Questions about W530

Hi! I'm thinking to buy the W530 and I need the opinions of the LENOVO forum members on the following issues:

a) I'm in a dilemma: shall I go with T430 or W530? For me the battery time and portability are very important but at the same time I like the big screen and the better GPU that W530 offers. I want to be able to use my laptop anywhere: at the airport, in my bed, in my car without having to worry about size or weight. At the same time I want my laptop to be fast and to be able to watch a DVD or to surf without struggling in a 14" screen with tiny letters. I'm not a professional just an average user and what I like most in W530 is the long battery life (the best in the 15,6" screen size) combined with a fast CPU (3940 in my case) and a very good GPU (QUADRO K200M).

b) I'm confused about the size of the ENTER button: In this image from notebookcheck it appears to be big ( http://www.notebookcheck.net/typo3temp/pics/47b9c092bc.jpg) but in LENOVO's webpage it looks smaller. Where the truth lies?

c) I'm thinking to order my W530 from ComputerUpgradeKing since they offer the Intel 3940 processor and a better variety of SSDs. Has anyone bought a LENOVO laptop from this company?

d) How heavier will become the W530 with the sliced battery attached?

Thank you for your answers.

 

a. If you need a notebook that has a larger screen and is reasonably portable, I suggest the T530 with i5-3210M CPU and HD 4000 integrated graphics. ( You don't need the Nvdia K2000M in particular, and you don't need the W530 in general.) The 6-cell battery can last you over 6 hours of regular usage, or you can upgrade to 9-cell for longer mobile hours. If you appreciate "the best in 15.6 inch screen size", congratulations, you will enjoy the FHD 1920x1080 display on the T530.

On the other hand, if you prefer a lighter notebook, the T430 is actually quite good.

b. The US keyboard layout is different from the keyboard layouts available in various countries. The shapes of the keys and the labels on the keys also vary. In other countries, the "Enter" key is fat and typically takes up two rows, whereas the US Enter key is wide and thin. (Your link leads to a page that show the German keyboard. For the US keyboard, check here.)

c. Unless you live in a country that Lenovo does not offer online shopping, the best way to configure and order a ThinkPad is online. You can also get better price (online discount + extra discount).

d. Hmm, I would not think about the W530 if I wanted to "use my laptop anywhere: at the airport, in my bed, in my car without having to worry about size or weight".

 

Have you ever considered the Macbook 15" with retina display? It has a powerful quad core processor, SSD, and graphics card all in a 4.5 lb package. It's as light as the T430 and as powerful as the W530. One disadvantage is that it doesn't come with an optical drive.

Alternatives include buying a T430 and swapping in a quad core processor (would void warranty, might not work) or waiting until the next generation of processors which possibly might allow quad cores in the 14 inch form factor.

Finally, you claim to be an average user. Do you need the extra processing power and graphics hardware? Quad core is nice, but perhaps the dual-core in the T430 is sufficient. The T4XX series discrete graphics card now has a 128-bit memory interface, so it should perform at a mainstream mobile level I think.

If you are in the United States, the Enter button will be bar shaped. Euro keyboards come in that L shape. Notebookcheck is a German review site.

I can't say anything about the that retailer.

In my opinion, the W530 is at the limit of portability. I would be willing to carry it around if I could get it with a 6 cell battery. The power adaptor is gigantic however, and the slice battery would make it too cumbersome to be mobile.

 

This. Well said.

 

Having recently purchased W530 myself, I agree with the previous poster that it's not really what you'd call "a portable" laptop. Even with 9-cell, it's quite above the comfortable handling weight. Compared to my old Sony Vaio VPCSE laptop (1.9kg), the Lenovo (~3kg) is big, bulky and cumbersome. For me the purchasing decision was mainly for power and driving four external monitors while I travel with it only once a month. It works in a nice backpack going through airports, but that's about it. Sure, it's not as heavy as the 17" luggable ones, but I still wouldn't consider it for comfortable, on-the-lap car usage.

 

Maybe fill out the FAQ? It seems that there might be other opinions you haven't considered base off of your limited information that you have provided. For example, if you do not want to use OS X, any Macs are out or if you don't require a professional GPU, you can stick with a T series Lenovo.

