Programmer's laptop: x220 ultraportable or W520 ultrafast?

I am a programmer and I commute to work every day. I have been comparing Thinkpads for a few days and I've come down to the following choices:

x220: Small screen and lower performance, but more portable.

W520: Perfect screen, second-to-none performance, but bulky with a big power brick.

I'm having a tough time deciding between the two. On one hand, the W520 is a clear winner for multitasking having a bigger screen and more horsepower. On the other hand, the x220 is lighter so I'm more likely to bring it on the commute than leave it at home.

Can any other programmers or multitaskers chime in on the values of both machines? And are there any side by side pictures of the x220 against the W520?

Castel

 

I have an x220 and do Windows programming on it (Silverlight, Win8 Metro, etc....it runs the Windows 8 developer preview very well).

Mine has a 2.5Ghz i5, 8GB of RAM, and an Intel SSD and it is very fast. More than fast enough for my needs.

The screen size is fine, it's the low 1366x768 resolution that makes programming difficult. The IPS screen everyone loves doesn't make up for the low resolution for me. I'm stuck with this machine for now, but I don't love it and will replace it next year. If it had 1600x900 resolution it would be much better, but that's not an option.

If you are considering doing any Windows 8 Metro-Style App development work, you might want to consider the x220T so you can test touch events natively instead of using the Visual Studio emulator. I bought my x220 before the Build conference so I didn't know how important touch would be.

 

Thanks for the perspective. What are you looking at for a replacement? The T420s has a 1600x900 resolution and is still fairly small, I'm thinking it could be a sweet spot between the x220 and the W520.

 

I almost bought the T420s, but I travel a lot for work and the x220 was already pushing the limits of preferred machine size for me (needs to be usable on an airplane tray table in economy class).

I'm going to stick with the x220 at least until Ivy Bridge machines come out next year, then see what's available.

 

What kind of traveling do you do? Do you take public transportation? I have a T410 and I find it kinda annoying to carry whenever I'm at the airport sometimes. It's a big laptop for economy seating, as well. If you fly a lot, I would consider the X220 seeing that it'll fit on the tray. The resolution is less than ideal though. I would think about getting T420 or T420s for the better resolution (1600x900) on a 14" screen. I would only get the W520 only if I didn't commute to work every day, or could carry its large profile (including charger) easily. I guess, it all comes down to preference of either weight/carrying or screen resolution.

 

imo the most serious disadvantage of the X220 is the vertical resolution, which is only 768 pixels. This hurts coding efficiency. Dual-core CPU is not too bad with HT, especially when you compile lots of code you want to submit the compiling job remotely onto a cluster or workstation.

However I wouldn't think the W520 a very good choice either, since it's very heavy and lost most of the purpose of a laptop, which is portability/mobility. If you don't plan to carry it every day, then why not get a desktop for a much cheaper price and much greater performance, plus a much higher resolution?

So if you drive, then the W520 seems a good choice. If you take public transport, then get the T420s instead and you'll need the vertical resolution if you code on laptop.

 

I program and I chose an x220 tablet. The reason being that I have a 30" monitor at home and in my office, so screen size was a minor concern.

I can run 4 VMWare machines concurrently, no issues, on a slower machine.... so when my x220t arrives, I'm sure it will be capable.

 

I am a programmer and the main reason I sold my x200 and got my T500 is the screen size increase. I program in Visual studio and I love my T500 for it.

 

why didn't you just get an external monitor?

 

When sitting in class I wasnt happy about my X201 tablet and the only reason was its resolution, 1200x800 is not a lot, but it depends on which apps you use to code in, if they scale properly. I used VS2010 but the menus in that dont scale at all so its pretty horrible on low res screens.

Ps: if you think the w520 is too heavy to carry around then start lifting weights, its not that bad the power brick is huge though, but if you only code then you can go a long time without it on battery alone

 

I've weighed up the options and I think the x220 is the best choice for a commuting programmer, here's why:

While the T420s offers better screen real-estate, it has less than half the battery life of the x220. With a small battery life it can't venture too far from a mains power supply, so the portability factor isn't great.

The W520 offers a somewhat better battery life but at the cost of weight and the large power brick, which again reduces the portability factor when a lot of walking is involved.

The x220 has a great battery life and is very portable, so it can be used away from mains power without too much worry. The only caveat being that an external monitor should be used whenever available, such as in the office. In this way I think the x220 provides the best of both worlds: great portability when you need it and great screen resolution (using an external monitor) when it's available.

I think we've all had times when we had to carefully ration our 5 hours of battery life. With the x220's 12 hours battery life that uneasiness just goes away.

 

To be honest I don't see much difference of battery life between my X220 (9-cell) and my T420s (6-cell main + 3-cell bay). The majority of the battery life is consumed by the CPU, which is identical between these two laptops. Also, don't believe in the lie of 12 hours battery life - if you run CPU-intensive programs, a 9-cell battery in an X220 can be drained within 2 hours!

A good example of fast battery draining is by opening this web page with a browser that supports WebGL (e.g. Chrome):

WebGL Water

I could also imagine the same when you compile code with 4 threads.

 

I'm a developer as well - mostly Visual Studio 2010 stuff.

I came from a Vaio S series to a thinkpad T420.

The primary reason I moved was (like others screen real estate), 1366 X 768 will do your head in.
I also moved for battery life.

