ThinkPad X220 (i/T) Owners Thread

Possible new info REGARDING THROTTLING ISSUE
I posted this in the Lenovo forum as well.
Potential buyer here, just started looking into the X220 and found the following. Don't know if this has been seen or mentioned here, but saw a review with a X220 and I5 cpu with the throttling problem. I have only seen i7 mentioned with the problem. Also seems memory related. Forgive me if already known as I haven't read the whole thread. Here is the review:

Review Lenovo ThinkPad X220 (IPS) Subnotebook - Notebookcheck.net Reviews


Here is the relevant info:

Throttling

Throttling is another serious problem which affects the performance. We did not notice any throttling while we were using the single RAM module installed in the laptop by the manufacturer (1 x 4GB). The power adapter exceeded its 65 W power limit only once and usually consumed around 60 Watt. The approximate CPU temperature is no cause for concern at 87°C (recorded using HW32 and TPFancontrol). We ran a few benchmarks (Furmark, Prime95, wPrime200 and Cinebench R10) in different combinations, and the laptop processed them at speeds ranging between 2.5 to 3.2 GHz.

The ugly problem of throttling rears its head soon after we add the second 4 GB RAM module. In the HW32, we noticed quite early that the processor speed constantly changed between 3,2 to 2.8 GHz and 2.5 GHz down to 800 MHz. According to the TPFancontrol benchmark, the CPU does not reach high temperatures as in the first scenario. Instead, throttling kicks in around the 68 °C mark. After 10 more minutes, the HW32 benchmark revealed that the CPU clock frequency remained stuck at 800 MHz, and even the temperature drop of 53 °C did not change the situation. Shortly disconnecting the power adapter helps the CPU recover its original speed.

The CPU usually throttled at 63 °C, although at maximum speed (3.2 GHz) the throttling took place after the 72 °C mark was reached. After throttling, the laptop remained at 800 MHz for a while.

 

That review was discussed in the lenovo forum X220 throttling thread end of page 16 and page 17 when it was the original in German. It's good that it is now fully translated by notebookreview. I believe it just shows that the problem is the power draw of the 65w ac adapter.

 

What about the fact they used an i5 processor (not i7) as well as the problem only showing up when they used the 2nd stick of ram?

 

Processor wouldn't matter either way if it is going over 65 watt. It is fine with one stick of ram, but once you add another you increase power usage. So it would make sense you only see it when you add that additional stick.

 

What he said...^^^^. Agree. That's why it happens when adding the 2nd stick of ram.

I think on the i7, the default configuration already draws more power than the i5 by default, that's why people only see it happening on the i7 and not on the i5. That's what it appears to be happening. Even on that review, they stated that one time the 65w adapter exceeded its power limit with only 1 stick of ram (i5 machine). Quote: We did not notice any throttling while we were using the single RAM module installed in the laptop by the manufacturer (1 x 4GB). The power adapter exceeded its 65 W power limit only once and usually consumed around 60 Watt.

On my X220 (i7), I'm currently using a non-slim 90w adapter and there is no throttling issues and I don't have touchpad or warbling sound problems either with this adapter (model 42T5276).

 

Oh dang that actually makes quite a bit of sense. The S1366(is that the right number) 3 channel Core i7 Nehalem chips drew a ton more power than the S1156 2 channel counterparts I remember. (anyone with a Core i7 definitely is using all available memory channels lol)
Well this issue seems a bit unfortunate, needs an AC adapter upgrade to fix?

I hope this doesn't happen with external GPU, which could cause an increase in power consumption. Actually on second thought it probably won't since the IGP can relax a bit.

 

Notebookcheck.net said the IPS panel on the x220 covered about 70% of the sRGB spectrum. Your chart makes it look more like 25%. How do you interpret that chart? The ones in notebookcheck show the spectrum of the better in transparent white and that of the worse (of whatever the comparison is to) in color.

Also, is it not the case that 70% , while not good enough for graphic arts uses, is still in the upper 20% of all laptop screens made?

