called would work on 4000 series mobile chips just like ThrottleStop does on Intel chips. I'd be interesting to see how much threshold there is when going for an undervolt.

Have you seen Intel's Tigerlake presentation? Some impressive numbers, many awkward ones, terrible naming scheme and way too often they mention the AMD chips, lol. I don't think Intel can win me over so quickly again. Love what AMD is doing. Remains to be seen how they answer the NVIDIA 3000 series (which looks insane and well priced too) with their own graphics cards and whatever from this developments will trickle down into Laptops a few years from now.

But if we're honest, compared to the performance of just a few years ago, the average user won't have to upgrade for quite a while if they got a Ryzen laptop this year!

 

@Scollurio Will you share your comparison between R5 and R7 in T14? I still can't decide. I don't want to regret that I didn't rather take the 8-core.

 

I will have a detailled comparison/review up shortly. But since I went through the same decision hell I can already tell you a few things:

• If you're not crunching excel sheets with 50.000 entries, compiling huge files or something similar, you will not notice any difference in performance beyond benchmarks
• If you're planning to perma-load your laptop with tasks, i.e. gaming, music production, rendering or video editing - this laptop, or any other ultrabook is not the right tool
• "not having the 8-core" is just a mental thing. Again the R5 can stretch it's legs further than the R7
• With the R7 in the T14s I could achieve 2900ish results in cinebench 20, with the T14 and R5 and everything updated and optimized I just scored 2550 yesterday. 350 odd points difference. Not noticeable in real life. Again, current gen thin workstations based on Intel are not even reaching R5 numbers in benchmarks, yet if Ryzen wouldn't exist you'd never second guess their "stellar performance". The R5 is PLENTY fast.

Again I want to stress that my T14s was no typical representation of the R7's thermal performance, it was oddly overheating, a lemon. I cannot say what factors play a role in the Ryzen 5 running so much cooler. Good luck with thermal paste? More competent cooling solution? The "weaker" processor? I can only say that it runs WAY cooler than the R7 with NO noticable performance difference in real life scenarions.

If the R7 is available, get it, the price difference is not much really. If you can get the R5, get it, you're not really missing out on performance in my opinion. I'd personally only get the R7 again if it's properly cooled, something that a slim and light laptop cannot really provide. Id would fly in a properly cooled (dual fans) P-chassis with a bit more space to "breathe".

May I ask what your use-case would be?

 

@Scollurio Thanks. I would use the notebook for school: various simulations, Matlab, OrCad, Altium, Eagle, Proteus. But I also need good battery life. I would need a direct comparison of R5 and R7 in T14 (not in T14s). I need to know the differences between their temperatures and frequency under load, how they behave, stress test, overheating (eg keyboard temperature during stress test), etc. I have the opportunity to get a T14 with Ryzen 5 and 7 for almost the same price (difference is about 40 euros -student price) . That is why I ask. These processors have almost the same power consumption, so they can behave exactly the same. If I had a direct comparison between these 2 processors, I would already know what to choose. Unfortunately I do not have.

 

If the difference is only 40 euros I wouldn't even worry about it. I would imagine that you can always downscale a R7 into a R5, but you can't go from the R5 to the R7.

I do have a Ryzen 7 T14, so if there are any tests you would like me to run, just ask

 

@ FusionR86 Yes, of course. Please, send me a CPU benchmark. I'm mainly interested about the temperatures and frequency of the CPU and its cores at 100% load (stress test), 50% load and during normal operation (office / youtube / web / maybe some simulations?) during 5 - 15 minutes? And I would also be very interested in the keyboard temperature during these tests. Is it really so hot? What is the noise of the fan during normal use and during tests?

And then I would need to find out all this data for the T14 with Ryzen 5, but I don't know who to get it from.

 

What program would you recommend for monitoring this? Ideally something with a nice graph etc.

 

Well for your usecase both processors will be fine. Unfortunately I cannot compare the two myself but since FusionR86 seems to have the T14 with R7 and I have the T14 with R5 I'd be up for comparison benchmarks.

What should we run?
Geekbench 5, Cinebench 20, measuring temps meanwhile? Let's make a list and provide some "scientific" data!

This will be fun.

@FusionR86 I'd really be interested if you can hit 3.100 and more in Cinebench 20 on your T14 /w R7!

 

I can already tell you that even under load keyboard temp is maybe around 40 degrees, maybe 45, slightly warmer than my hand (36°). HWinfo shows when benchmarking not hotter than 72°C.
If we can communicate each other to a series of tests and monitoring, I'll gladly provide data.

