T440p first impressions

I got the 4700MQ, 1080p IPS display, 802.11ac, backlit keyboard options. Upgraded RAM and swapped in an SSD myself.

My first thought looking at the laptop is that it was fatter than it looked in the pictures. Due to a bezel the bottom part of the laptop is not as obvious to the casual observer. When you actually set it down it is about the same thickness as the T400 I am upgrading from. Similar weight too.

The access to the RAM and SSD is quite easy. Take out two screws and slide the lid off. Much better than some past Thinkpads. I did not get a cache drive or WWAN but it looks like I only have 1 m.2 slot available. Maybe if you get the cache drive they use a different main board??

The keyboard layout - Fn lock makes the function keys pretty usable, I like the new page up\down buttons though I preferred the old back\forward buttons in those positions on T400. Can probably remap them if I really want. As a programmer home\end are very important buttons, while the new layout confused my muscle memory for some time I am gradually learning. My biggest complaint about the keyboard is the loudness of the spacebar. When pressed from the left side it is a lot quieter than when pressed from the right side. Maybe a defective key?

The mouse - The large surface area is great for trackpad users, guestures are pretty smoothly understood. The space is large enough for comfortable 4 finger guestures.
For trackpoint users, not as good. You can still tell which area is left\mid\right click easily due to the ridges in the mid click area. The default area for right click required significant contortion of my hand to keep first finger on the trackpoint and click with thumb. You can change the area associated with each click so maybe over time you can adjust.
The biggest issue for trackpoint is the loud noise of the click. Again the mechanism seems biased towards clicks from the bottom of the pad. If you click the bottom of the pad softly then the sound is pretty low. At the top of the pad( as a trackpoint user) regardless of how softly you click the actuation is moderately loud, and the return is exceptionally loud.

Let me know if you guys have any other questions and I will answer if I can.

 

Congrats!

How is it WRT cooling / performance? Have you run anything cpu intensive and is it able to allow the cpu to stay in some turbo state?

 

Cooling seems good, I ran Prime 95 on it for ~45 minutes and while the area just under the heatsink was slightly warm the rest of the machine was cool to the touch. The fan was on continuously during the run and expelling some pretty hot air. Processor temperatures stabilized at 80C after a few minutes and stayed within 2C for the duration.
I did not verify the turbo level.

 

Do You use win 7 or 8? WHats about 1080p display on the 14,1 screen? Its ok or no. Can You make some photos?

 

Excelent! Thanks

I'll probably order one later this week... just trying to decide if I should stick with an 840 pro ssd or go with an 840 evo (with ram caching)....

 

I'm using Win 8.1. The display scaling pretty much sucks, it makes things look slightly fuzzy and just plain does not work on some legacy programs, Windows has a long way to go before matching OSX on this.

I am using the panel without scaling so lots of tiny text etc, but I like it that way. Generally browsers, word etc that have a lot of text have built in zoom that I use when I need to.

The panel itself is very good, The brightness tops out at a pretty high brightness that is probably workable outside (have to confirm). The viewing angle is really wide though at extreme >150degree angles you start seeing some bleeding.

I'll get some photos up after work, what exactly do you want to see?

 

Battery life:

with 9cell battery for light browsing\editing etc:

Windows estimates ~7 hrs
Lenovo Settings estimates ~6.5 hours
My estimate (based on 20% used after 2 hours) ~10 hours

Balanced power plan, Wifi on, Intel CPPC driver installed and enabled.
It looks like the low power states enabled by CPPC really screw with the estimates from both Windows and Lenovo due to their unpredictable nature.

By the way if anyone knows how to get detailed battery info in Lenovo Settings let me know. I mean stuff like battery capacity (current and max) etc.

 

Would love to see some photos giving a better idea of how fat it is, perhaps next to the T400? Measurements suggest it's slightly thicker than past T4XX machines, but with a smaller footprint.

That's worrying... can anyone confirm that machines ordered with the cache drive get one additional M.2 slot or is one slot just the standard for all models? I'm planning to use an M.2 SSD and to not then have WWAN upgrade option at a later stage would not be ideal.