Thanks for clarifying this.

 

Does ist now support up to 1866 Mhz or not? Can somebody give me a proof?

Thanks

If yes, I would buy 2 x 4 GB 1866, if not, i would buy 1 x 4 GB 1333 mhz

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo-ibm/581663-starcraft-2-kingston-1866mhz-amazing-results.html

 

Is anybody else getting a wicked ground loop hum when they use the headphone jack with the power plugged in?

 

No, it could have something to do with the fact that the jack is an auto-sensing one. Its supposed to detect when you have a headset or not plugged into it automatically.

 

Sorry if this has been brought up before, but the Lenovo forums point to the power adapter being the issue for x220 i7 throttling issue. They say if a 90W adapter is used, there is no throttling. I must admit that I have only notice the throttling while plugged in. If I run on battery on high performance I have no issue. Has anyone else noticed this?

 

First, I will say that I am NOT a color expert. Everything I have learned has been through trial and error, websites, and my own observation. What has driven me though, is my quest to improve my understanding on these issues.

With that in mind I will try to clarify what I was thinking.

First, I have provided two images attached. One with profile i made myself with my x-rite i1display2, the other image comes from the profile that notebookcheck supplied, using a datacolor spyder3elite. This time, I have used the CIE 1976 u'v' diagram. This diagram comes much closer to giving you a sense of what you are missing, compared to srgb, in line with what your eyes are sensitive to. The other, previously posted image I supplied GREATLY exaggerates the green, but that diagram, the CIE 1931 diagram, has become a little bit of a "standard." So, people who care about these diagrams generally know the 1931 diagram has exaggerated greens.

Second, the software I am using to make these gamut comparisons doesn't appear to have a way to give me % percentages of coverage of the srgb space, but I think my measurement device is in line with that notebookcheck has come up with. I have decided NOT to include the 3d diagrams that notebookcheck has supplied, since they are harder to read if you cant move them around.

Finally, yes, this lcd panel is very good for a laptop, but I know there ARE better ones in larger, more expensive laptops. If you are a graphic designer or a visual artist, you will think this is the best lcd ever. I agree with notebook check, the blacks and contrast are EXCELLENT, so its the brightness uniformity and gamma tracking. Overall this is very good LCD, but honestly, I was hoping for better rgb coverage.

I am giving you the link to the slightly technical discussion of the CIE 1976, but I think it might help. CIELUV - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Let me know if you have any other questions, maybe I can answer them.

PS: After re-reading my post, two things. First, the dotted boundary is the srgb space. Second, I tend to think my measurement device is better, since one of the things I noticed right away with the x220 ips screen, is that the greens are very yellow, I noticed this before I took any measurements of the screen. Otherwise, I think the two diagrams show similar results.

Mouse over the images below for the image names, you can see which one is mine, and which one is notebookcheck's.

 

Yes, i can 100% confirm everything in this post. Get a 90watt NON-ultraslim adapter, it should solve your throttling problems on an adapter.

The ultraslim adapter makes the touchpad jumpy.

 

Perfect! Just bought the ultraslim and never use the touchpad

 

When you say "get", do you mean "buy"? Because I don't see that as an acceptable solution when we don't have a choice on which power adapter comes with the system.

 

so what size screws will I need for the intel 320 ssd?

 

Agree. I got an old thinkpad 90w adapter from a friend, but I did give him $20 to keep it. I think lenovo should provide the 90w adapter with the laptop at least to those with the i7 and replace the 65w adapter with the 90w non-slim to those who already bought it.

 

It also makes the trackpoint choppy. You'll see what I mean, but it is still more usable than the touchpad.

 

Thanks for the detailed info there. I'm not sure that kind of gamut coverage is going to work for me as a photo pro. Guess I better just keep waiting for the HP 8560w with Dreamcolor.

 

I just installed a 2nd stick of 4gb ram on my i7 and my WEI scores shows a lot of improvement. I ran the test with the 90w adapter both times. The new memory installed is the G.SKILL 4GB 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Laptop Memory Model F3-10600CL9S-4GBSQ from Newegg, bought it for $31 when it was on special about 2 weeks ago.