 

@ FusionR86 @ Scollurio
I am very happy and very much looking forward to your results. I'm not sure which software is the best for this testing, I think the best software can be AIDA64 Extreme (it also does graphs, the free version can fully do so (Tools -> System stability test and select). If you do it through AIDA64, after the tests you need to save all the columns (clicking "Save" will only save the screen of the clicked column.) But you may have better programs. I have no experience with that. It would certainly be best for both of you to use the same software.

It would be great to record as much data as possible (temperature, frequency, noise, approximate keyboard temperature -> AIDA64 shows it during the test) ...
AIDA64 shows: Temperatures, Cooling Fans, Voltages, Powers, Clocks, Unified, Statistics during tests. All this informations are needed.

Your results with both processors will help many users like me who can't finally decide .

AIDA64:

​

 

Thanks for that info,
I'll gladly provide data tomorrow or on wednesday as soon as my schedule allows. Let's do the testruns in bestcase scenario, with no other stuff running, on AC-power in performance mode!

 

I did some benchmarking with 16 and 32 GB of RAM on my ThinkPad T14 with Ryzen 5 PRO 4650U processor and could gain up to 19% performance!
--> https://medium.com/@scollurio/ryzen-loves-dual-channel-d7d95794b794

 

I'm thinking about cheaping out this year and going with E14 Gen 2 instead, to go all in on T-series once Lenovo releases AMD Thinkpad with high-res displays, hopefully next year.

Thinking something along the lines of 4500U, 8GB soldered RAM (will add 32GB stick), aluminum chassis. I know the display is dim - although comes without PWM, which is nice - and the thing runs hot, but I'm hoping to counter the latter with undervolting.

What do you think, guys?

 

Nothing wrong with the E-series in my opinion. If you mostly use the thing inside and you don't need too much color accuracy, the screen will be fine, even though it's only 250 nits. If you add the same amount of RAM that is already soldered (i.e. going symmetrical) you'll gain the most performance. I don't know if the 4500U is really that hot, is it? Just be aware that there is currently no way (except within Linux) to undervolt your 4000 series Ryzen CPU.

 

@Scollurio thank you!

Nice! I am a bit appalled since I like to drop Thinkpads, while E14 Gen 2 lacks magnesium inner frame. (=

I can swap the screen to something better if I decide too keep it, e.g. in the sad event Lenovo doesn't release AMD Thinkpads with WQHD or 4K yet again next year... although to be honest the main thing I am looking for in a screen is lack of PWM.

It does get hot in E14 gen 2, according to Notebookcheck.

That's sad, hopefully changes soon.

 

@ FusionR86 @ Scollurio The sooner the better .

 

I ran a few Cinebenches in a row, with the AC plugged in. Results: 3274, 3295, 3217, 3272, 3255, 3176.
The fans started spinning and you could definitely hear them, but not enough to be disturbing in an office environment (where I am at the moment). This is with 16GB single channel. I'm probably going to get another identical stick soon. I'll try to run the other tests this Friday.

 

@ FusionR86 Will you try AIDA64? Why Friday? The user @Scollurio will have tests for Ryzen 5 today or tomorrow.

 

Has anyone here set their T14 or T14s on a USB "laptop cooling stand" like my Belkin? It has a fan blasting air straight up into the bottom of my W520. Is that a solution to high operating temps on these new Lenovos?

 

I ran two tests, because I forgot to click on the save button while still running the first test.
https://imgur.com/a/twDyu9S

I don't have one of those, and I also don't see a reason to get one. During these stress tests (which did NOT stress the GPU by the way) the clocks stayed around 3.3 GHz. The fans were somewhat loud, but it wouldn't be an annoyance in an office setting. The keyboard also wasn't hot to the touch, it was warm for sure (mostly top right), but not hot enough to be an issue.

 

Of course, the reason to use one is to cool down one's laptop. It keeps my W520 from throttling bigtime. So you don't have one and will never buy one, fair enough.

My question was directed towards anyone on this thread who indeed has used one to keep the temps down on their T14/T14s and could let us know if it does keep the temps down. Thanks.

 

@ FusionR86 @ Scollurio

Hi. I'm very sorry, but I'm afraid that only the "CPU stress" test won't help much. Could you perform a test using AIDA64 by selecting these options? I mean separately.

1) CPU stress
2) FPU stress
3) Stress cache
4) Stress system memory

Here is an article about it:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/stress-test-cpu-pc-guide,5461-4.html

I quote from the above article:
" AIDA64 With Just CPU
All of these results are on the low end of what we've seen from other stress tests in our suite. In short, then, this may represent the maximum load generated by older apps, but certainly not the most demanding ones. Not surprisingly, we measure lower temperatures. "

 

My reply sounded harsher than intended, and largely wasn't event directed at the laptop cooler. Sorry for that. What I meant to state is that I didn't experience any heat related problems with the laptop. I can try to add some more airflow to it to see if I can achieve higher (sustained) clocks that way.

