ThinkPad E485 - (Underrated gem!)

Well I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this little A485. It's really a love hate thing for sure. I love the price and the size. I hate that the cooling is so terrible on it. I can only hit 15W sustained load if I raise the temp limit to 95C. I've repasted but this single large heatpipe is a terrible design. I've looked into the dual heatpipe 01YR202 from the T480 but the cpu mount is offset from the stock heatsink.

If the E485/E585 had the option to add battery capacity I would go that route, but I need at least 6 hours of battery life.

Selling this X1E will be harder than I thought.

 

Didn't know you were trying to sell your X1E. What makes you wanna part with it if I may ask? Too big?

Yeah, cooling design is a major problem when it comes to Ryzen notebooks. Very few machines out there have a headroom to break 30W. E485 is limited at about 35-37W it seems. But some Matebook D owners are able to push theirs to 40W+ with liquid metal and AC. Yesterday someone with a 2500u scored 760+ in CB15 @40W. Unless a better heatsink is made, my E485 can't beat or even match that on air cooling. There's a thermal solution company (I think it's Enertron) that can do fast and not too expensive prototyping and only need a CAD file to get going. They could easily add 1.5-2mm thickness to the pipes to increase the TDP capacity of the HS by 30-50%, but not sure I will be willing to pay the entire price. If there were at least 5-10 people with the same machine, this could be done very cheap. As is, I'll probably endup using it at 90% power @30-35W to have a really cool and quiet machine.
As for the battery, yeah, 6 hours is only possible if you lock it down @400mhz, which is slow for any CPU intense tasks.

 

My X200 sounded like a vacuum from the factory. Lenovo sent and I replaced the pipe/fan. It solved the problem. The two didn't look any different to me.

 

No the X1E is great and I really don't have any complaints about it besides the screen is terrible (Lenovo will never change I suppose). I was planning on selling it and using the cheap A485 because I would like to save some money.

Yeah if there was a following for the A485 then I would also consider doing a custom heatsink, but I have a feeling their sales are abysmal. Shame on Lenovo for giving the "higher" end A485 worse cooling than that of the E485 (among other things).

 

They're always like that...

 

Which screen do you have and why is it terrible?

 

It has the same FHD screen as the T480, the NV140FHM-N46. The reason I don't like it is because the brightness is lackluster and the colors are terrible. Even after calibration it only covers 56% of sRGB and 35% of aRGB. They look really washed out to me. I did buy a new screen to replace it though (N140HCE-EN1).

 

I thought the X1E was a 15" notebook?

 

I have an X1E but was referring to the A485 that I just picked up.
The X1E screen is also not great when comparing it to the XPS 9570 screen. The X1E has a NV156FHM-N61 that I would describe as dim and lackluster quality wise although it covered 87% of sRGB after calibration. Not as bad compared to the A485 but not as nice as the XPS FHD screen that I had.

 

People used to say that about the X220, but it looked good to me, though I never needed a high gamut or color fidelity.

 

I had an X220 with the FHD and didn't mind the screen. It wasn't until I got a Clevo P150EM with a 92% SRGB gamut screen that I realized I was missing out when it came to screens. I'll take some pictures of the A485 before and after I change the screen today...

 

Yeah, it's a pain going from a 100%AdobeRGB back to 60%sRGB. Feeling like your eyes are being robbed of color. One of the reasons I won't let go of my AW 13 OLED.

 

My main TV is a 52" Sanyo I bought at Walmark in 2011. At the time it was a Consumer Reports best buy. It's got a hideous 2" bezel that surrounds the screen, but still offers a nice picture. When I go to Best Buy and look at the new OLED TVs, they look stunning and I'm sure if I were to plop one down next to my Sanyo, the Sanyo would be ashamed, but absent being next to a new TV, it still looks good when watching a movie or playing a game. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

 

Yeah I've got a X1 Yoga OLED and I'm kicking myself for not speccing it with 16gb of RAM otherwise it'd be my main workhorse. Absolutely stunning display.

Wish they'd put one on the carbons or extremes =/

 

So my E485 turned up a couple of days ago. I've moved across my work image to it and it is now my main workhorse. Experience so far is very positive, much better than the 6200U's I have been using before and I am very pleased with the keyboard. The screen is also better than what I have read for work use.

Overall I am very pleased with this laptop - I know Lenovo have a bit of a rep of going downhill quality wise but for something that is around 750 AUD retail I don't think you can really beat this.
Although I'd really like to see the newer AMD mobile chips start to appear in the medium and top tier offerings from laptop manufacturers.

 

Hello, how's the battery life? Do you get a performance improvement with dual channel memory with this machine?
Thanks

 

Battery life is mediocre - 4-5 hours.
Dual channel memory gives a huge performance boost. Don't recommend running single channel, you would be losing more than 20%.

 

Hi I just got this beauty and installed eOS juno 5 on it after wiping out the windows pro. Everything seems to be fine but having issues with my ethernet card and the battery drain. The ethernet card is detected but the connection is never established. The battery is reporting between 10 to 13 w drain during normal use and low brightness. The laptop came with a single channel 8GB RAM I immediately ordered another 8GB after seeing this thread. In addition to that, I also would like to replace the wifi card with an intel Bluetooth 5.0 wifi chip. Did anyone try that if yes which model and how did it go?

 

Its better to ask Lenovo if they support it. Acc. to Killer Networking Rep, Win 10 supports only subset of BT 4.x and doesn't have full BT 5.0 support for extreme Low energy data transmission and geo-fencing features. You need to use Linux distros to exploit full BT 5.0 stack features.

 

4-5 is a little low, what batteries are you using? Is there second internal battery?
From an earlier post, didn't you figure out how to run with the cpu clocking as low as 400mhz, or are you leaving the low end at 1600 for performance?

Thanks

 

To run @400mhz all you have to do is set max TDP @4w in Ryzenadj.

There's only one battery unfortunately and it's pretty small, so 5 hours is probably our max. At 400mhz, you can hit a full day computing, but the impact to performance is noticeable. Typing texts is ok but anything more demanding, like watching videos on youtube will be a pain.

 

Did you try tuned-adm? You need to use synaptic pkg mgr otherwise Gnome SW Store doesn't list it.

 

Haven't tried it yet, as I'm using the current build of Parrot Sec for my IT projects and it's 'locked' at its current state for now. But I'm going to put another Linux distro on the second ssd and try it then.

 

What about custom cooling? I'm in if price will be reasonable.

 

The price isn't reasonable, unfortunately...
It costs too much to prototype it, and since we don't have 100+ people ready to buy a heatsink that costs 1/10 of the machine itself - there's really no way we can proceed.

 

Soon to be another owner of it, wonder if that counts for prototyping the custom cooling.

 

If you have the tools and skills to make a custom heatskink that would fit the chassis - sure!

 

Quite an interesting thread! I was browsing through lenovo’s section to find something on Thinkpad E495 and found this. Just order one and will be delivered in August with Ryzen 3500U processor, first think will be doing is adding a ram stick snd maybe repasting the thermals.