1st screenshot attached - Previous WEI Score with 1x4gb ram (4gb total)
Proc -7.1
Memory - 5.9
Graphics - 4.7
Gaming Graphics - 6.2
Hard disk - 5.9

2nd screenshot attached - New WEI Score with 2x4gb ram (8gb total)
Proc -7.1
Memory - 7.5
Graphics - 5.9
Gaming Graphics - 6.3
Hard disk - 5.9

 

yep my wei went from 5.9 to 7.5 after adding new 8 gb 1333 ddr3, from 4 gb

 

Yeah, I can see that. But I'm actually more impressed about the graphics going from 4.7 to 5.9. Didn't think it was gonna be such a big difference on the graphics.

 

Got my i5 x220 in yesterday.

Laptop itself...no abnormalities construction wise, and everything worked out of the box. The screen bugs me a bit, as it seems pretty fragile for a thinkpad. The bottom half has the nice solid feel one would expect though.

Common issues present on mine....

I have the significant light bleed across the bottom with my IPS panel as well. It's only bad on a blank screen at full bright, and not noticeable with normal use, so even though it could be better, i'm fine with it.

trackpad... it didnt bother me at first, but the more I used it, the more it bugged the crap out of me. I tweaked the settings and got it a little better, but finally had enough and disabled it already in favor of the trackpoint.

Another couple things I find not ideal that I havent seen complained about...

Speakers....wasnt expecting much out of em to begin with considering the type notebook, but they just flat out SUCK! Not only are they extremely range limited and very tinny, they dont go very loud at all. Even though I knew they would be average at best, they still disappointed me. Worse laptop speakers I can remember hearing, easily.

Display brightness... might be able to tweak this for better operation, but to me, the right brightness of the IPS panel while plugged in is at it's max. Anything less is too dim. Just kind of odd having no headroom. While playing with that some, I also noticed you cant set a lower default brightness in BIOS like a lot of other machines...so you are stuck with the full bright well into windows booting up and desktop showing before the power management kicks it down. That is pretty annoying. This can be tweaked out as well using windows color management, but shouldnt have to go that far.

So those are my nit picks. Overall I am happy with the machine. Due to some DHL/USPS shenanigans, I only have 2gb ram in the machine right now. Even though newegg ships from an hour away from me and usually get stuff delivered next day...they decided to take my ram a few hours south of me to MD to sit for a couple days, pass me up again and end up in NY a couple hours north of the newegg warehouse the left from, sat there a few days, made it a little further south to about an hour north of where they left newegg, and has been sitting there since. It's been a week and a half now...rediculous! If it ever gets here, I'll have 6gb in the 220. I've already wiped the drive and installed a fresh normal copy of 7 x64 ultimate as well as the rest of my usual software. It's actually doing better then I expected with 2gb on an x64 system.

 

Recommendations on a low cost 90W non-slim adaptor? Yes I searched first...

 

Ditto. And I really don't mind the Anker 90w adapters too, I heard they are a wonderful alternative to the Lenovo non-slim 90w adapters. About 1/3rd of the cost, longer/thicker cables so they can handle more, lighter, but a little bigger.

 

Can anyone recommend a small X220 cary case? Just after a basic pouch with handles plus a pocket for the charger. nothing fancy or expensive. Any suggestions?

 

As somebody who enjoys color grading video, I can confidently say, yes.

I use an external monitor for my grades. I can do basic stuff in the field, but all serious work is done on an external monitor.

 

Agreed. I don't suppose you'd want to run a 3DMark with and without the extra RAM to see if there's a real world difference? I don't trust the random WEI scores, especially when it show something like that.

