Open Source Thinkpad T420 Battery Design

Re:Open Source Thinkpad T420 Battery Design by iam4722202468 on Saturday August 29, 2020 @07:20PM (#24320111)

The T420 is old, but still has some advantages over laptops currently on the market. Up until 2018 many laptops still had dual core cpus like the i7-7500u which are worse than the i7-3840qm that can be put in a T420, and the few currently available laptops that have 1440p displays and quad core cpus are still pretty expensive. Some other reasons people still use the laptop are being able to use coreboot with it and the upgradability of it. It's really cheap to upgrade the laptop to work with bluetooth 5 and wifi 6 and multiple ssd's can be added using the two 2.5" slots and the one msata slot. Using this, someone could make a large 150wh or even 200wh battery that would let this laptop last longer than most new laptops.

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Re:Open Source Thinkpad T420 Battery Design by Joeri on Sunday August 30, 2020 @02:43AM (#24321806)

For reference, I just looked up the benchmarks for the i7 3840qm. Seems to perform in the same ballpark as an i5 10210u for multicore, which is the base cpu in the current thinkpads. Intel really hasn’t made faster cpu’s in a long time.

https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/929

https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i5-10210...

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Re:Open Source Thinkpad T420 Battery Design by floatboth on Sunday August 30, 2020 @10:41AM (#24323240)

The 3840QM has three times the TDP of a 10210U. A modern 45W part is going to be that much faster. Meanwhile the modern 15W part is also going to be a lot better in bursty single core desktop workloads.

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Re:Open Source Thinkpad T420 Battery Design by zhte415 on Sunday August 30, 2020 @09:06AM (#24322945)

Not old. Perhaps forever young. My T420 is 9 years old, both batteries are shot but that's my 'desktop', also have an X220, identical last-of-a-generation keyboards, with a fresh 9 cell battery for when on the move. Upgraded with SSDs and RAM; probably not great for gaming or video editing, but no interest in that and there's a PCMCIA bay sitting there just for such applications. I can't see myself changing for at least 5 years, and wouldn't change to something that doesn't have an excellent keyboard, which rules out most laptops including and especially Mac, nor something which can is hardened enough to survive being a little bashed on the floor, in backpack, left outside in sun or snow.

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Re:Open Source Thinkpad T420 Battery Design by dividedbyzero on Sunday August 30, 2020 @03:30PM (#24325250)

> something that doesn't have an excellent keyboard, which rules out most laptops including and especially Mac

Probably not very relevant to you, since Macs don't like being bashed into the floor too much, but the new post-butterfly keyboards are really nice IMO. Way nicer than that of my late 2013 MBP that got a new keyboard last year. They've really fixed that issue for me, and you still get the Touchbar with a physical ESC key, which IMO is a lot more useful than F-keys ever were.

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Re:Open Source Thinkpad T420 Battery Design by puzzlingcaptcha on Sunday August 30, 2020 @07:45AM (#24322723)

>laptops that have quad core cpus are still pretty expensive

They are really not. If you are after performance on a tight budget, you can get a ThinkPad E14 with 6-core (that's 6 physical cores) Ryzen APU and 16GB of RAM for under 900 dollars [1]. You still get a good quality keyboard and the trackpoint nub if that's your thing (I'm a happy user of an older Thinkpad E485).

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-e-ser...

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Re:Open Source Thinkpad T420 Battery Design by iam4722202468 on Sunday August 30, 2020 @12:24PM (#24323839)

I was looking at the T14 AMD laptop a few days ago, if it had a 4k or 1440p display option I'd considering getting it.

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Re:Open Source Thinkpad T420 Battery Design by andromeduck on Sunday August 30, 2020 @01:19AM (#24321535)

The display quality is so far behind more modern laptops like the macbook pro though.

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Re:Open Source Thinkpad T420 Battery Design by iam4722202468 on Sunday August 30, 2020 @01:31AM (#24321578)

One of the mods that can be done is adding 1440p 14" ips display, like the LP140QH1-SPB1 from the carbon x1 gen 2. It's not as good as a new macbook pro display, but it's very nice to use.

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Re:Open Source Thinkpad T420 Battery Design by numpad0 on Sunday August 30, 2020 @01:46AM (#24321626)

Note that ThinkPads’ display quality always had been far behind competitors across the industry, at times of launch of each models, not against future laptops.

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