Thinkpad Carbon X1 Extreme (upcoming)

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/perksoffer/deals/black-friday-preview

CODE: PAWGU$T

 

Those are the current deals. Does that mean the deals will be even better on BF?

 

No idea, don't know how anyone would know. Just happened to see this and posted it.

 

XPS 15 seems to beat the Razer somehow. I was all excited about the X1E but not if it underperforms the slower XPS chip (was looking at the 8850H version of X1E).

 

Any hints about which BIOS update gimps it? I don't want to have an XPS 15 type issue where they throttle it without telling anyone and lock BIOS rollbacks.

I have a WD Blue 1TB SATA SSD that I plan on putting in next to my 512 GB included NVMe SSD. There isn't that much difference for me tbh.

 

They all probably need to be undervolted to help maintain higher clocks.

 

It power throttles yes, it is more the benchmark performances I was referring to.

 

Someone I know on the /r/thinkpad server has the latest bios on his X1E (as is, from factory).

The CPU doesn't budge from 80c or 85c, seems to be thermally limited. Though reviewers have been able to push it to around 99c for some reason.

 

Can it charge with a 45w type c charger?

Sent from my CLT-L29 using Tapatalk

 

45w, maybe

 

Anyone who could confirm wether 2TB nvme drives work or not?
Or just check if Lenovo has put a drive size block directly in UEFI.
Thanks

 

I hope they work!

Just purchased a Samsung 970 Evo 2TB for my X1 Carbon. I was as not aware it could be blocked from working!

That would be a VERY APPLE (Richard) move if its blocked.

Will report if it works in my X1C Wednesday.

 

45W is only a third of what the AC adapter meant for this system provides (135W), so that seems a bit optimistic. Fwiw, I just bought this Nekteck 65W USB-C charger. I'd never heard of Nekteck (I'm a big Anker fan, but right now their chargers only reach 60W), but it was one of only chargers I could find that offered 65W other than Apple's, and it's USB-IF certified. And at $40 on Amazon I felt it was reasonably priced, especially considering that it came with a 2m / 6ft USB-C cable, also USB-IF certified. The Finsix Dart-C seemed interesting, but they're never in stock and I didn't like that the USB-C connector on one end was proprietary.

In addition, after I measured the total cord length of my "normal" Dell and Lenovo AC adapters and found they were ~9 ft, I looked for a 3m / 10ft USB-C cable capable of 5A / 100W (rather than the standard 3A / 60W) because I didn't want less slack than I already had. I ended up buying this Nekteck 2-pack since it was cheaper than an equivalent single StarTech cable, and the StarTech cable had prominent branding on the connectors that I didn't want to see all the time.

The charger and all cables seem well built, and my ThinkPad T480 and Latitude 7480 are both using 65W just fine as long as I use those cables. I tested a regular USB-C cable that's only rated for the normal 3A / 60W, and sure enough in that case the systems only drew 60W.

I originally planned to wait for someone to make a "road warrior travel charger" that had 65W USB-C plus 3x USB-A ports capable of at least 2A simultaneously, since it allow me to charge everything I carry around. But thinking about it, I realized there are times when I want to charge my laptop at a desk and my phone+tablet+battery pack on a nightstand, so having my laptop charger separate from my multi-port USB-A charger started to seem better. Also, a charger that could handle 95W total output wouldn't be a "wall wart"; it would be a brick with a power cord to the wall. The problem with that is that if the brick where you plug your devices in is just sitting on the floor, you've just lost about 1 ft of usable cord length compared to if you were were using a wall wart, based on the typical height of wall-mounted electrical outlets.

 

The Samsung 970 EVO 2TB works without issues.

 

X1E is 40% on perks discount it seems

 

Why no discounts like that in Germany?

 

check campus or educational discount

germany is under EU too so at base you get better warranty and customer rights (not sure about this part)

 

What is a "perks discount" and how can i get it?

 

pm me

 

That's so true. Unbelievable the huge differences in buying from usa or from some european site, like the italian one in my case.
If it wasn't for shipping troubles and warranty I'd buy from usa. I'd even accept the us keyboard.

 

Had a chat with a sales rep from lenovo web shop Italy to get a quote for i7,4k screen,32Gb RAM and 1 Tb drive.
He came back with a 2800€ offer.
Same config, with 64 Gb RAM (!!!) on USA lenovo shop totals approx 2400€ at today exchange rate.
I can't understand it.
Really

 

Darn!

I missed it!!!!

 

Anybody have a part number for the 32GB sticks?

