Short, Non-Technical Review of the Thinkpad W520

As indicated in my sig, I have recently purchased a Lenovo Thinkpad W520. I bought it for personal/school work in college, gaming, and for rendering such as AutoCAD that I might get into in the future (which is used quite a bit in FIRST FRC Robotics, of which I am a proud member). I bought this laptop (as opposed to the Dell Precision M4600 and HP Elitebook 8560w) primarily because of it's light weight (relative to the other workstations), long battery life, and because this system has been on the market for awhile now and thus it has plenty of reviews online. I've only had this system for a short time, and I am not installing any benchmarking software or games until I configure my final storage setup (ideally, a mSATA SSD with the stock 500GB HDD) (EDIT: due to the lack of 310 drives in stock, I purchased an Intel 320 series 160GB drive instead. SECOND EDIT: I bought a Thermaltake BlacX ST0005U instead of a caddy, for using my extra HDDs). This short review is only for the laptop construction, display, keyboard, etc.

The W520 is a powerful workstation laptop that is also built tough. The only flex I've noticed in the system was in the area on the bottom edge of the display between the hinges, though this is more of a non-issue, since this area shouldn't experience pressure in day-to-day usage.

Out of the box, 2GB of RAM is used up, leaving only 2GB of usable memory for the user for those who order the minimal amount of memory from the factory.

UNBOXING

The W520 comes with a 170W power brick, paperwork (warranty and how-to booklet), and the 9-cell battery.

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Underside with battery installed

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Power brick is an actual brick!

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9-cell sticks out a little bit

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DISPLAY

The first thing that I noticed right away was the screen, which is the 1920*1080 display. The W520 ships with a default DPI of 125%, and when changing that to 100%, the difference is pretty dramatic. The 125% reminded me of what my Toshiba's screen (1366*768) looked like, though with 100% text was tiny (might be a problem if you have terrible vision, but then again you might stick with 125% instead). Excel 2010 was able to display 41 rows along with the toolbar on the top. I rarely have to scroll on websites due to the amount of text a 1080p screen can display at once. Reading two websites side-by-size was no problem.

This is what NBR looks like with the display set to 1920*1080 and DPI at 100%:

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The same page using 1600*900 resolution:

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Same page, using 1366*768 resolution, common in many consumer-grade laptops:

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KEYBOARD

There's no question, Thinkpad keyboards are a pleasure to type on. One reason I went with this laptop was because I can't stand typing on an island-style keyboard, and Thinkpads are one of the few new laptops with the traditional style. Keys are firm, there are no flex points anywhere, and the keys make a pleasurable noise when you type on them (and the spacebar makes a nice, loud-ish "click" when I press down on it). This keyboard has about the same travel (time between you putting your finger on a key, until it hits the bottom of the keyboard) as a normal desktop keyboard, as opposed to a chicklet-style keyboard which would have very little travel. Only difference between this keyboard and others is that the Fn and Ctrl keys on the bottom-left are switched, so the Fn is on the corner instead of Ctrl (you can easily change the mapping of these keys in the BIOS, however).

CPU, INTERGRATED GPU, BATTERY

I purchased the W520 with an Intel i7-2720QM quad-core processor and Intel HD 3000/nVidia Quadro 2000M switching graphics. While using the laptop for basic tasks such as internet browsing, Youtube, and installing software (Office Starter 2010, MSE, Malwarebytes, FireFox 4), I was able to squeeze around 7 hours and 30 minutes on the 9-cell battery before needing to recharge, with display brightness at 9 and the CPU running at ~800MHz, no other changes being made. Internet browsing was smooth at 800MHz, however.

HARD DRIVE

My system shipped with the Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200RPM hard drive (I would have gotten a 320GB version instead, but the 500GB was a free upgrade during the sale event that took place in early June). Using a stopwatch to time the system, I get these results:

From pressing the power button, to loading the Login Screen: ~41 seconds
From Login Screen, to useable desktop (waiting for FireFox 4 to load): ~30 seconds
From clicking "Shut Down" to actually shutting down: ~18.5 seconds

In total, it takes around a minute and 10 seconds to boot into the Windows desktop and begin using the W520.

FINGERPRINT READER

I registered my fingers into the system and use it to log into Windows without any problems. The reader recognizes my prints on the first scan and will load into the OS in no time.