 

Thank you so much for your answers. I'm impressed that T530 and W530 have so much difference when it comes to portability, according to zhaos, since the first weights 6,1 lbs and the latter 6,2 lbs both equipped with the 9 cell battery (correct me if I'm wrong, I found the info here: http://computerupgradeking.com/products/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=79). I like the idea of T430 but I'm concerned about the performance of the graphics card since for the money that I plan to invest (up to $3800) I would like to keep the laptop at least for 6-7 years and most likely it won't be compatible with future windows versions (I will use my laptop exculsively with Windows 8). On the other hand W530 has received very good reviews and the graphics card performance looks very solid. Concerning the Macbook it's out of question because it is overpriced and lacks lots of upgradability features that one can find in LENOVO thinkpads. Trust me I'm trying for weeks to find a 14-15" laptop that have a fast CPU (minimum I7-3840) a fast GPU (minimum 2GBs), thus I won't have to upgrade every 2 years, and a battery that will last for long time (at least 8 hours). I have checked all the major brands: ASUS, MSI, ALIENWARE, DELL, CLEVO...all of them either they didn't have satisfactory cpu-gpu upgrade options or the battery life would last 4 hours tops. I was even looking for a battery pack from a third party maker that I could connect to my laptop to extent the battery life but without any success. I like so much the W530 features but if it is so bulky as you describe (I plan to use it mostly with the attached slice battery) then I suppose I won't have other choice than to go with T430 (which I hope it won't be too heavy with the slice battery attached) even if I don't like the GPU option.

 

I was comparing between the T430 and the W530, the two laptop models you mentioned in your initial post. You did not at all mention the T530.

 

Zhaos I confused you with Kaso who suggested T530 instead of W530. Sorry for this!

 

You can buy two very stuffed Thinkpads for this money. Also, unless you have *very* specific reasons to get 3940XM, don't. You won't see a practical, noticeable, difference from Q3720 unless you encode video for several hours daily (and in that case laptop is a poor option anyway).

There is no upgrade-ability in either CPU or GPU. You will not be able to replace GPU, or put a Haskell CPU once they are released. K2000 GPU is not very fast btw; for gaming etc. you won't see any difference between 1GB or 2GB video RAM. The only place where Thinkpads offer decent and easy upgrade options is RAM and storage, yet apparently you don't need 32GB RAM as T430 is being considered.

So best upgrade option: cut the budget in half, get something with SSD and the cheapest processor. In 3 years, if you want something faster, get out the other half of the budget, and buy a new Thinkpad, or Mac, or whatever. It will be faster, more powerful and lighter, while with the same or better battery life, than any laptop you will buy for $3800 today.

As to portability, T/W530 is as portable as any 15.6" laptop: very convenient to use if you have enough space (including on your lap, or in bed, but not on economy class airplane table). For transportation you'd want a backpack. "At least 8 hours" is not something you'll get out of even 9 cell battery if you put screen on 60%+ brightness or more, and start using the CPU even mildly. 5-6 hours of real, practical, use is more reasonable expectation, especially as battery gets some cycles. If you plan actively using GPU when mobile, cut that 5-6 hours in half.

If you want something smaller and lighter, can live with 8GB RAM limit, don't really care about storage upgrade options X1 Carbon is probably more interesting choice than T430.

 

^^
With a $3800 budget, I split it and only spend $2000 on a thinkpad. Fastforward 2-3years, I would sell that thinkpad and use the remaining $1800 to get a new unit. This way you stay current for much longer and also minimize the risk of having a unit breakdown when out of warranty.

 

If you really need high portability than the X1 Carbon is for you, it's better than any Mac Book Air IMO. In saying that, while the X1 Carbon is a powerful machine for it's size it is nothing compared to a high spec'ed W530.

Normally high portability and high power don't go hand in hand. I have just recently purchased a W530 with i7 3820QM, K2000M GPU, 16GB ram and installed a intel 520 series 256GB SSD (highly recommend, for speed and reliability). Yes the unit is about 3KG with the 9cell but it has very good battery life when using Lenovo power manager and to be honest 3KG is not going to break my back. I have no problems using it on the train or having it with me on the plane.

I highly recommend the W530 if you want a high performance laptop that is strong, has great build quality, a good display etc. If you must have a light laptop then the X1 is for you but I never found the 3KG W530 and issue and having this kind of portable power is great, the only issue you may not like is the 170W power brick. This however is not an issue if you leave it in the office or buy a spare to have one at work and one at home. The battery life is normally more than long enough for a 4hr trip on standard loads, you can stretch it to 8hrs on light load.

 

Thank you for all your suggestions. I think most likely I will go with T430 since it combines portability and satisfactory performance. I have one question: if I decide to change the factory installed SSD with a 512GB one, will it be an easy task to do the upgrade by myself without disassembling the laptop? I know that there is a panel that gives access to memory slots. Is the hard drive slot equally accessible?