I travel to the Netherlands about once a month on average, and I take a carry on, everything for a week fits (including the T420 and it's slice), here in no particular order are the things I like and don't like about the T420:

+ Screen res (16X9 is absolutely minimum imo for VS work) I don't have a problem with the screen quality either
+Visual Studio performance is great, we have solutions with 25+ projects in, and they build very very quickly. I can also have all the VS2010 power tools and add ons installed, as well as resharper and its still snappy when debugging and doing all the day to day stuff I need to do.
+ Battery life - even without the slice I can get 5 hours + working on max performance, thats doing builds, debugging stuff, running virtual machines, e.t.c e.t.c.
+ Build quality - eclipses the vaio, and feels sturdy.
+ Ultrabay portability - v.easy compared to the vaio to swap cd for hdd
+ Esata - I can boot from an esata drive, which admittedly I don't do that much, but I can if I want, esata is also a lot faster for running external VMs than USB2 if I need to.
+ Options for spindles. And by that I mean I can have Primary Drive, Secondary in the Ultrabay, a Third in the msata, and a fourth in the expresscard slot.
+ Quiet - normal development usage and it's so quiet, a joy to use.
And even when the fan does kick in - it's subtle.
+ Weight - for a 14 inch laptop even with the slice it's not a big deal at all.

- No backlit keyboard - I do miss this.
- No USB3 - I don't have any USB3 devices, but it should be there really.
- Displayport instead of HDMI - I bought a neet adaptor, but I would have preferred HDMI
- Trackpad, I used to love them but now with gestures and everything - they seem to offer little for me at least.
- No Quad core option (out of the box) - I would have liked to have seen this.

I think a lot of the testimony for the thinkpads comes from the content of these forums, I've owned Dell and Sony for years before this, and have seen far more defect posts on forums for those brands than I have for Thinkpads.

For me it's been a fantastic machine so far, I'll be interested to see how it fares with 16Gb of RAM in it when the price comes down.

 

The W520 + adapter brick isn't very heavy at all if you're carrying it in some sort of backpack or something.

 

I'd take the w520 with 8 gig of ram but maybe because I use VMware a lot when I code on vs2010, I'd like to always keep my host OS as clean as possible and put in all my databases, dev environment on different guest OS.

 

dev here

I've used both the 768 and the 900 screens (E420, T420) and they are both insufficient for my work. I now have a T520 with 1080 and it is barely adequate.

As for the power brick, I use the 135W monster at home, and take a 90W brick with me. Got the latter from ebay for cheap and it is not a knockoff, it is ThinkPad, in case you were wondering.

I wonder if it's worth getting a W520 ultrafast, though. If it is the XM processors you are talking about, they are 55W TDP and though nice, imho do not make up for the $750 premium, never mind the battery drain and the heat output. I got the i7-2760, and the i7-2860 is still 45W TDP, if you've got the extra $200 to spend on it.

Other than that, the main diff. is the graphics processor. A must for 3-D work, and useless for me.

BTW, the T520 (and the W520, likely) have +10W on the 9-cell battery over the T420. Dunno about the X220 but it translates to ~1hr more on battery over the T420.

 

I agree. A good backpack is key. For a few months, I had to commute every day with a Dell Precision M6400 (the ThinkPads stayed home during this project ).

For serious development work, I'd recommend W520 or T520 with FHD. It's unreasonable to expect one laptop to meet all sorts of requirements.

 

No way could I code on a 12 inch screen. I would recommend 900p resolution at the least.

 

I used an x220 for development work (mostly python) and found it to be good enough. The screen size isn't optimal, but portability is great and you can move your taskbar to the sides and get some extra vertical pixels. Battery life is excellent.

Now I have a T420 which is pretty good as well with more vertical pixels, but more importantly, enough horizontal pixels that I can actually split windows and code (or code and test) side by side. This is excellent. Because the screen tilts all the way back, you can probably use it in economy airline seats as well. Battery life is on par with x220.

 

Agreed. For it's size and the specs it has, the W520 is extremely light. That along with the great battery life and increased resolution make it a real winner in my book.

 

CPU does not consume the most battery.

That belongs to the display.

T420 has a larger LCD(14") compared to the X220 (12.5").

The larger the screen size, more backlighting that is needed, more power consumption.

That alone makes the X220 more power efficient even with the same internals.

There are more times when the CPU is idle than when it is in full use, so the CPU utilization argument doesnt matter.

However, LCD screen is used CONSTANTLY.

X220 > T420.

 

I'd suggest to the OP to try out the screen sizes first in a store, Going to be useless if he did buy an x220 with pimped out specs but can't code efficiently because of the screen size (I know I'd hate myself and the laptop if that ever happened).

 

Are you kidding me? Opening a web page and make the CPU on load can bring the battery life from 8 hours down to 2 hours, are you suggesting that by turning off the LCD screen we can stretch the battery life back to 8 hours even with that web page running? Are you aware that the OP is going to do coding stuff on the laptop, which could stress the CPU a lot if he compiles a lot?

If you don't have X220 and T420s at the same time, how could you make such a blowing statement with your imagination and speculation? I'm telling the results of experiments I've done, i.e. the X220 (9-cell) and the T420s (6-cell + 3-cell bay) have almost identical battery life, i.e. they both idle for about 9 hours.

 

Erm.. Because he wanted a laptop that he could carry around with him?

 

From home to work?
Then external LCD would fit

 

LCD is NOT going to be the main draw of power. When coding it is going to be the CPU. Sandy Bridge has crazy low idle wattage (some people report 5.5-6 watt with i3 2310 and i5 2510 in power manager), so sniper_sung's 9 hours idle is a correct figure.