THINKLIGHT

Unlike a backlit keyboard (which would compromise the keyboard with flexing problems), Lenovo uses a light at the top of the screen to shine down onto the keyboard, which is useful since you can not only see the keyboard, but also the immediate area)

Thinklight off:

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Thinklight on:

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THINKPOINT and TRACKPAD

The mouse nub between the G and H key is firm and accurate. Having never used one before, I quickly picked up on it and I prefer it to a trackpad, using the middle button for scrolling. Out of the box, the trackpad wasn't sensitive enough for my liking and scrolling was terrible. While some NBR members use two-finger-scroll code to fix the scrolling issue, I disabled finger gestures and scrolling would then be smooth. Changing the trackpad sensitivity to the max also helps.


When I install aftermarket parts (an extra 8GB of RAM and an SSD), I will update this review with more technical tests.

 

Well, I've settled into the new SSD and memory (though for testing I kept memory at 4GB since it wouldn't matter for the below). I've installed different applications, opened them, and added some anti-virus and anti-malware scans to see the difference between a higher-end hard drive (7200RPM) and a lower-end solid state drive (SATA II).

On the hard drive, install times are as shown:

World in Conflict: Soviet Assault >> 17:41.7
LibreOffice 3.3.3 >> 2:44.1
Adobe Reader 9.4 >> 54.5 seconds
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 >> 8:02

On the SSD:

World in Conflict: Soviet Assault >> 16:18.7
LibreOffice 3.3.3 >> 1:38.7
Adobe Reader 9.4 >> 36 seconds
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 >> 5:28

The flash technology in an SSD does help increase write speeds, though the true power in using a SSD over a hard drive is in read times. Mechanical hard drives read data using spinning cylinders, which can be a problem for speed because the head has to wait for the cylinder to spin around so that the wanted data is under the head, which takes up precious time. On the other hand, a solid-state drive doesn't have to worry about this since there are no moving parts, and the controller inside the drive (Intel, SandForce, etc.) knows exactly where the data is located within the drive, so seek times are practically non-existent.

HDD:

LibreOffice Writer >> 3.0 seconds
LibreOffice Calc >> 4.8 seconds

SSD:

LibreOffice Writer >> 2.5 seconds
LibreOffice Calc >> 2.4 seconds


AV and AM scanning show the differences in drive technology much more clearly, as seen below. The first time shows how long the program takes to scan the whole drive for the first time since installation; the other times are taken from scans preformed immediately after the first scan. MSE and Malwarebyte's scans are taken from their "Quick Scan" options, and not "Full Scan".

MSE scan times, HDD:

(Items scanned: 258,788)

6:20
25.6 seconds
23.2 seconds

MSE scan times, SSD;

(Items scanned: 78,349)

2:58.9
9.4
9.2

Malwarebyte's scan time, HDD:

(Items scanned: 173,765)

1:24.4
33.5 seconds
33.3 seconds

Malwarebyte's scan time, SSD:

(Items scanned: 172,921)

1:04.9
28 seconds
24 seconds

Just for comparison, the following times are from the time I click "Yes" in UAC (after clicking on the Malwarebyte's icon) to a completed scan:

HDD: 1:25
SSD: 33.2 seconds


As seen above, solid-state drives make for a noticeable improvement in the user's computing experience. With prices on SSDs at reasonable rates (1.5 to 1.9 dollars per GB for SATA II drives, around 2 to 2.5 dollars per GB for SATA 3), I believe that buying one would be a great upgrade to a laptop, especially if you spend $1,500+ on a computer.

WINDOWS INDEX EXPERIENCE (as of 8-10-2011)

There's two different WEI score sets to look at, thanks to the two graphics options; I'm unsure if Optimus gives a third set of scores difference from the other two, since I always either have Integrated only or Discrete only. My limiting factor in either test is my SSD and GPU, since it's not the fastest out there (basically, it's just a 25nm version of the Intel X-25M, and the GPU is somewhat close to a GeForce 540M).

WITH INTEL GRAPHICS
Processor: 7.5
Memory (RAM): 7.5
Graphics: 4.9
Gaming Graphics: 6.2
Primary hard disk: 7.6

WITH NVIDIA GRAPHICS
Processor: 7.5
Memory (RAM): 7.5
Graphics: 6.9
Gaming Graphics: 6.9
Primary Hard Disk: 7.6

EDIT: After Updating to BIOS 1.26 and setting the boot order so that the SSD is first, my boot time hovers around 23-25 seconds until the fingerprint reader is ready for me to swipe my finger.

 

Nice writeup of your thoughts. Very impressive that a W520 with a SB quad-core and a powerful Quadro GPU can pretty much match my T500's battery life: although I was hesitant of whether the W510 was a good successor to the W500, the W520 seems like a good step forward.

