Thinkpad T61 vs T61P

Message

deathcon1 · Post by **deathcon1** » Tue Jun 10, 2008 9:56 pm

So I`m ordering a Thinkpad T6 series laptop, and debating between the standard and the P. The only differences between the two would be the P has a Quadro 570m and the standard has an Intel X3100. My main concern is battery life. All the reviews I`ve been reading say 3.5-4.5 hrs, vista, 50% backlight for the Quadro (assuming Aero enabled, but not specified), and the X3100 claims to have only 1/2 hour more life. Anyone using either of these in a Gentoo environment and care to testify the battery life on each?

System config will be:
Intel A/B/G/N wireless
Bluetooth
Fingerprint
WSXGA+ screen (1680x1050)
4GB RAM (Lenovo stock)
Core 2 Duo T9100 (2.5GHz 6mb L2 cache)
160GB 7200RPM drive
Quadro 570M (256MB) or Intel X3100 GMA 965

P.S. anyone have the WUXGA 1950x1200 screen? Thoughts on its usefulness?

ppurka · Post by **ppurka** » Wed Jun 11, 2008 2:26 am

T61, with NVS 140M. Typically shows an acpi estimate of >3 hrs. This is with a 6 cell battery and 15.4" display.

V0rtex · Post by **V0rtex** » Thu Jun 12, 2008 9:00 pm

I have the T61P and absolutely love it. It is the best laptop I have ever owned. When I bought the laptop I went with a lot of the best specs I could (except for things I was going to upgrade for cheaper on my own). Here are the specs I chose:

Intel 4965 A/B/G/N Wireless
Bluetooth
Fingerprint reader
Wireless USB
WUXGA (yeah I went with the 1920x1200)
2GB RAM (Now upgraded to 4GB)
Core 2 Duo T9300
80GB HDD (Now upgraded to 320GB Western Digital)
Quadro 570M
9-cell battery

I am very happy with the WUXGA screen but it's a personal preference really - I usually take advantage of as much screen real estate as I can get and the 1920x1200 gives me plenty of it

. If you have trouble reading the smaller-sized text, however, you might want the lower resolution instead.

Originally I went with the cheapest HDD and only 2G (single stick) of RAM because it cost less and I planned to upgrade both of them once I got the laptop. I have since done the upgrades and am in the process of resolving one issue where the MTRR's don't get properly configured with 4G of RAM. I have figured out the correct ranges and am almost done fixing this problem, however, so you may want to get in contact with me if you go with the 4G of RAM.

I went with the 9-cell battery when I bought mine but recently I noticed that Lenovo no longer offers this as an option on their site when buying a laptop. I don't know why they stopped offering it - the 9-cell battery works great! I have fine-tuned all of my power settings and highly customized every aspect of my kernel to get the best possible performance/battery life I can and my battery indicator usually tells me I have around 4.5 - 5 hrs after a full charge - it seems like it lasts me somewhere close to 4.5 hrs although I've never really timed it to know for certain and most of the time I don't let it run the battery dead either. Vista lasts much less on the battery (3.5 hrs I think), but then I can't quite fine-tune vista as much as I can Gentoo.

One thing I would consider given that the difference is pretty much just the graphics is whether the X3100 supports a full-resolution framebuffer. I know for a fact that the Quadro does because I use it, but I don't know about the X3100. It may not make a difference to you either way but I personally like having a 1920x1200 framebuffer splash while booting - I'm a big fan of eyecandy and sometimes spend way too much time trying to make my laptop graphically rich

deathcon1 · Post by **deathcon1** » Thu Jun 12, 2008 9:49 pm

Vortex, thank you that's exactly the kind of review I was looking for (and, with the popularity of the laptop, I'm sure others will as well). Could you post some screenshots of your laptop doing various things with the WUXGA resolution? There is a huge lack of good screenshots (just people taking pictures of their laptop) Somethings like looking at Google's homepage, some random text in OO, and since we seem to both love eye-candy, your desktop? Just some every-day things, and by comparison (if you have the time) at WSXGA+ resolutions?

