very slow X220 i7-2620, please help!

Hello to the community. i just received my X220 i7-2620 and installed additional 4gb ram. I thought I had purchased the fastest laptop in the market, however, it performs worse than my 3-year-old dual-core HP, especially for opening applications. I downloaded all windows upgrades and defragmented the hd. Is the particular machine I got a lemon or am I supposed to tweak some settings to get a decent performance? Please help!

 

You need to be more specific about your old and new systems.

 

I suppose the first thing I would do is take out the only thing that has changed since it left the factory......the memory stick you added.

Then please benchmark it (at least run the WEI scores and get back to us with specifically where it is "slow."

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe there is a throttling problem common to all X220 machines with the i7 2620M.

 

I do not find that to be the case on mine.

 

Not 'to all'. Many people on this forum have reported having the problem, but many others, including myself, do not. Forums tend to blow things out of proportion

 

And throttling would not impact app starting performance...

 

What hard drive is in your X220? That's likely your bottleneck.

 

I just got my x220 Tablet as well with i7 and it's a lot slower than my nearly 2 year old desktop with i7. I expected this puppy to be blazing fast, but programs are not very quick to open up, and when browsing through photos, it even takes a second to render each one...

Thoughts?

 

Post your WEI scores so people can try to narrow down the bottleneck.

 

Here's my WEI...The graphics card is the weak link...but that shouldn't slow down the whole system.

Component Details Subscore Base score
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2620M CPU @ 2.70GHz 7.1 4.7
Determined by lowest subscore

Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB 5.9
Graphics Intel(R) HD Graphics Family 4.7
Gaming graphics 1696 MB Total available graphics memory 6.2
Primary hard disk 225GB Free (287GB Total) 5.9
Windows 7 Ultimate

System
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Manufacturer LENOVO
Model 429637U
Total amount of system memory 4.00 GB RAM
System type 64-bit operating system
Number of processor cores 2

Storage
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Total size of hard disk(s) 297 GB
Disk partition (C 225 GB Free (287 GB Total)
Media drive (E CD/DVD
Disk partition (Q 913 MB Free (10 GB Total)

Graphics
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Display adapter type Intel(R) HD Graphics Family
Total available graphics memory 1696 MB
Dedicated graphics memory 64 MB
Dedicated system memory 0 MB
Shared system memory 1632 MB
Display adapter driver version 8.15.10.2342
Primary monitor resolution 1680x1050
Secondary monitor resolution 1366x768
DirectX version DirectX 10

Network
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Network Adapter Intel(R) 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection
Network Adapter Intel(R) Centrino(R) Advanced-N 6205

 

Just desolder that i7 and solder on a 980X and all your problems are solved.

In all seriousness, overall snappiness isn't all dependent on the CPU, what hard drive do you have? Does your system pass all diagnostics? Also there are pretty well documented issues with the i7 and throttling issues.

 

WEI means nothing. If you have an i7, you should expect throttling on the 65 watt adapter. Get a 90watt non-slim, and you should have no issues.

 

Shouldn't power supply be fairly irrelevant? I have the power settings set to Max Performance on both Lenovo software and Win 7, then shouldn't it be full throttle all the time?

I have not added the extra 4GB of ram yet, but thing is driving me a bit nutz. I expect it to be MUCH faster. IE pages aren't loading, applications take forever to open, pictures don't render quickly, and even typing is sometimes delayed!

Please help. Spent a small fortune on "the best" and am getting very frustrated.

 

You can't really expect an ultraportable to beat a Core i7 desktop.

On the other hand, I don't think it should be that slow as you describe it either. Could it be some software running in the background and eating up the system resources? (Did you check it with Task Manager?)

 

are you using the laptop with the battery installed?

 

of course. I think the latest bios update did help...but not a huge amount. On some boots, it seems blazing...then if I reboot again, it's slow.

Really ticking me off.

 

I'd try backing up your personal data, and doing a factory restore.

uninstall all the thinkvantage programs you don't use.

also, once you go SSD, you never go back.

 

Jared2, did you ever find a solution to this? This thread's a bit old, but directly on point. I have the same model X220, same processor, and I've had the same issue with my laptop ever since I got it fall 2011. Checked my scores and they are virtually the same. I'm hoping you found a solution. Thanks!

AND, I do have a 90W power adapter, though I don't know if that was ever an issue.

 

This is very strange. It must be a driver or software issue. Also, he mentioned replacing the RAM, so maybe it is set VERY slow or something? My WEI scores are as follows for my i7 system:


Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2640M CPU @ 2.80GHz 7.1
Memory (RAM) 8.00 GB 7.5
Graphics Intel(R) HD Graphics Family 6.3
Gaming graphics 1696 MB Total available graphics memory 6.3
Primary hard disk 89GB Free (132GB Total) 7.7

Obviously I have an SSD, which helps, but my other scores are also significantly higher than above, especially for the processor and RAM, which is worrying. Did you replace your RAM? You should make sure it is running at SPEC. Also, check to make sure you have the newest drivers for everything.

 

if you guys' hard drives are 5400 rpm, change them.

Time to go SSD

 

This, it's the hard drive speed that generally dictates the responsiveness of the system. 5400RPM don't really cut the mustard as a boot drive nowadays, you should be looking at 7200RPM at least but even that speed is not good enough for some. SSD prices are tumbling lately and are much faster than the best spindle based drive can offer, for the X220 I would consider a mSATA SSD for the OS while using the base hard drive for storage purposes only.