 

Very easy. You open one door on the underside to add a second RAM stick. You open another door to replace the stock HDD with a SSD of your choice. Take a quick look at the well-illustrated ThinkPad T430 Hardware Maintenance Manual (PDF, pages 70 and 73).

 

Thank you for the info. I see that LENOVO uses rubber rails for the hard drives and spacers for the SSDs for increased stability. If my T430 has a hard drive+rubber rails where can I find the spacers to firmly install the SSD? Do I have to buy them separately or they come with the laptop?

 

I simply reuse the rubber rails. Make sure to select a SSD with 7mm height/thickness.

 

I see. I'm thinking for an Intel 520 series 480GB 6Gb/s or a CRUCIAL 512GB m4 6Gb/s SSD. Crucial has 7mm height but I cannot find any info concerning the Intel SSD ...does anyone know if both can be installed with the rubber rails?

 

If I recall correctly, the 2.5mm plastic spacer on the Intel 520 can be removed. I've been a loyal user of Crucial M4 drives for some years now, so you can guess my recommendation. Also, you could get one of the Samsung 830 drives for relatively low prices these days, as they are being replaced by 840 and 840 Pro models.

 

I can confirm that the Intel 520 has a 2.5mm plastic spacer that can be removed if required. I also re-used the rubber rails for my intel SSD, works fine. The screws that came with the intel SSD were a little fatter than the ones used by Lenovo for the Toshiba HDD so I just cut out the the hole for the screws on the rubber rails and it fits perfect, nice a tight so no movement, on a W530.

The rubber rails already have a semi cutout for the screws on the sides so I just completely removed that little section of rubber that would normally cover each screw, this reduced the total thickness of the caddy back to standard to compensate for the slightly thicker screws provided by intel, very easy to do.

I strongly recommend the Intel 520 series, if you look at the benchmarks on some of the most popular tech sites you will see that it's one of the quickest, if not the the fastest SSD in it's class/price point but unlike the OCZ Vertex 4, it has an excellent reliability record. Crucial also make very good drives so it's up to you. I don't think you can go wrong with either.

 

I assume that the newer Samsung models 840 and 840 Pro are compatible with the rubber rails, correct?

 

Yes, they are.

 

The K2000M is not someting fancy if you want gaming. Otherwise, it's an overkill for you.

You need to justify your need for a 3940XM. What kind of program will you run on the device? Can you show some evidence that the performance difference does matter?

Buying a computer in the hope that it'll last so many years doesn't make much sense. If money is a problem, buy a cheaper one. Otherwise, buy whatever you like now and worry about updating later.

 

Mr.Koala I plan to use the laptop mostly for office applications, mp3 and dvd playback, web-design, encoding and video processing, web browsing etc.
A few more questions: is the mSATA drive easily upgradable? From what I see LENOVO offer T430 only with a 16GB mSATA drive.
Also in case i would like to swap sometimes the DVD player with a second SSD do I have to order an Ultrabay caddy (like this one: 2nd HDD or SSD Caddy Lenovo ThinkPad T420,T430,T510,T520,T530 [TP-W510-T510] - $46.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

 

Forget about the mSATA SSD "file cache" that Lenovo offers.

If you want mSATA SSD, go native, get a 128GB and use it as a boot drive or a storage drive. It's very easy to add one. The mSATA/WWAN slot is next to the second RAM slot on the underside. Hardware Maiantenance Manual, page 77.

That newModeUS UltraBay caddy adapter is "deluxe" (and expensive). You can get a less expensive one elsewhere, like this for example.

 

Yes the newModeUS caddy is a "deluxe" caddy but it all comes down to how much you care about the finer details, for me, if I buy a $2000 + laptop I like to spend a bit extra to make sure any accessories I add are of the same high quality so I purchased a newModeUS caddy and the build quality is excellent.

It's a all Aluminium caddy, unlike some of the cheaper e-bay caddies that are part steel and a good part plastic. The only plastic part on the newModeUS caddy is the external bezel and it has been treated with the same finish as your lenovo laptop so the plastic matches down to the texture, it also has a nice blue LED HDD activity light which I believe is something most cheap caddies don't have but in the end it comes down to are you the kind of person that cares for the finer details or just want something that does the job.

I wouldn't waste any more money on a bigger mSATA drive, I was in the same boat recently, wondering if it was worth spending more on increasing it's capacity. I came to the conclusion that it was best to put that money towards a good SSD and use the factory HDD as storage.