V0rtex · Post by **V0rtex** » Thu Jun 12, 2008 11:12 pm

deathcon1: Sure thing, I'll take some screenshots as soon as I get home from work

. That reminds me, I keep forgetting to install OpenOffice.

pdw_hu · Post by **pdw_hu** » Fri Jun 13, 2008 2:22 pm

I've a Lenovo N200 with just a bit slower specs, and an X3100, and it can do widescreen framebuffer. I use it with vesafb in 1280x800 with vga=866.

Link31 · Post by **Link31** » Fri Jun 13, 2008 2:52 pm

V0rtex wrote:I went with the 9-cell battery when I bought mine but recently I noticed that Lenovo no longer offers this as an option on their site when buying a laptop. I don't know why they stopped offering it - the 9-cell battery works great! I have fine-tuned all of my power settings and highly customized every aspect of my kernel to get the best possible performance/battery life I can and my battery indicator usually tells me I have around 4.5 - 5 hrs after a full charge - it seems like it lasts me somewhere close to 4.5 hrs although I've never really timed it to know for certain and most of the time I don't let it run the battery dead either. Vista lasts much less on the battery (3.5 hrs I think), but then I can't quite fine-tune vista as much as I can Gentoo.

Could you tell me what you tuned on your kernel and your system ?
Because I tried everything I could do to improve power management, but my 9-cell battery only lasts 3 hours (with half brightness and wifi enabled)...

As of the review... The screen is a bit too dim. The processor is quite good for use with Gentoo (OOo compiled in 3 hours).
The Quadro 570M is fine with most games, although IMHO the Linux drivers are not optimized enough.

deathcon1 · Post by **deathcon1** » Sat Jun 14, 2008 3:15 pm

V0rtex wrote:deathcon1: Sure thing, I'll take some screenshots as soon as I get home from work . That reminds me, I keep forgetting to install OpenOffice.

Do you have the screens? I've been checking back here once an hour or 2 at work looking for them

V0rtex · Post by **V0rtex** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 8:03 am

Sorry, I did take screenshots as soon as I got home but then I got distracted with my rush to get everything ready for camping this weekend and forgot to upload them. Here you go:

Copying a file

Compiz-Fusion cube

Google open in Firefox

Watching a movie in mplayer (also shows Gnome's fancy composited volume indicator)

Just shows some basic power info (after unplugging my laptop for a few minutes and attempting a few screenshots trying to get it right)

These are all with 1920x1200 resolution - I'm going to try and get my brother to take some screenies from his laptop (his is a T61p only with the 1680x1050 screen instead).

The battery life it shows isn't 4.5 hours like I said before, but I also don't have everything power-optimized when taking that screenshot. For power optimizations, I'll generally turn the backlight as low as it goes (in the BIOS even sometimes since the BIOS setting lets you take it lower than the ACPI driver will) and disable various unused things like the bluetooth, sometimes wireless networking, etc.

Link31: there are a number of things I've done such as the items I just mentioned above. If you'd like to see my kernel config I can post it here or private message it to you or something but most of what I did is strip out almost everything that I don't need and I configured various power-saving things such as the newer tickless idle option. Please note that if I do post my kernel config it would be for the latest masked version of gentoo-sources (I like to unmask my kernels so as to use the latest stuff).

Link31 · Post by **Link31** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 3:36 pm

V0rtex wrote:The battery life it shows isn't 4.5 hours like I said before, but I also don't have everything power-optimized when taking that screenshot. For power optimizations, I'll generally turn the backlight as low as it goes (in the BIOS even sometimes since the BIOS setting lets you take it lower than the ACPI driver will) and disable various unused things like the bluetooth, sometimes wireless networking, etc.

That may explain why my battery doesn't last as long as yours. But I don't know how do you work with the backlight set to the minimum, because the screen is barely readable at its normal backlight level with some sun light. And it seems strange that lowering backlight and disabling some devices increases so much battery life...

V0rtex wrote:Link31: there are a number of things I've done such as the items I just mentioned above. If you'd like to see my kernel config I can post it here or private message it to you or something but most of what I did is strip out almost everything that I don't need and I configured various power-saving things such as the newer tickless idle option.

