Switchable graphics and blu-ray

Two separate questions:

1) What is the point of switchable graphics? Does it really hold much advantage over traditional discrete setups?

2) Why has Lenovo been opposed to offering a blu-ray drive option with their notebooks? I believe they offered it briefly on the old W-series, but that was it.

 

Way better battery life.

 

2) There is not much of a demand for business user for blu-ray. I bet when they do offer the blu-ray option they do not sell much, thus reinforce they decision of not offering it as a option.

If you want blu-ray and your want a Thinkpad laptop, you have to get a external one. They are fairly cheap, around $100 on amazon.

 

Ultrabay Slim
Lenovo Support & downloads - ThinkPad Blu-ray Burner Ultrabay Slim 9.5mm Drive (SATA) - Overview

Ultrabay Enhanced
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/library/MIGR-69014.html

 

Switchable graphics allows you to choose the optimum configuration depending on your needs. For instance, when you want to use things like CAD or gaming, you can switch to the discrete graphics for more processing power. But on days where battery life is more of a priority then you can switch down to the low powered integrated graphics. This setup pretty much ends the dilemma of people having to choose one or the other, and find out wishing they had chosen the other graphics option instead. (i.e. You can find on forums people wanting to play modern games on their integrated graphics but couldn't, while those with discrete graphics wishing they have battery life and better cooling).

 

I've had several laptops with discrete graphics and I've never noticed a major battery drain. I always figured discrete gpu's just used as much power as the need for the given task.

 

Switchable graphics is better for battery while still allowing a high powered GPU in a laptop.

Blu-Ray is available on most any Thinkpad with an optical drive, but they are hugely expensive for some reason.

 

I'll have to read up more on the switchable graphics. I'm wondering if the switch is a seamless transition while the machine is on, or if a reboot is required.

As for blu-ray, I know the drives are available. But Lenovo has rarely put them as a configuration option when purchasing a new Thinkpad.

 

Probably because few opt form them at $500+. For a while they had the burner as a $100 upgrade on the R61. I almost bought one to get the Blu-ray drive for my R60. Then I was going to sell the machine with my DVDRW. At the time you couldn't get the BD drive for less than $400, but it seemed like to much work.

 

If you buy a Thinkpad with switchable graphics, you have to switch the graphics yourself. Some other laptops have Nvidia Optimus or a custom program to switch the graphics for you. When you switch the graphics I believe you have to close all your open windows and restart them before you can switch graphics cards fully. No current machine requires a reboot, unless you don't have the proper driver installed and you'll need to go into the BIOS to switch graphics cards.

I really wish that Lenovo would get with the program and do Nvidia Optimus. Then again they dropped switchable graphics from several product lines so I'm guessing they won't do Optimus for some time.

 

I tried to switch graphics to energy saving but I keep getting this message.
I don't have any 3D applications or video applications running and its not connected to an external monitor.
I tried to switch by right clicking the battery bar. Can somone please help me out?
Running windows 7 on t400.

 

Don't get in too much of a hurry -- Optimus has a number of high-profile problems right now. The most glaring problem for gamers: the automatic switch to high performance mode is based on 3D detection, which most online games see as a hack attempt. Your game goes into 3D, Optimus detects it and switches the graphics adapter, and punkbuster kicks you off. You don't immediately understand, and try to go in again -- and now you're banned. This isn't speculation, it's a massively documented problem

Another massively documented problem is when Optimus doesn't detect your app correctly -- which is quite a bit more common than you'd expect. There's no way to force it on, so in apps that it doesn't detect, you're stuck with onboard Intel video for your gaming experience.

And the opposite is true too -- there's no direct way to force it off either. So i you are trying to save power, but then open a website with flash and you happen to have Adobe Flash 10.1 installed (ie, versions that accelerate with your video card) then you have no way to keep it from starting your 3D card.

I FAR prefer having the capability to switch when I want, not when the buggy software decides it should.

As an aside, nothing that NVIDIA currently makes is as power efficient as ATI's 5xxx series cards. You can certainly get more performance, but per-watt and for total heat output, ATI has them beat on both the desktop and laptop fronts.

 

It'd be a great opportunity for ATI to release a better dynamic switching graphics driver now. At the least they should have dynamic and manual graphics options so you can switch it to the card you want.

 

First off, are you sure that you have switchable graphics?

Do you have any programs running? you might have to close all running programs.

If that doesn't help, then use system update to find out if you have the latest driver. You might have to reinstall Windows or do a BIOS update to make sure it's not a software issue.

 

This happened to me in my personal T400 when I was messing around with various catalyst versions. Uninstall Catalyst Control Center using the installer. Then uninstall the Ati driver. Let windows reinstall everything, then reinstall CCC from Lenovo.

Imo, Switchable Graphics is one of the best, if not the best feature in laptops. It's one of those rare win-win options with zero trade-off. For those wondering, even if you don't game or do a lot of graphics/CAD type work, it's useful just for watching movies. Integrated graphics can't handle a lot of the shaders (esp when you combine them) available in MPC-HC. I like Switchable Graphics so much I never gave T400s, T410, etc even a second thought.

 

Thanks for the help guys. Your suggestions helped and its working now. I updated my bios which was 2 updates behind and reinstalled the switchable graphics driver.

I think the problem might have been after I tried to install the new Catalyst Control center a while back. I didn't notice it didn't support computers with switchable graphics. Should have read it more carefully.

 

All Catalyst versions support switchable graphics (at least Lenovo's) even if the release notes say they don't.