The 16GB mSATA cache actually gives a good speed boost to the standard HDD when it comes to boot and shutdown performance. I still find it very handy even now after installing my SSD, I have set it up to exclude my C: (SSD) from caching - seeing that my SSD is faster than the mSATA drive, and configured it to only do caching on my D: (HDD Storage). This way any frequently accessed files on the D: still get a good speed boost from the cache - they must be frequently accessed files.

This solution leaves you with a very fast SSD (256GB) for the OS/frequently used programs and a fairly quick HDD - if you use it in a manner which allows for caching to speed things up.

In saying this, caching on the secondary drive is no where as effective as on the primary boot drive where it can always cache boot files but if you already have a mSATA cache drive and you buy a SSD primary drive, you may as well put it to use caching your secondary drive.

Or as Kaso mentioned, if you want even more solid state storage you could upgrade it to a 128GB drive and disable caching on it, however I would only do that after first spending the money on a SATA3 SSD drive, but this is just a personal choice.

Regarding the 3940XM CPU, it's not even an option on the T430, so are you looking at the T430 or the W530? Big difference in performance at the top spec.

For what you are using your laptop for the 3940XM seems like overkill, it's a $1k plus CPU. The i7 3820QM is already a beast, the only area you would notice the difference is in "encoding and video processing" and the i7 3820QM already eats them tasks up. The only reason I went for the 3820QM was because I also do a fair amount of encoding and video processing and a quad core makes a big difference here plus due to Lenovo's weird discount system which is tiered, the more you spend the bigger the discount and for me, selecting the 3820QM put me into a bigger discount bracket which meant it was cheaper for me to buy the 3820QM than the 3720QM, even though the 3820QM is normally $200 more expensive it ended up $150 cheaper. So look out for this when building your configuration, due to the tiered discount system, sometimes a higher spec system can end up the same price or even cheaper than a lower spec system.

 

The OP is leaning toward the T430 now.


@Flickster: Are you a writer/journalist/blogger by any chace? Lots of words.

 

Flickster and Kaso thank you so much for your inputs. I plan to order my T430 from ComputerUpgradeKing that offer I7-3940 as a CPU option (+$880 to the original configuration cost). I will follow your advise and invest to a secondary fast SSD instead of a small size mSATA. BTW T430 doesn't accept more than 16GB of memory even with Windows 8. Why's that?

 

It's probably a site error, as quadcore is offered only for 15" models (with a big power supply as well). CPU Dual core Thinkpads have only 2 memory slots, limiting you to 2x8GB DIMMs. However, for your intended purposes, 8 or 16GB should be probably enough.

As to caddies, Lenovo produces proper 12.7" ultrabay adapter now ( p/n 0A65623 ). It was not the case 2 years ago, so companies like newModeUS got an opportunity to charge a lot for it. If you don't want to spend more than $15, can grab one from ebay for about $15, will work just as well. There is nothing "deluxe" in these items really, it's just an adapter.

 

power7 I have already communicated with ComputerUpgradeKing and they confirmed that the latest I7 CPU is offered as upgrade option for T430s. It is not a site error. Also they offer 3 years warranty on their upgrades with free shiping.

 

Yeah, the OP is ordering from a site that does custom upgrades to TopSeller ThinkPad models (and other notebook brands).





Great fun.

 

Lenovo also offers latest i7 CPU for T430s. Just the dual core one, i7-3520.

How T430 cooling system is going to deal with quadcore TDP 55W CPU, instead of the usual 35W dual core ones that are listead in tabook, all that with 60W power supply, would be interesting to see. Not sure about the T/W530, but in xx20 era, XM quadcores had a custom heatsink too.

 

Yes, but it's one thing to replace Customer-replaceable units, like RAM, HDD or DVD, or do a fresh Windows install. It would be interesting to see how are they going to put officially unsupported CPU XM with 150% of the usual heat dissipation into a 14" laptop. I suspect BIOS may need to be updated as well, if Lenovo is white-listing CPUs.

 

I didn't praise nor criticize such upgrades.

One thing that site does not offer is an "upgraded" quiet fan together with smart fan control logic. That, I do need.

 

@kaso - Not a blogger, I just really enjoy technology. I am a Network Engineer by profession so have been around and working with computer tech for most of my life.

- I also wonder how they are going to put a quad core TDP 55W CPU in the T430 chassis. You would think the Heat-Sink and Power Supply would need upgrading for Lenovo to be able to offer the same warranty.

 

I hope that everything will go ok with the upgrade. As soon as I have the laptop in my hand I will post my impressions. Thank you for all your advices!