New P71 owner mini review and rant

Haha there is no real "way" to get it. After sending me 2 bad units and making me wait 3.5 months to get one that sort of works correctly I pretty much demanded a concession in the form of either a partial refund or a component upgrade from my case manager. The only component I didn't max out was the GPU, so he made it happen lol. That's the sole reason why I'm willing to work with them / tinker with it myself to try and fix it. I've given up a ton of my time fooling with it and they gave up a $1,200 (full retail) GPU upgrade lol.

 

2 replacement units with 3-5 months waiting time is way too much for me. Probably harder to get sine I bought it 2nd handed.



Maybe I should've goy'd out on the P5000 model, but that's $600 over the P4000 :|

 

Oh man
I thought Clevo was bad

I was incorrect

@bloodhawk check back last page for the photos

 

even worse :v

 

@Galm too

 

Sorry to hear about the throttling issues. Ouch.

Just a quick question - so they knew you opened the P71 / went upto CPU / tim and still offer help? (normally when a Dell/HP/Lenovo laptops that still has active warranty overheats - I tend to just send it to them for fix / just say it's overheating, rather than go into details, nor open it up; I thought that invalidated warranty? / didn't know the CPU was a customer serviceable part). P5000M is a pretty neat upgrade for the trouble! (if it were a less generous rep the could have potentially said the opening up work has invalidated the warranty?)

Obviously - unfortunately they seem to use pretty poor thermal pastes so even after their repair, the temp can still get high with higher spec CPU / so sometimes opening it yourself seem the most effective / the only option.

 

You don't void warranty for disassembly of machine.

 

Guys i have read this informative thread!
I am interested in buying either lenovo p71 or dell precision 7720.

Both will have 7700 cpu, 16gb ram and p3000 gpu.

Which one do you think is the best, especially in terms of build quality, reliability and faultless operation?
I intend to keep this laptop for several years.
I would appreciate your opinion, especially those that have experience with both machines!

 

Just buy an MSi WT73 or WT72, the thinkpads and dell have too much heat issues.

 

Wow, I am glad that I happened across this thread! I was coming close to pulling the trigger on a P71 with Xeon and P4000M, but it sounds like I will either wait for the next-gen (P72?) and hope that Lenovo learned something here, or buy from another manufacturer. While a large part of the thermal issues look like they can be addressed by manually tweaking some of the thermal interfaces, that seems like it might be a recipe for problems in the future (messing with pre-loads on the dies and that sort of thing...although I question whether Lenovo even looks that deeply based on what I am seeing in the P71's construction).

 

There's a review on the German Notebookcheck site. It's with 7820HQ, but apparently the TDP is unlocked to 60W and no throttling or heating issues are reported..

https://www.notebookcheck.com/Test-Lenovo-ThinkPad-P71-i7-P3000-4K-Workstation.230672.0.html

 

tdp at 60w is not extraordinary


all skylake, kabylake laptops can adjust the tdp



however heat issue seems to be a lottery, or cherry picked review units




my experience with overheating on this p71 is that tdp will be overridden by EC if the cpu core temp is critically high

 

Notebookcheck gets many review units from retailers, so those are normal retail models, not special picked review units.

 

That sounds like a bad copy. I have a P70 with Xeon E3-1505M and under heavy CPU load it usually runs between 2.9-3.1 GHz (from /proc/cpuinfo). This isn't a particularly scientific test, but it does appear (on my system, at least) that the CPU is able to run above its rated frequency.