Either way, I was on the fence about grabbing extra RAM because of the stuff I read about throttling and because, honestly, 4 is working great atm. But this makes me want to fast track it. $30 for a significant improvement in gaming? Yes please! lol

 

I really don't play games, I was just surprised it improved that much. I definitely think the upgrade to the 8gb of ram is worth since it is so cheap. If you want you can try running 3DMark06 and check what score you are getting. I just ran it and got a score over 5000. I remember I ran it before with only 4gb of ram but can't remember what was the score at that time. Again, this test was performed with a 90w adapter so no throttling issue on my machine.

Also, from the notebookcheck.com review on the X220 with i5 2520m (graphics performance comparison 4gb vs 8gb - 2nd screenshot attached)...
A second RAM module increased the performance of the graphic unit in the benchmark by 10-30% (a significant increase). This increase was mostly thanks to the activated "Dual-Channel" mode (the big RAM storage of 8 GB contributed much less to the increase). This mode improves memory efficiency and thus raises the graphic performance.

 

Hi everyone, I'd like to make some comments regarding the audio drivers and subsystem on the x220.

I've made some comments before on this, but the audio circuitry on this laptop is really excellent. It approaches audiophile grade, really. Here are some of my observations on driver behavior.

A few days ago, a good friend gave me a high resolution recording of Beethoven's 7th symphony, at 88.2khz, 24bit, flac. I loaded it up into foobar2000 and noticed a strong hissing in the playback. At first I thought it was originally recorded on analog tape, and digitized, but my friend was able to confirm that the recording was indeed, dead silent. What I hypothesized was going on was that the audio driver was down-sampling the 24bit to 16bit, which lead to the dithering hiss that I thought was tape hiss at first.

I noticed that I was not able to configure the playback sample-rate and bit-rate in foobar2000, the option was grayed out. So, I went into: control panel, sound, speakers, properties, advanced, and set the default format to 96k, 24bit. I restarted foobar2000, played the high resolution flac again, and this time, the playback was stunning! No hiss, and the dynamic range was EXCELLENT. The laptop has DEAD SILENT playback. 24bit audio has an theoretical dynamic range of about -144db, I know when I boosted the gain on my headphone amp, I heard the room noise on the recording pretty well!

Ok, so at this point I was not satisfied that I had to make a system level change like that, to get proper playback for my high resolution files, so I started looking for another solution. I found an incompatibility of keeping that control panel setting at 96k 24bit, the google video chat plugin would not output audio when I had it set at 96k 24bit, so I switched it to 48k 24bit, and now the google video chat plugin sounds fine now.

Ok, so I knew that windows vista and win7 have this new feature called wsapi, which is a way for applications to stream bit-perfect data to the sound driver, completely bypassing the windows mixer. Foobar2000 has an output plugin to access this waspi feature. I installed the output plugin and tried playing the 88.2khz file. foobar2000 threw and error and said the sample format was incompatible. At first I thought i was stuck, but then I realized that foobar2000 has a dsp upsampling plugin! I enabled the upsampling plugin, and now i have really awesome playback, all upsampled to 96k, sent directly from foobar2000 to the driver with no intermediary processing by the windows mixer!

This setup sounds sweet, it really does. I have a nice headphone amp and a decent pair of cans, and this laptop is doing these uncompressed files justice.

 

Awesome Floz!

I agree that audio sounds surprisingly good (other than through the X220's 'speakers'), and even without WASAPI. Just using earbuds with the foobar DS driver, sounds really nice!

But I've also been using the WASAPI plug in, which is here in case anyone is interested:

foobar2000: Components Repository - WASAPI output support

Where is this exactly?

Even after installing WASAPI, I'm am still able to use the windows volume mixer in much the same way as before. You not?

 

audio does sound pretty good on x220t

 

The resampler can be found in the DSP section in the preferences. It is called Resampler (PPHS). load the plugin, and open its preferences. I chose 96k (you can do 192 if you think you can hear it I kept the "ultra" mode off as was suggested by a few webpages.

As for the master volume control, yes, that's the only thing that I can adjust on wsapi mode. Also, of course, no other program will be able to send sound to the device.