 

Nice write up. Now only if W520 offered an IPS screen. Or maybe sub in a 8540W/M4600 screen.

 

Except that the 10bit IPS screen on M4600 is not compatible with Optimus...

 

Good review. Also, yay FIRST! I used to do FIRST Robotics back in high school, many years ago. Those were good times.

Team 267, Demolition Squad!

 

1758!! lol

Sadly, I'm going to college this fall, so my involvement will be extremely limited :/

 

Become a mentor. If there's a local high school in your college area that has a team, get involved. My former teammates did that, since they went to a local college, and essentially stayed with the team, just in a mentor role.

I've been thinking of getting involved with the local high school here and mentoring a team in an engineering role.

 

Team 2108 here (Team Awkward Turtle)

I thought about going back and mentoring, but it just wouldn't be the same being on the other side of things.

And unfortunately my team split up into two sub-teams.

 

Of course I'll still visit them sometimes. I also might help them with the AutoCAD thing, since I now have the most powerful computer in the group

 

I did a bit of work with 3dsmax back in the day (2002ish), on the Animation team for FRC. Had to do rendering on a 600 MHz Pentium 3, with 256 RAM!

Wish I had that kind of laptop back then. Would have made rendering so much faster, and I wouldn't have to sit around for hours waiting for stuff to finish!

 

That is a lot of laptops in your signature formerglory. Sell some
You'll definitely enjoy your W520.

 

Awesome review. Can't wait till mine arrives

Out of curiosity, how long does yours take to boot up? Asking because mine is set up similarly to yours, but I ordered it with L's SSD. Wondering how much difference it makes.

 

Working on it! I've got a few of them on the auction block, looking to slim down the collection before bringing in more.

 

fomerglory, sell your Apple collection and come to the dark side....

 

Thanks, this was great! Easy enough for me to understand

 

About an hour ago, I have placed orders for two packages of Mushkin 2x4GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM and for an Intel 320 series 160GB SSD drive (I'm annoyed at having to wait for the 310 series) on Newegg. The RAM will arrive sometime in 4-7 business days, and the SSD in 3 business days. Hopefully I'll have part two of the simple review up by the week after .

I decided to get the 320 series (SATA2) over a faster SATA3 drive due to price per GB, smaller storage space, and that I know that 7200rpm HDD to any SSD will be a huge leap for me (as in how fast the computer feels; subjectively I doubt I'll feel a difference between SATA2 and 3). I'd rather have a larger drive anyway since I'm thinking that I'll have it as the sole hard drive for now (I might put the HDD in a caddy sometime in the future?).

 

My 320 arrived a few days ago, and the RAM was in my mailbox today, so I'll go ahead and install that soon

 

Looking forward to seeing some benchmarks!

 

With the Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200RPM hard drive that I originally ordered the laptop with, I had times as follows:

From power button to Login Screen: ~41 seconds

From Login Screen to useable desktop (when Firefox 4 would load): ~30 seconds

From pressing Shut Down until all power is off: ~18.5 seconds


This was just me using a stopwatch to time these, instead of a boot timer software. It was a snappy drive, though of course any SSD could easily blow it out of the water. The 320 I have now, while I haven't timed it yet, is simply amazing in that there's really no wait time. As soon as the Windows logo forms during boot up, I'm taken to the login screen. Logging in, I can almost immediately use Firefox 5 (about a second or two delay, but only because I use a slow 1.5Mbit/sec DSL connection at home). Drivers took no time to install, and the system is absolutely quite when I use it (until the fan turns on, but that's barely noticeable).

 

thanks for the response Private, I just got mine yesterday and have been playing with it for awhile, I'll add 2cents about mine.

good:
-- this thing is a beast with the stock Lenovo ssd, everything is very responsive and almost no wait time.
-- time to windows and working firefox from using finger print reader to boot, is about ~40 seconds.
-- Keyboard feels AMAZING, now I know what the hype's about.
-- not nearly as many bloatware as other computers I've owned. I didn't do clean install, took ~15min to go through the stuff I didn't need and uninstall
-- power manager, awesome utility
-- 1080p screen took a bit of getting used to, but very nice once eyes adjusted
-- awesome battery life. I got about ~6hrs: firefox (surfing, youtube and downloads), installing programs on balanced power setting with brightness @ level 12.
-- very easy to install ram

not so good:
-- trackpad finger gesture is crap, but mended with TwoFingerScroll (works well now)
-- the fan is freaking loud... most of the time it blows out cold air. Could use TPfancontrol, but rather not risk it
-- battery charger is huge
-- DVD drives keeps coming out everytime I bump into it
-- keyboard was a bit hard to put back once it has been removed for installing ram
-- funtion key and ctrl key. should have came from the factory swapped, but went in bios and changed it, so not a problem - except ctrl key is now blue

other than the few annoyances, this notebook is solid, very glad I choose this over the macbook pro (not that mpb is bad, but w520 felt better to me)

 

I've been considering using tpfancontrol, but I wasn't aware of the lack of quad-core support, so that's good to know.