I also stripped out everything which was not related to my hardware... Post your .config if you want, maybe I missed something obvious, and it may be useful for other people as well. But actually I think that the most power-consuming things are located in userspace, like e.g. hdapsd (btw, do you use hdapsd ?).

V0rtex · Post by **V0rtex** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 6:39 pm

It's all a matter of your working environment I guess - a lot of the time my working environment isn't overly bright so it hasn't been a huge issue for me but yeah if you're outside in the sun or in a more brightly lit room it could be a problem to have the screen too dim. In those cases, if I'm not going to be using the laptop for more than maybe an hour or two I just turn the brightness up and don't worry about it

The screen on my T61p definitely can't go as bright as my last laptop (Dell Inspiron 1720) but I've found that for my uses it's not a problem at all.

I actually haven't gotten around to installing HDAPS yet though I have been meaning to try it out for awhile. Actually I've been somewhat curious how well it works - I think I read somewhere that it has some sensitivity issues or something. Have you had any problems with it?

Link31 · Post by **Link31** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 9:31 pm

Yes, it is a bit too sensitive. A weak hit on the table is enough to make it park the hard drive. Apart from that and the frequent ACPI calls (which wake up the CPU quite often), it works pretty well.

anton_kg · Post by **anton_kg** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 8:20 am

You can change both values by modifying:
/etc/conf.d/hdapsd (sensitivity)
and
/sys/devices/platform/hdaps/sampling_rate (frequency)
files

BTW, hdaps-related ebuils are out date in the portage.
You can find an updated ebuilds in bugs.gentoo.org and also in (easy to use) sectools overlay:
http://gentoo.o0o.nu

V0rtex · Post by **V0rtex** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 7:05 pm

deathcon1: here are some 1680x1050 screenshots that I got my brother to take on his T61p.

Google in Firefox

Mplayer

Showing powertop in a terminal

Compiz-fusion coolness

Compositing volume control

deathcon1 · Post by **deathcon1** » Tue Jul 01, 2008 2:05 am

V0rtex: What did you do to fix your MTRR? I can't find the settings in the BIOS.

stewart_butler · Post by **stewart_butler** » Wed Jul 02, 2008 7:51 pm

I'm about to buy one myself, but have a major question before I purchase it.

The one thing that drives me crazy about Linux is the NVIDIA support. On my current laptop (Sager NP2090), if I hook up the external VGA I get scanlines on the screen due to the NVIDIA power management scaling and it drives me nuts. This is, in fact, the ONLY reason I am getting rid of this laptop. I am thus hesitant to buy the T61P; after the problems I've had with the m8600GT that I have in my current laptop, even the (very tempting) offer of 1920x1200 seems to sour.

My question: how good is Linux support for the Intel chipset? Is it better than the Nvidia? Does anyone experience similar problems with external VGA on ANY card? And are there any problems with the Thinkpad Essential dock?

Stewart

deathcon1 · Post by **deathcon1** » Wed Jul 02, 2008 10:41 pm

This is my second laptop with an nVidia card, and I have never had a problem with them. BTW, what nVidia drivers where you using? The open-source or closed source? I use the closed source and don't have any problems with them. Got an 8800GT on my desktop that's working fine with dual monitors, gaming, etc... all working and yes, I do have my desktop to be as power-efficient as a desktop with an 8800GT can be. I'd check your nVidia config files.

To answer your question though, I have a friend with the Intel X3100, and it makes an awful noise whenver he does any sort've 3D acceleration (althougn not in GLXGEARS, which is the opposite of my case...weird.) If you're not going to be doing any sort of gaming, rendering, or otherwise anything that needs any sort of acceleration then the X3100 is an alright choice, but I'm a huge fan of dedicated hardware, so nVidia is still my choice.

The dock is reported to work across all T60/T61(P) series laptops and the graphics card is independent of that.

stewart_butler · Post by **stewart_butler** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 1:14 am

Um, as far as I know the Nvidia problem I'm talking about only applies to laptops; it is the powermizer power management underclocking that causes the issue, and it is relatively intermittent. Also causes issues with compositing.