Also, for lovers of REAL music, I highly suggest this recording.

https://www.hdtracks.com/index.php?file=catalogdetail&valbum_code=HD723385252078

 

Done it. Thanks my friend.

Clicking on the volume mixer, it still shows separate mixers for 'Device Speaker', 'System Sounds' and 'Foobar'. Hopefully, that's as it should be.


Incidentally, I'm using an outboard DAC via usb that cost more than the X220!

 

Thanks for the tips, guys. I'm going to have to get that HDMI cable so I can send digital audio to my AVR and see how it sounds on real speakers.

 

to all x220t owners:

could somebody please try and draw diagonal straight lines over the screen edges using the stylus? I'd be really interested to see if all the digitizers produce wobbly lines like these and have a great offset around the edges.

cheers

 

I'm not really a true audiophile or anything but I've worked a little with recording and all and yea, the audio on the X220 is fantastic. Much better than my mom's Macbook Pro, which I can hear a soft hiss on. This thing is dead silent. The speakers are also pretty crazy for something this small, very neutral response and fairly powerful. Bass gets distorted obviously but that's because it's so small.

Thanks for the heads up about the sampling rate, I'll keep that in mind if I ever run into that issue.

 

Which DAC? Also, how does it compare to the x220?

 

I think there are driver defects. First, on DirectSound mode, foobar2000 should be able to select the right sample rate on its own, without having to go into the control panel to manually select it.

Second, the fact that the wsapi interface doesnt support 88.2khz is a little lame.

As for the speakers, actually, coming from a sony vaio TZ, I was bit underwhelmed with the x220's built in speakers.

 

Has anyone tried using the laptop display plus two external displays connected to the VGA and Display Ports, so yielding three active displays? Possible?

 

Not possible.

 

I do it, but with the Mini Dock 3.

 

Just as an update to my purchase, with so many bugs, mainboard replaced after two days, ridiculous 16:9 which is even more useless in portrait tablet mode in reality than I thought it would be, poor pen usage, irritating touch response, poor battery life when used for anything like decent usage I was able to return my x220t for a full refund. Luckily. Unfortunately it appears to have been stolen in transit with FedEx. Luckily I have it covered for the full value. I won't tell you what I have bought instead but it is far superior for the money!! and I thought buying a PC was easy..

 

Please do tell us, really

 

This 3 in 1. The headamp is top notch and it drives an amp or active monitors via a quality stepped attenuator. USB sounds really nice (no usb to spdif converter needed!) and Foobar's wasapi immediately recognises it. It has a relaxed, composed sound, a quality I associate with the best-sounding hifi:

Headamp 160D

That said if your thing is mainly classical, THIS is what I'd recommend (although I haven't actually heard it):

http://www.anedio.com/index.php/product/d1_overview



BTW, only thing about that resampler is it will resample everthing to 96k (if chosen), even 32 or 44k MP3 files, unless it's disabled manually every time?

Sorry Serial but I couldn't disagree more about the speakers sounding good. Seeing as Lenovo upped the screen to IPS, it was a shame they couldn't spend a few more cents on them. Never mind.

Although this is my first notebook, I still suspect that the Conexent gain is not as high as it should be. Only files that are recorded to the correct levels are loud enough, and not with much to spare. As soon as you listen to stuff recorded slightly lower (such as dj mixes that haven't been normalized to 0dB), it sounds a tad low, imho. And that's with sensitive earbuds. Nevertheless, it sounds really nice, as already mentioned.

 

I couldn't possibly...

 

Ok, I have read reviews of the Burson. Yeah, that's gonna lay the x220 to waste.

On the conexant chip, yep I feel the same way. Why not just a little bit more gain? The whole laptop sound system seems underpowered!

 

One question about the sound from external speakers...why is the volume so low when I connect my bose system through the headphone jack? I had it at max volume but still low compare to when I use my airport express to transmit the audio via itunes to my bose system.

 

For whatever reason, the system doesn't get very loud, either on the speakers or the jack. I'm hoping it's some type of software defect, but I'm pretty certain that's not the case.