My thoughts on owning the T410, and occasionally playing games

1) The computer is built better than any computer I have ever owned. The keyboard is great and mine doesn't really flex at all. If you press down hard on it you can see it depress somewhat but in normal typing circumstances it is rock solid. As far as I'm concerned, that's as far as anyone should hope for. The body has a couple weak spots, however. Around where the lid hooks latch into, the plastic is basically hollow and can make a creaking sound as it rubs against the bottom piece of molding. Not really a big deal but I played with a T60 before and it felt more like a rock than this. The screen lid is also more flimsy than what I experienced on that T60. Still though, not bad considering the price. You gotta cut corners somewhere, I suppose.

2) The CPU on this thing is really great. Even the lowest variation of i5 available still blows the pants off of any application I throw at it. Basically, I don't think the CPU is going to be a limiting factor for this laptop for the next 3-4 years. Easily. The memory is also very quick, and although I'm using the regular 5400 rpm hardrive with it right now (SSD later) I can tell that applications have no trouble going from hardrive to RAM very smoothly.

Now, the weakest part about this laptop is definitely the graphics card. I can't imagine why lenovo would choose an abstract card like the 3100m for their flagship line of notebooks. The thing's shader performance is really laughable and is below cards that had come out years before. The card as a whole isn't so bad, and has a pretty good fillrate and wireframe rasterization capability. But shaders kill it. Utterly chop up games.

Which brings me to a crux: If you're looking to play some games on this thing, you can. Not without some sacrifices though. I own the Orange Box. I tried Starcraft II beta and Crysis.

Orange Box: Everything runs great at native 1440x900x32bit and I don't have to turn anything down except AA which isn't useful to me at native resolution anyway. A little AF doesn't hurt either..Vsync off, and you got yourself 60fps even in Episode 2, which is one of the heaviest valve games so far.

Crysis: Unless you plan to run this at the very lowest setting in every category (ugly as sin) then I don't recommend even trying. The game isn't that fun anyway.

Starcraft II: This one is interesting. This is not a very demanding game by any stretch of the phrase. You can turn up everything from model complexity to texture resolution to ULTRA and have no problem playing on the 3100m. Even at 1440x900. But as soon as you notch the shader setting from Low to Medium...prepare to take a hit. Shaders destroy your performance in Starcraft 2. If you set all of the other options to Medium (besides CPU intensive ones, those can be Ultra) then you can use medium shaders with soft shadows. It looks pretty good. I can't decide if Ultra-shaderless is better looking than medium-shader..full.


Anyway, I'm happy with this laptop. I need it for college and I can't be spending that much time on games anyway. This is a business machine, and it does business well. I'm typing lighting fast on this keyboard and I can't wait to dig into some essays I need to get done. It'll be a joy doing them on this thing.

Oh and PS: The screen does stink but you can make it subtly better by using a custom ICC profile or Nvidia's color enhancement tool coupled with lowering the Gamma a little bit. Looks more even that way.

Thanks for reading.

 

Thanks for the feedback, definitely interesting to see what the Quadro NVS 3100M can do. The 3100M is quite a bit more powerful than the T400's Radeon 3470, though. The real question is why the T510 uses the same GPU as the T410 (most likely to differentiate the W510).

+rep.

 

thanks for running us through the sort of graphic performance on the T410, i have never really expected much from Thinkpad GPU, apart from the performance W or Txxp models. As such, i usually get the integrated GPU version where i can, so i can get more battery life out of them, since i don't play much games on the laptop.

 

You have to remember though, the Quadro is a workstation GPU. It's not meant for games.

 

thanks for the informative read Adamant Swiss!!!

 

Could you maybe post some low shader vs higher shader screenshots? It would be much appreciated

 

Thanks for the little write-up—with a game focus. Then again, I have a ThinkPad to mostly runs circles around the consumer crap that’s out there—and I game on a 60” screen with a PS3.

 

im very happy with the nvidia 3100m. im constantly using java3D and VTK for 3D visualization. everything is running smoothly so far. im curious though how 3100m performs in more intensive applications like autocad or maya?

 

Thanks for the write up. I just received my T410 a few weeks ago and I'm loving it as well. I got the integrated graphics and the 2.53GHz i5.

I actually haven't used it as a laptop much(yet). I've been using the series 3 plus dock which I have an HP ZR24w screen plugged into, it's awesome.

I also got one of those Thermaltake BlacX eSATA drive holders which I put a 1TB WD Green drive into. I setup automated weekly backups to that.

Anyway, one thing I was going to mention that seemed kind of slow is Windows Movie Maker Live. I recently made a 10 minute slide show with music and it just seemed to take awhile. Any thoughts on this? I have 4GB of ram and the 500GB 7200rpm drive. I think it is the Samsung Momentus.

 

sorry for the late bump, but is there any way you'd be able to comment more on starcraft 2 performance (it's basically the only game i'd play).

i'm looking at the Macbook Pro 13 vs the T410s versus the Macbook Pro 15, and they all have pros/cons. If the T410s can run Starcraft 2 well, then i'd like to get it.

Can you post screenshots or elaborate of the two modes you were describing? (Medium/Shaders vs ultra/shaderless)

 

Hilariously I am also interested in and thank you for your gaming-lite review! I was looking for a business laptop that is lightweight and capable of handling SC2.
+rep

Does anyone know when the next refresh to the T series is?

 

the next refresh would be at least 1 year away.

 

Yeah, I wouldn't look for a serious refresh until the sandy bridge intel chips come out sometime next year.