Yeah, that is my biggest gripe with the new trackpad design. I played with one on a T431s and found is usable but loud, unrefined and cheaply implemented. Not the solid quality one normally associates with the T-series and I can't help but wonder how much sloppier it will get over time.

When you were running Prime95, how loud was the fan compared to, say, the T400 low and medium speeds?

Thanks for the insights.

 

How often / loudly does the fan run when web browsing or running basic office apps? Did you get the NVIDIA graphics upgrade?

 

Does the 9 cell battery come out from behind like on previous models? ( pic)

 

@NRSally
Pretty quiet when running office tasks. soft whooshing noise for medium load (running a VM etc). Pretty much the same as T400. I think in most normal office environments you would not notice the noise even at medium load. I work in an office with lots of computers around me(~30 in a test farm 10 ft away), so it is difficult to be more precise.

I did get the 730M, I think it is standard on the 440p. Not terribly impressed by it. I am considering disabling it in BIOS to see if I get extra battery life.

@fireztorm yes the battery protrudes from the back, roughly an inch.

@pipsqueak
Will get you a comparative pic when I get home to the old T400. As I mentioned the bezel makes the computer look surprisingly thin at a casual glance because about 1\3 of it is angled inward.

Update on battery life. I accidentally left a VM running when going to a meeting and was surprised by drain. Running a VM seems to kill battery even if it is not doing much. 25% in 1 hr 15 min. So effectively 5 hrs battery life. I do not have power savings turned on in the guest OS so maybe that is why.

 

Would you recommend this over an XPS 15/M3800? Fully configured they are similarily priced.

 

If you are considering those then the compare should be a T440s. The T440p is a thicker, heavier, more powerful laptop.

 

They're different beasts IMO... one with higher-end CPU options, optical drive and better expansion options (including true docking) and the other a potentially powerful 15" machine with outstanding screen and fast GPU that sacrifices flexibility for thinness. They weigh about the same, but the Dells do have a significantly bigger footprint, too

The cheapest quad-core XPS15 is currently $1900, which is more than my ideal T440p config because I'd be paying for some stuff I really don't want (QHD touch screen, cache drive etc.). I'm assuming the M3800 will have more configuration options than the XPS15, but I still expect my ideal 1080p Dell config to end up being more expensive than the T440p, and the lack of true docking capability with the Dells is pretty much a deal killer for me.

I decided that with a decent quad-core CPU I can deal with the relatively weak GPU in the T440p since I don't really do much gaming or CAD (just a lot of photo/video editing)

 

In the Why Lenovo Why? section:

The T440p does not have a "plugged in\charging" LED. Not even on the power brick like some Dells. So when connecting to a "questionable outlet" at a coffeeshop\airport etc, you cannot tell whether the laptop is charging without turning it on to look at the task area.

The whole LED situation is weird. Mute & FnLock get LEDs but not Capslock, HDD(probably kind of obsolete) or battery status.

 

Good impression. Thanks.

 

@wizzardofoz,
thanks for your nice impressions!

The T440p (and all other new ThinkPads) has something for this: If you lug in the power supply, then the red-dot of the i in the ThinkPad logo on the lid will blink, as well as the power-button LED, so you know if the laptop is charging or not. See:

Taken from the HMM of the T440p.

 

I'm happy to report that my T440p was delivered today. I've ordered mine with an i5-4300M and nVidia GPU. I was pleasantly impressed by how small and light it is. Before attaching the 9-cell battery I got with it, it weighed only 3 lbs, 13.55 oz. The 9-cell is 1 lb, 1.07 oz.

I haven't powered it up yet, but immediately tested all the trackpad buttons action and noise. Lucky me, all buttons are quiet, with the TrackPoint buttons being exactly as quiet as the lower trackpad ones.

I'll have more impressions to share as I start playing with it.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

The external red-dot only blinks 3 times ONCE when you first plug in power.
If you missed that and the lid is closed, how do you know it's connected to power & charging ?