Are you sure you want to run those test separately? Ticking all those boxes at the same time would give a better 'worst case scenario' to compare against.

 

@ FusionR86 Yes. Please, run stress test with all the options (not separately) and after that please, make stress test with only "FPU stress". But I hope, it will not destroy your laptop . Maybe you can only run "FPU stress".

@Scollurio Hi. Where are your tests? Please, could you do the same what I wrote above to FusionR86? Maybe only run "FPU stress" may suffice.

I hope, that's correct. I read this article about it and there they describe it with only the FPU:

" Especially since what the AIDA64 SST FPU subtest does is the absolute worst scenario. Even gaming all day long (or encoding videos for that matter) will not cause such high temperatures for your CPU, since the CPU load will not be that high all the time while playing a game".
https://forums.aida64.com/topic/3029-how-should-i-run-the-stress-test/

So I think only "FPU stress" test alone may suffice. But it will really be enough to perform the test only for a while (about 5-10 minutes). So you don't ruin your laptops. 100% load anyway will never be long in practice. And what temperatures will you have during normal use (YouTube / Word / web browsing)? Does the fan rotate during normal operation and does the notebook warm up? What are the temperatures?

 

Here a review of the Lenovo T14s from PCMag.com

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/lenovo-thinkpad-t14s

 

@FusionR86 @Mithrand @Scollurio pardon my insolence, but why not use a combination of Prime95 + Furmark (from MSI Kombustor) to stress CPU, GPU & RAM simultaneously?

 

Did anyone has any comment on video editing with the thinkpad T14 gen 1 with the NVIDIA GeForce MX330 ?

 

There's a new E14 G2 with Intel Tiger Lake CPUs, USB4, optional Nvidia MX450 and better displays with touchscreen option around the corner. Might be an acceptable alternative for those who want Tiger Lake here and now, instead of waiting for next T,X series update cycle next year.

The slides look weird so far though, listing UHD graphics while i5 & i7 Tiger Lakes are supposed to come with Xe, and RAM information is not detailed.

 

I’m currently trying to decide between a T14, T14s, X13, and the S540 13 inch. The build qualities and thermal properties of the T and X series appears to be way better than that of the S series. However in reviews the S540 gets abysmal scores on the performance while on battery, keyboard and webcam. The biggest advantage why I’m considering it is the higher resolution screen.

What are the odds that we will see higher resolution on the T series for amd? I plan on using the laptop for about 10 years. My current MacBook Pro is from early 2011.

 

@Spockz there's no technical reason for lower resolution displays on AMD Thinkpads. It looks as if Lenovo gimps AMD models on purpose, so that sister model Intel Thinkpads look better in comparison. Thus, it's impossible to tell whether Lenovo will finally start including high-res displays next update cycle or not. Only time will tell.

Given that you plan to use your laptop for many years to come, I'd definitely wait for next update cycle before pulling the trigger. Or you may follow my example, and get a much cheaper E-series as a placeholder for a year or two until either Lenovo adds high-res display options for AMD Thinkpads, or Intel gets their **** together and starts producing worthy CPUs.

 

Hoping for some input on these questions:
1) What's the best OLED display you can put in a T14/T14s - has anyone tried installing one?
2) Is there enough motherboard bandwidth to do software raid with mirrored NVMEs?
3) How to decide on T14 vs T14s - one is more durable & has a bigger battery, the other has more memory and is easier to fix, potentially. Kind of annoying they make us compromise.

 

@ZeBookofNote main SSD slot is 2280 NVME with 4x pcie lanes, secondary SSD / WWAN slot is 2242 NVME with 2x pcie lanes. I would advise using some sort of scheduled backup inatead of software RAID even without those limitations...

 

Yes, I'll be using remote backups as well. But I still don't know if the CPU / motherboard can handle it.

 

Personally, i find it odd that Lenovo puts a dGPU together with a CPU which the maker "claims" in their initial launch that they hv improved the iGPU performance that could beat what dGPU maker had achieved so far with their latest power saving model...
Then Josh's reviews shows those "little" disappointments...

​

...i began to understand why... ...

 

@Ed. Yang still, I'm looking forward to E14G2 Intel review before pulling the trigger on AMD version, for peace of mind...