 

Ordered the Thinkpad Carbon X1 Extreme FHD 16gb 512gb 8750h model last Wednesday with the 40 percent off via their EPP site. MSRP is exaggerated, but with the discount the price is actually lower than that of the Dell XPS 15 9570. Thought briefly about the 4K 32GB 1TB model, but the price difference of over 800 dollars and the worse battery life of models with a 4K screen really directed me to this FHD model. It still hasn't shipped though.

 

I think i might do the same. I was going to get the 4k 1tb 32gb model but it was always out of stock, and now i don't even see it listed anymore.

 

I get around 8 hours off a full charge on my i7/FHD P1

 

About 5 hrs on a 4K X1C.

 

Makes me think I made the right choice

 

Big thing for me on the 4K with this machine is going back and forth with VMs' resolution on the X1C and the left half of my Dell U3818DW and not having to change. I do about half my work at my desk, half in a recliner.

Road warrioring days are largely over so I rarely am off being plugged in to an outlet.

Best road battery machine in the past fifteen years was probably a 14" ThinkPad T430s with an HP EliteBook 840 G1 a close second. Ivy Bridge and Broadwell respectively.

 

Similar use for me, but what r u saying, u prefer the 4k or don't ?

 

Now that I no longer travel I prefer the 4K. The larger screen, the higher res, the higher nits.

NVMe SSDs on the past three machines don't hurt either. Faster disk and faster memory are always a good thing.

 

OK I'm going to order the maxed out model i think. Spoke with the salesman today.
But have you had any cooling problem with it?

And by the way, the guy above who mentioned his "40% perks" discount and then wouldn't share it...just ask the salesman for it! Lenovo sales people are quite flexible. They want their sales commission. Turns out my military discount is much better anyway.

 

No cooling problems. Fan kicks on occasionally, but nothing too ferocious. Have had my unit 5 weeks now and am well pleased with it - build, screen, speed, keyboard and mouse of course.

 

You must stress the CPU with VMWare but give it a go to stress the GPU as well while gaming or rendering.

 

Last game I played was Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards c.1994. An IT guy 35 yrs I'm on a machine 10, 12, 14, 16 hrs/day or more. No interest, time for games.

VMs work the SSD a little when WebSphere is spinning up, and sometimes when I have two going at the same time, but still not bad. When I pop more RAM in later to emulate a true n-tier environment we'll see.

 

Do any of you guys use a dock with it? If so, which?

 

The Lenovo P1 and X1Extr are identical except the former is somewhat better - and i just found out it is less expensive too! So I'm going with the P1.

 

is anyone else finding their package c-states aren't being utilized properly ? As in, the chip will idle in C2 with around 2W power draw as opposed to C8 with 0.5W. I have to restart to BIOS to get it working again temporarily.

edit: okay, this is quite odd. I noticed that Throttlestop was able to read my GPU's temperature, even though there was no activity on it per the tray icon. I disabled then reenabled the P2000 in the device manager, and lo and behold my CPU was able to properly go into low power states.

 

Better in what sense? I thought the difference in hardware was basically down to Quadro P vs GTX series GPUs

 

Yes, and I've revised my opinion as i noted on the what notebook should i buy board. I was under the impression that the Quadros were better, and for some people they are but not me i think. The only other known difference between them is the P1 includes the ethernet adapter to the ridiculous mini ethernet port and the x1E inexplicably does not and so you need to pay over $30 more to get that proprietary adapter with the P1E.

 

Hi

Has anyone upgraded the RAM on the X1E themselves?
There are only pre-configured units available in my country so I'm forced to manually upgrade.

Would these modules work?:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/352503326913

I believe the Samsung EVO 970 2TB drives will work fine.

Thanks

 

Yes, pretty easy.

They should, yes.

 

The only dock I'm aware of that provides full power to this system is the Lenovo Thunderbolt 3 Workstation Dock ( link), which plugs into both the TB3 and AC adapter connector and is itself fed by two separate AC adapters. That was discussed early in this thread a bit. If you're ok only getting 60W from a dock (or potentially no power at all, i.e. keeping the regular AC adapter connected as well), then there are some other solid dock solutions out there, depending on how much you want to spend and what connectivity you need, particularly in terms of number of displays and maximum resolutions. Plugable and StarTech both make some good options. My wife uses a Dell WD15 with her work T480 and personal XPS 13, both of which work fine with it.