I don't really use any 3D acceleration, so that isn't an issue, but I may still get the T61p. All I _really_ want out of it is the 1920x1200 resolution.

Has your friend found any solution to the noise problem? The ThinkWiki had some recommendations on how to fix that...

Is anyone else with the T61 still having this problem? I'm getting the one that comes pre-installed with Suse 10, so I thought there wouldn't be any big issues.

d2_racing · Post by **d2_racing** » Thu Jul 03, 2008 3:07 am

If you have the money, go for the T61P.

deathcon1 · Post by **deathcon1** » Thu Jul 10, 2008 1:46 pm

I've found a workaround for the sound problem, I enabled the "Aggressve power saving" option in the kernel, set to 10 seconds before it completely powers off the sound card.

I'm still getting MTRR problems, can anyone assist?

termite · Post by **termite** » Thu Jul 10, 2008 2:52 pm

MTRR problems will be fixed in the kernel in a few weeks, apparently.

For now, you need to set your own table. Have a look at http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-69 ... -mtrr.html. If that isn't sufficient, pm me and I'll help out.

deathcon1 · Post by **deathcon1** » Thu Jul 10, 2008 9:14 pm

Which kernel version? I've already tried going to 2.6.25-r6 which combined with MTRR:4 in my grub.conf let me get 3/6 MTRR's working, and made a noticable improvement in performance, but there's still alot lacking given this systems power.

Code: Select all

reg00: base=0xc0000000 (3072MB), size=1024MB: uncachable, count=1
reg01: base=0x13c000000 (5056MB), size=  64MB: uncachable, count=1
reg02: base=0x00000000 (   0MB), size=4096MB: write-back, count=1
reg03: base=0x100000000 (4096MB), size=1024MB: write-back, count=1
reg04: base=0xbff00000 (3071MB), size=   1MB: uncachable, count=1
reg05: base=0xd5000000 (3408MB), size=   8MB: write-through, count=1

P.S. I have no idea where that 5GB comes from; I have 4GB RAM and 256MB from my Quadro 570M...no SWAP or anything.

Code: Select all

free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3882        397       3485          0         13        134
-/+ buffers/cache:        249       3632
Swap:            0          0          0

dmesg reports:

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system 00:00: iomem range 0x0-0x9ffff could not be reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0xc0000-0xc3fff has been reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0xc4000-0xc7fff has been reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0xc8000-0xcbfff has been reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0xcc000-0xcffff has been reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0x0-0x0 could not be reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0x0-0x0 could not be reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0x0-0x0 could not be reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0x0-0x0 could not be reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0xe0000-0xe3fff could not be reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0xe4000-0xe7fff could not be reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0xe8000-0xebfff could not be reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0xec000-0xeffff could not be reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0xf0000-0xfffff could not be reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0x100000-0xbfffffff could not be reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0xfec00000-0xfed3ffff could not be reserved
system 00:00: iomem range 0xfed4c000-0xffffffff could not be reserved
system 00:02: ioport range 0x164e-0x164f has been reserved
system 00:02: ioport range 0x1000-0x107f has been reserved
system 00:02: ioport range 0x1180-0x11bf has been reserved
system 00:02: ioport range 0x800-0x80f has been reserved
system 00:02: ioport range 0x15e0-0x15ef has been reserved
system 00:02: ioport range 0x1600-0x165f could not be reserved
system 00:02: iomem range 0xf0000000-0xf3ffffff could not be reserved
system 00:02: iomem range 0xfed1c000-0xfed1ffff could not be reserved
system 00:02: iomem range 0xfed14000-0xfed17fff could not be reserved
system 00:02: iomem range 0xfed18000-0xfed18fff could not be reserved
system 00:02: iomem range 0xfed19000-0xfed19fff could not be reserved
system 00:02: iomem range 0xfed45000-0xfed4bfff could not be reserved
PCI: Failed to allocate mem resource #6:20000@f0000000 for 0000:01:00.0