Just curious, what model of 128GB SSD does Lenovo ship?

 

Sorry, I didn't mean lack of quad-core support, what worried me was that our i7 have four cores, I'm not sure if the tpfancontrol will be able to pick up the right core to run the temperature on. Maybe I'm paranoid, but a fan noise is livable, burning laptop is not.

Device manager shows the lenovo ssd as Samsung MZ7PA128HMCD-010, i think that's the Samsung 470.

Also, since you have ssd and 16 GB of ram now, configure firefox to use memory cache - reduces writes to ssd and is faster

 

The newest version of tpfancontrol works just fine with quad core W520's Be sure to run the version at the bottom of this thread.
forum.thinkpads.com • View topic - W520 w/ tpfancontrol issue


I've been using it since I got my machine and it's been reliable. I find it much more comforting to have my fans spin up to higher speeds rather than rely on CPU/GPU throttling once they get too hot. In my opinion Lenovo's fan management on the W520 isn't stellar. They don't spin the fans up enough under max load and don't spin them down enough at idle. If I load the CPU and GPU 100% I'll hit temps around 200F/95C. Spinning up the fans with tpfancontrol I stay below 180-185. Playing a game, tpfancontrol keeps temps down around 170 or so.

 

One of the RAM modules that I had purchased was DOA, so now I'm returning that 2x4GB package back to Newegg for replacement. I'll test with 4GB and 12GB (one Mushkin package, plus the factory-installed Samsung memory) instead. I should have part two posted either by tonight or tomorrow.

Oddly enough, I've had problems installing RAM into the slot below Slot 0 (I think it's Slot 3?). I could never get the module to fit in there and the pins on the side would prevent me from trying to fit the RAM in correctly. I never had any problem with the other three slots, though. It's annoying since I want all 16GB badly

 

Just wondering how you're going to deal with the Mushkin rebates? They say one limit per household...

Also, just curious why you opted for a 160GB SSD... other than the OS and apps, what else would you store on it to make a 160GB over a smaller one warranted?

 

I first called Mushkin for the RMA (they told me to talk to Newegg) and I asked them about the rebate while I had them on the phone. They said that it'd take ~2 months to process and send a check to me, but no mention on if I'll get one or two rebates.

I got the 160GB instead of something like the 120GB because of the read/write speed increase in the larger SSD; the 120GB would be slightly slower compared to the 160GB. I was also wanting more storage and the 160GB version had the best price/GB ratio on the Intel market (I didn't consider other brands). I'm thinking about either putting my 500GB HDD in a caddy or external HDD dock, and perhaps even adding a SDHC card to store my music on (I go through music a lot, and I would like to try to preserve my write cycles on the SSD) if I end up not using a caddy.

 

I actually contacted Newegg via online chat about the rebate and was told that it was a limit of one per household and that if I used the same CC to make the purchase, I would only be entitled to one. Gonna send in both at different times to see if it'll slip through.

Still up in the air about getting a SSD, but your review and reasons for getting one is pushing me closer! In your current setup, the DVD writer gets replaced by the 500GB HDD if you don't go the external HDD dock method?

 

Eh, oh well. I'm thinking about returning that pack of RAM for a refund anyway. I think I'll be fine with a mere 12GB of RAM

I'm thinking about that 500GB caddy setup. Might do it in the future when I get around to needing that space.

 

which slots did you put the additional sticks in? I have the lenovo 4gb from the factory and ordered an additional 2 x 4GB of Kingston from today's newegg ShellShocker (for a total of /only/ 12GB of RAM )

 

I'm putting the new sticks in the bottom of the laptop, and I'll leave the factory RAM in Slot 0. I'm finding it impossible to fit any memory into my Slot 2 and I don't want to push it any further since I'm worried that I might break a RAM stick out of frustration rofl.

 

Updated original post

 

When I was filling up the slot, I had to put it in at a different angle than the others before it would slid in the rest of the way.

 

Posted WEI scores. Might run benchmarking software later, if I have the time.

