Re:ThinkPad X1 Carbon
by fencepost on Friday December 30, 2016 @05:06PM
(#13287887)
Lenovo's prices for a lot of upgrades (RAM, SSD) tend to be high. My recommendation there is to upgrade the things that aren't reasonable to do yourself/later (screen, WiFi adapter if you have choices between 2x2 and 3x3, backlit keyboard, fingerprint reader). RAM and HD upgrades on Thinkpads tend to be pretty easy (though I don't know about the X1 never having looked at one), so for those it may be better to get the cheapest option then upgrade on your own.
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Yes, I actually did that with my SSD and memory. One of the things I miss of Thinkpads is the GPU. It seems like in the past two or three years it's been increasingly hard to find a Thinkpad T with GPU. I'm aware that the W have them, but those are beasts. I read somewhere that you could buy them through other countries, like Japan, but didn't look much into it.
They're not mentioned very often, but it looks like at this point for the T4xx you have to go with the "p" models to get a Nvidia GPU - the T460 and T460s are only Intel, as I understand it the T460p is somewhere between the T460 and the W product line - a little bigger, a little more expandable, etc.
Looks like you can also only get the GPU with the i7-6820HQ, so out of all the T product line there's a single CPU/GPU combination that's not using the Intel graphics. That may in part be related to the significant improvements in Intel's graphics capabilities in recent generations - starting around the HD4000 in the third-generation processors the GPUs are actually reasonably capable, and they've improved rapidly even from that point.