New to IBM, looking for recommendations

Hi all!

I just registered and was hoping you all could perhaps answer some questions and ultimately advise me on which laptop to purchase. I just finished my undergraduate career and am moving onto grad school as a phd student in the fall. My program will require that I use SPSS, SAS and other statistical programs with pretty significant datasets. In addition, I will use this computer for simple Microsoft Office tasks, email, and research purposes. I currently own another laptop which I use for random fun: sports, fantasy football, etc etc.

I have been looking at the 'T' series as it seems that these would most fit my needs. I know NOTHING about computers. I have been told that I would need atleast an i5 but more likely an i7 processor. It seems from the website that some models have the 2nd gen processor, and some have the 3rd gen. Also, when I go through the process of customizing it asks how much 'overall memory' in addition to hard drive. I assume I would want atleast 6G, but what would I be looking for in terms of hard drive?

I am hoping to spend in the neighborhood of $1000, preferably a little less..

If anyone would like to take the time to help me out a bit I'd truly appreciate it.

 

the third generation processor vs 2nd generation: much better in graphics, but about the same in cpu. If you plan to run matlab then 3rd generation Ivy Bridge is helpful. In any case an i5 is probably good enough.

A 14" thinkpad T430 is more portable with an average 900p display, a 15.6" T530 has a very good 1080p display, and W530 is the most powerful but not sure if you need that much power.

 

IBM was actually bought by Lenovo, but you're probably aware the brand is now Lenovo as you've been researching it.

Anyway, a PhD. takes many years and if you want this computer to last a few years then get the latest technology. I'd go with the ThinkPad T430 with a Core i5 and 1600 x 900 screen. RAM can always be upgraded later and Lenovo.com tends to overcharge by a lot, so even if you have little computer knowledge you can figure it out or find a friend to help upgrade the memory for much, much cheaper after purchase -- it's especially easy to do on ThinkPads.

Good luck!

 

Thank you both so much for the advice. I guess the 3 areas of question I'm having are Processor, Memory, and Hard drive.

So a 3rd gen i5 processor would be sufficient it seems. I went through the customization and selected a few things, does it look sufficient?


Intel Core i5-3360M Processor (3M Cache, up to 3.50 GHz) (this was the most expensive option other than i7)
4 GB PC3-12800 DDR3 (1 DIMM)..(the jump to 8g was +$160)
500GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm

I guess the question is, will this have enough 'juice' to handle all the datasets?

Thank you all so much. I know you may find these questions (which are probably very simple to you) annoying, but I really do appreciate all of the help. Thanks again everyone.

 

It depends. In my company some statistics programs run a few minutes and some run a week. In the latter case a W530 will be more useful as it can have a quad (4) core CPU and a lot of memory (RAM). You can ask your school to find out the CPU requirement.

 

I noticed I couldn't find any laptops that support ECC RAM.

If you are running extremely long simulations you may want to look into ECC RAM vs NON-ECC RAM and see if a laptop would be a good desktop replacement.

 

The *PC division* was bought by Lenovo. IBM is still very much alive and very much a different company.

No laptops on the market support ECC RAM.

Thankfully, it's not really necessary. Yes, cosmic rays, etc. might mean that you get a flipped bit at some point. The chance of that is small. But the chance that the bit is in some crucial area? Even smaller.

If you're building a high-end workstation or a server I'd get ECC RAM, especially considering it's dirt cheap if you go with AMD kit. But I wouldn't fret too much over the lack of ECC if you're getting a laptop.

 

I'm a researcher (computational neuroscience) and frankly I wouldn't worry too much about laptop performance. I just got a T430, but for anything it can't handle I have a workstation on my desk, and access to an off-site cluster with more computing power than I could cram into the entire department.

You'll have access to similar resources at your department when you need them. Nobody is going to ask you to spend significant amounts of your own money on research tools. There are research grants and other resources there for that sort of thing.

With that said, yes, a T430 is probably a good choice. You can't have too much memory, and an SSD would be a very significant speed upgrade. An NVIDIA card would be nice (in case you want to do CUDA or OpenCL development if nothing else) but the Intel graphics are plenty for Minecraft^X^X^X serious science presentation graphics.

 

If you're running week-long simulations on a laptop -- you're doing it wrong. Stuff like that usually runs on a desktop computer/server or a computer cluster where users can connect to and run stuff remotely (e.g. SSH, Remote Desktop,...).

 

It's actually run an old Unix server

 

I would recommend the T430 or T430s. Both are great machines but of course the slightly thinner and lighter T430s will cost a tad more. Stick with the standard i5-3210 and make sure you upgrade your screen to 1600x900. The intel HD 4000 graphics is quite capable but if you see yourself using it for moderate gaming then the dedicated nvidia graphics is worth the extra cost (I would not pay more than 150$ for this upgrade). Memory can be upgraded after you purchase it and of course will be much cheaper than what lenovo offers. Also I would get the 720p camera since it is very troublesome to add later on. I would keep the standard HDD and add an ssd at a later date if need be.

Overall it is a great machine and I am sure will suit your needs. I've been using my T500 (3generation older then the current T530) for 4years and it's been wonderful. T-series definitely are able to handle more abuse than many other laptops so it's worth the extra money imo.