 

hey mate, I’m here in the UK wanting to buy either a t14 or t14s. The only thing putting me off the t14 over the s model is the plastic housing compared to the magnesium composite - can you comment on how the two compare to each other? Also the battery is 15% or so smaller in the t14 compared to the S...wondering if it’s worth having the s for the larger battery and battery materials?

atm I can’t get a 4750u in the s model and only 32gb of ram - apparently 32gb and 4750u will be back in stock at the end of the month - for Black Friday no less which is ideal. Just a struggling to decide between the two!

 

Early on in this thread someone was having problems with their WLAN 6 acting wonky and he wondered if this was a "known issue" with the T14/14s. Is it? Or was that just a one-off experience.

 

More questions. I see in the "Tech Specs" page on the Lenovo website that there are two M.2 slots, one 2242 PCIE 3.0 x 2. Is this occupied with the boot drive? Then there's a 2280 PCIE 3.0 x 4. Is this the storage drive where I can pop my own 1 TB PCIE drive in there?

I'm used to dealing with my desktops where I can put in an M.2 SSD (PCIE or not) and also 2.5" SSDs as needed. It doesn't seem as if adding a 2.5" SSD to the T14 is an option, it's a PCIE in the only M.2 slot available for storage and that's it, correct?

As far as a monitor choice, I've settled on the 400 nits option. Anyone want to talk me out of that choice? It's more money upfront but would seem to be the prudent choice.

And it looks like Lenovo now has a T14s Gen 2 but the T14 remains at Gen 1. I'm only interested in the T14, is there a Gen 2 on the horizon? Thanks.

 

is it possible to undervolt the 4750u ryzen ? like the equivalent of throttlestop to amd ?

 

OK, answering one of my own questions here. I popped the back off my new T14 AMD and put in a 16 GB stick of ram in the DIMM slot. So far so good. Now on to the 1 TB storage NVME M.2. But no, there is no 2280 M.2 slot for what I call storage. Lenovo calls the boot drive a storage drive. There's a spare 2242 WLAN slot which I knew about but somehow I was thinking that was where the boot drive would be installed, leaving a 2280 M.2 slot for "storage". But no, I couldn't have been more wrong.

Which seems a ridiculous way to set things up in this notebook, I would think there would be a second 2280 for true storage but I have only my own self to blame, not knowing that going in. Guess it's all external storage via the USB C port. I may clone the existing "storage" drive over to the 1 TB M.2 NVME I was going to install but I have my reasons why I don't want to use the "boot" drive as a "storage" drive. YMMV

 

Hey guys. just received my t14s. wanting to install a glass trackpad in it....i ordered a lenovo x1 yoga 3rd gen trackpad which physically fits, but it does not work. I tried all the drivers from the x1 carbon and x1 yoga series from 1 through 8 and 1 through 5 to no avail....part number was 01lv554 (/555/556). noticed the new trackpad PCB is blue instead of green like on my existing pad....has anyone had any luck doing this? surely it is possible....

when i installed it, in device manager it was showing as function but it just doesn't work

I have noticed that the buttons on the trackpad the t14s dont come out, so im wondering if because of the mismatch, that it just wont work? hoping not....it feels soooooooo much better than my old one!

 

I'm thinking of grabbing a T14s (AMD), and have a question on the screen. The general consensus seems to be to get the low power 400 nits screen. Is the primary reason that is recommended over the 250 nits because of the overall brightness, or does that screen seem to just be a better quality also? I believe my current laptop screen (T440s) goes to 250 nits, and other than super rare occasions I've always found it plenty bright. If anything I typically have more problems with screens being too bright when I'm in darker rooms (enough so that even with my current screen I'm going into the windows settings and adjusting the brightness between base and 10% higher, as the keyboard 10% jumps can sometimes be too much).

 

Lenovon ThinkPad T14s AMD, Fan is almost always on a little, even when idle, doing nothing. Even when it is switched off, it keeps on spinning. Sometimes the fan spins at a high speed when the laptop is in standby.

Anybody experienced the same problem?

I am in a room alone, teleworking, no other noise. It is super annoying to hear the fan spinning. Especially when I put the machine to Standby.
Any ways to force the fan to turn off?

 

Those of you who have WWAN installed, update your drivers from Lenovo website ASAP.

Looks like there is a possibility that an automatic driver update will kill Fibocom 850-GL wwan card and render whole computer in a state where it will not boot until card is physically removed.

We've had this happen to three T14s yesterday and two X1 Carbons with same card couple days earlier.

T14s dated 25.1.2021 severity critical
Fix FW update failed due to can t found the 0ACC when restart the PC issue. https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles/r1bfb10w.exe

 

Did you found any solution?