 

What about "plug it in again"? It will blink again, and it costs you only seconds.

And I think if you really are somewhere with a questionable power-source reliability, you will pay attention to it, if you want to know if your notebook is charged or not.

Not to mention, that this is something they didn´t change compared with the T430. On the T430, the battery LED on the lid will blink three times if AC-power is connected, so if the lid is open, there is no way to tell if the laptop is charging or not.

 

I'll take what I can get. That tip is useful to know and impossible to accidentally discover.

 

So if you're not sure the power source is plugged in and the notebook is charging, the official solution is to unplug and replug it. What a great feature!
Those Lenovo guys are always innovating at the cutting edge trying to be just like that fruit company.



Ooops, maybe they missed that memo

 

people care about a blinking light? could have mistaken this thread for an action figure thread on a toys r us forum.

 

Verified the turbo states for short 5 min runs of Prime95 blend using CPUz in High Performance power plan.

1 thread - 3.0GHz
2 threads - 3.0Ghz
3 threads - starts at 2.8 down to 2.5-2.6 within 30s fluctuates there for the duration.
4 threads - starts at 2.7Ghz down to 2.4 GHz within 30s-1min
8 threads - starts at 2.4Ghz and stays constant.

During regular usage clock speed is at 3.4GHz but obviously the thermals don't allow that boost for synthetic loads like prime95.

 

@pipspeak

Some pictures hosted at imgur

 

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Thanks much for your reports.

 

Thanks again.. that is helpful...

Ok... .... I think I've been talked into it

So sometime this week I'll be heading back to the dark side? (not sure if Dell is the dark side or if Lenovo is the dark side )... my last ThinkPad was a t42p

 

I found no such option in the BIOS. How do you go about doing this?

 

Do you mind explaining exactly what steps you took to upgrade to Windows 8.1? I have tried multiple times and the installation is always failing with a BSOD screen at the end of install. There is a driver or series of drivers that are incompatible causing the installation to fail.

 

What are the cache drive you guys talking about. I cannot find that in configure option on lenovo.com

Thanks

 

The battery light keeps blinking while charging, open or closed on the previous models.

This post is about as shameless as it gets in being a fanboi.

 

730m doesn't come with optimus?

 

You are right, I assumed you could turn it off but checking the BIOS there is no option to do so. Also it seems the 730M is included automatically when picking a quad core processor but is an option for some lower end processor.

I may have confused a 440s option with 440p. It is difficult to tell what the differences are. 440 and 440s have the option of an M.2 16GB cache drive. I thought I saw it when configuring my 440p but it is not there now so I probably made a mistake. It therefore looks like 440p only has 1 M.2 slot and that may be reserved for WWAN. Not sure if a drive would work there.

Can't really help other than suggest running the Lenovo system update before upgrading. I know there were some updates in there.

I did a clean install using a Win 8.1 ISO on an empty SSD so I did not have any driver issues. Unfortunately the 8.1 installer does not accept the Win 8 key stored in BIOS so you need a workaround to install it directly(MSDN key etc). Otherwise you have to install Win 8 then install 8.1 which sucks. Classic Microsoft screwup there, if you are going to give 8.1 as a free upgrade then either the Win8 key should work or there should be an upgrade license service to convert the keys.

This was something that also annoyed me that I forgot to highlight. is Lenovo doing shipping Win 8 instead of 8.1?

 

It does, but I do not have an option to disable it in the BIOS.

 

Thanks, I've been posting on the Windows 8 Forums ( Windows 8 Forums) and it sounds like based on my minidump files from the BSOD, the problem is rooted with the NVIDIA drivers, even though I upgraded to the latest Windows 8.1 drivers on the Lenovo site.

I forced a clean install of the drivers so I will attempt to do the 8.1 upgrade again...

 

XPS 15 has quads and GT750M.

LOL.

 

yeah with 3k resolution but to be fair, it would be nicer to see the 3k display and 750m in the t540p

 

Thanks!