 

hey guys, I'm a first year Civil Eng. student. I think my mind is set on the W520 (that AC block IS huge!! lol) I'll do mostly AutoCAD, MatLab and other few eng. related softwares. And I'm also doing photo and video editing (NX2, Photoshop, Vegas pro 10, after effects and premier). So aside of having good performance, screen accuracy/quality is also important for me.
-i7 2720QM + Quadro 2000m + intel 310 for boot and few softs + 500GB HDD for datas (almost the same setup as Jarhead's
So, is the FHD screen good enough for image processing accuracy? (I'll have an external monitor too, tho I still like to have a workable screen on my laptop) and is this setup an overkill for what I need? (1000m vs 2000m epic question I guess)

Thanks~

 

The monitor is bright (270nits) and colors stand out pretty well. I don't do any image-related work, so I can't tell you exactly how good the screen is for that, but I think it's a great screen overall. You might want to consider buying the built-in color calibrator though.

You could send a PM to dimm0k to ask about the 1000M, which he has. I bought mine mainly because I wanted to game as well as work, but if I had a separate gaming desktop I would probably have bought my W520 with the 1000M instead. The 1000M has 92 shaders and the 2000M has 128, which I believe is the only difference between the two.

 

Hey, sorry, but I have the 2000M as well pretty much for the same reason as you. I don't have a separate gaming machine so I went for the 2000M

 

My mistake. I thought your sig said that you had the 1000M. Sorry about that.

 

I was just asking about the same thing. I'm interested in the 1080p, but can't justify the 2000M just for gaming (don't have separate gaming machine either). Would the 1000M be too underpowered at 1080p compared to the 900 screen for decent (not cutting-edge) gaming?

[edit]My question is already posted in another thread, so I won't ask again here[/edit]

 

Thanks As you guys, it will be my only machine. I guess going with 2000M would be a wise choice,since it's also gonna be future-proof.

I do have a external calibrator. I found an other post of someone else discussing about the screen. It seems to have good reputation for its color. FHD it will be

Happy joining the W520 clan ~ XD

 

Updated with boot time using Intel 320 as the first boot device, as well as updated WEI scores.

 

hi everyone,
First off thank you so much for an excellent peer review of the W520. It has basically helped convince me that this is the machine I want to acquire next, and soon. My netbook has just about reached the limits of what I can do on it, and I'm ready to splurge to get a laptop with real horsepower.

My only question which I can't find documentation of on the Lenovo site, is regarding the 'Display Port' on the left side of the laptop, adjacent to the fan grill. Is the display port a proprietary plug? And what are the specifications on that video output port? Can it handle, say, 1920x1080? Since this machine doesn't have HDMI I need some other way to hook up to some high-res displays that I have, and hope this port can fulfill my needs.

Again thank you for an excellent review.

 

Yes, the DP handles high resolutions like 1920x1080 w/ Audio (I used this) on a Sony Bravia.

 

DisplayPort isn't proprietary plug, it's just not as widespread as HDMI (both basically being DVI 2.0, except with audio on all HDMI ports and on some DisplayPorts). As AES said above, 1080p is easily handled by DP.

No problem, just wanted to make one to help people out. When I was looking at it, there wasn't a lot of reviews on it (just a few blogs and YouTube videos).

 

Thanks for the review, been on fence whether to get W520 or XPS 15, W520 looks more professional and non-gamie if you will.

Do you guys recommend 1080p or 900p screen?, I was thinking text might be too small for me on 1080p, based on your screenshots 1080p screen can be switched to 1600x900 and text/screen will not look funny or messed up.

Which one do you recommend 1080p or 900p screen?. I believe 900p is about $170 cheaper.

 

The 1080p screens is 95% gamut compared to a 60% gamut 900p screen. You may always lower the resolution (to 1600x900) of the screen in Windows to increase the DPI system wide (make your text bigger).

 

Quick update:

Woke up this morning and noticed that my battery was stuck at 37% charged, even though I had it plugged in for at least 24 hours, so it should have been fully charged. My laptop came with the LG battery (suppose to be the better of the battery options) and has a low cycle count (130).

I went ahead and called IBM (Lenovo themselves don't support Thinkpads, only Ideapads, etc.) and now I'll have a new battery shipped free-of-charge in two business days.

 

Are you sure its not power manager driver or battery firmware issue?

 

Not sure what the issue is. It was working fine up until this morning. I'll try figuring out the problem in a few days since I have to study for finals.

 

Nice, glad support worked out for you. Now you have a brand new battery