I'm personally a fan of the Dell TB16 because unlike the "regular" Lenovo Thunderbolt 3 dock, the TB16 is much more flexible about how its available video bandwidth is allocated across its outputs, whereas Lenovo's dock dedicated an entire DP 1.2 channel to its USB-C/TB3 upstream port, leaving everything else to split the other channel, which really limited available display resolution options if you wanted to use just DP and HDMI instead. However, based on this table for the Workstation Dock, that appears not to be an issue anymore. The Workstation Dock will apparently drive dual 4K displays in any combination of outputs, or a single 5K display over the TB3 "output", or somehow dual 4K displays and a 1440p display all simultaneously. That last one really surprises me, because it suggests that the system uses DP 1.3 or better over TB3, although I believe that would require the Intel Titan Ridge TB3 controller, which I didn't think this system had. But it must, because the dock only connects to a single TB3 port on the laptop, which only allows two DisplayPort channels, and dual 4K + 1440p requires more bandwidth than 2x DP 1.2 channels can provide. In fact it normally requires more bandwidth than the entire 40Gb TB3 connection, before allocating anything for other traffic. Could it be using DisplayPort DSC? If so, very interesting, but then I'd expect it to support even higher-bandwidth display configurations. Strange....

 

Unless you need things like PXE boot support and MAC address passthrough, you can arguably pass on the proprietary Ethernet adapter in favor of a USB 3.0 / USB-C adapter. As long as you're willing to sacrifice one of those ports for this purpose, of course. Or there are USB Ethernet adapters that also include a passthrough USB 3.0 port so that you don't lose a port, but you'd still be losing a powered USB port and gaining an unpowered one.

 

Yeah I'd rather buy the adapter than waste a powered usb port. It's $31. I still haven't ordered the computer yet. How long is the quote the salesman gave me good for? - and then perhaps they'll reduce the price for black friday...or maybe someone will come out with something even better while I'm procrastinating!

Thanks a lot for the dock suggestions!

 

Perks is back at 40%+ again

 

Can anyone confirm that the X1E/P1 supports DisplayPort 1.4 over USB-C?? Other than the lack of media keys, the swapped Fn and Ctrl keys, and just-ok matte display, all of which I can live with since this system will be used with a dock most of the time, this system ticks all of my boxes, and these discounts on a brand new system are insane. But I'd really like to have DP 1.4 support for futureproofing. I know that current Intel GPUs don't support it, but it looks like the USB-C/TB3 display outputs are wired to the dGPU instead, so if this system also has the Intel Titan Ridge TB3 controller, DP 1.4 support would be possible.

 

Hi

Thanks for the response.

I notice you have the 4K display unit and you use VMs.
I myself will be using VMs, however, I read there are issues using a 4K display with VMware.

I also remote desktop to older servers, and there is no scaling at all (tested with my HTPC connected to 4k TV).

Are you having any issues?

I'm still on the fence regarding FHD or 4K.

Thanks

 

I think it was Server 2012 R2 / Windows 8.1 that first allowed RDP sessions to cause the RDP host to adopt the scale factor of the client you were connecting from. Maybe that was added in Server 2012 / Windows 8, though. But whichever it was, if you RDP to an older OS than that, then as mentioned above, there is no scaling, which makes the session virtually unusable from a 4K laptop display. You'll end up needing to drop the resolution on your display before you start the RDP session. As for performance, this thread was recently posted in the Dell forums about guest video performance when running on a 4K host display on a recent XPS 15. Maybe not an issue depending on what you need to do inside the guest, though. It sounds like the user in that thread was using their guest as their primary work environment.

 

I personally will be going FHD if I pull the trigger, for two key reasons:

- Scaling issues are still fairly prevalent even on the latest release of Windows 10, simply because so many applications don't scale well, including some MS applications.

- Even if all of your apps scale well, scale factor changes are still a huge pain. For example, if you log on while using the built-in 4K panel at 200% scaling and then later switch to external displays that use 100% scaling, Windows will still render internally at 200% scaling and use GPU scaling to adjust the rendered image downward, which doesn't look great. Same goes if you start with 100% scaling external displays and switch to your 200% scaling 4K display. Windows only changes its internal rendering scale factor when the user session begins, and it gets set based on the scale factor of the display that's designated as primary at that time. But having to log off and back on every time your display setup changes is obviously inconvenient for someone who might dock and undock frequently during the day. And that doesn't even address trying to use the built-in display and external displays simultaneously. That will never look good unless you can use the same scale factor on all displays. However, if you have external 4K displays that would use 175-200% scaling, then you should get the 4K internal display to better match those.

- I still don't like glossy displays, especially when I see one next to an anti-glare display.