Yes, shame that Lenovo doesn't really have an equivalent to the M3800 (quad-core + mid-high GPU in thin chassis). Nearest seems to be the W540, but that's a beefier competitor to the M4800.

 

No mistake... the 16GB M.2 cache drive option was there yesterday and is gone today. What the heck is Lenovo playing at? First the base price in the configurator jumps from $979 to $1009, we're forced to buy 15-months of Norton Antivirus protection, and now the cache drive option has been removed. So does this mean they're using a different main board or simply stopped offering a cache drive?

 

So it was a freaking Lenovo memory hole. I thought I was going crazy.

 

Anyone who has used the T440p and the 15" retina MacBook Pro and can comment on the weight differences between the two? IIRC 15" rMBP is ~4.5 lbs and this is ~4.7 lbs?

 

I was ready to order the T440p until Lenovo reps told me they would not be offering a slice battery for it. I realize Haswell gets awesome battery life, but the big extra chunk of battery, and, more importantly, the increased typing angle provided by the slice really stuck with me.

 

Is there no ultrabay battery for the T440p?

 

The T440p does not offer a slice battery nor a UltraBay battery. AFAIK, there are only 2 battery options: The 57 Wh 6-cell battery and the 99 Wh 9-cell battery which sticks out of the back.

 

The T440p also does not have the internal battery like the 440&440s. So switching batteries is the old school hibernate then swap then boot up again.

 

i noticed this as well, i am already not too happy about the price as it is, was looking to upgrade soon since my t430 is only a temp machine, but the price + lack of battery options, and the requirement to get 730m (which is bad for the price IMO) if you get a quad core is really a con, only reason i have left to upgrade is the display, but now i am considering the macbook pro retina because it is at my school store for 1200 + 3 year apple care and comes with ISIS

 

A couple of the sales reps have pointed to the ThinkPad Battery 43 as the UltraBay battery that works in the T440p, right from the product Q&A. But now that you mention it, I can't find any other documentation to confirm that. Is this something that Lenovo sometimes waits to produce? Or are we likely to never get one, since the UltraBay is listed as "cold swap"?

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

I don´t think there will be one. If there were one, they would already have announced this option somewhere. It not in the PSREF, or in the parts list (where all parts are listed) nor on the Quick-Pick website, where all accessories are listed.

A typical misinformation from clueless Lenovo reps I think. :wub:

You can check it out for yourself, if there is a port for the UltraBay battery inside the UltraBay or not.

 

I got my T440p in the mail yesterday. The hardware seems nice enough; I'm not blown away but it still feels like its well made. I had a T61 in college and decided to get another thinkpad, and the T440p seemed to have everything I wanted without some of the limitations of the T440s (internal battery, soldered RAM, low power cpus).

I have two major complaints, though. First, the backlight bleeding on my 1080p IPS display is atrocious. I can see individual streaks of light all along the bottom and right side of the display where the LEDs are when viewing a black or dark screen. I was planning on using this for photo work and watching HD movies, and this will not be acceptable for me. I have owned many displays over the years, and this is the worst bleeding I have ever had on one of mine.

I am having Lenovo replace the display, and hopefully the new one is better. If not, I'm going to have to return it and buy something with a better screen. Otherthan the backlight, the screen viewing angles and brightness are very good. I also confirmed it is an IPS panel using Creative tools for Creative mind.

My second complaint is the fan noise. It cycles on and off frequently when the computer is idling. It is annoying in a quiet room. I hope this is some kind of driver or power setting issue that I can resolve or fix on my own.

I called Lenovo last night at 7:30 PM about the display, and the return box has already been delivered (from Louisville to delivered in Iowa in less than 5 hours!). I will get a picture of the backlight bleed before I send it in for repair.

 

Either battery option lifts the back of the (already thick) T440p up about an inch!

Oh my!

Hmm. Late 2013 design with energy-efficient Haswell?

Thanks much for your feedback. Welcome to the forum.