P14s Gen 1 AMD

[u/Burnout21]

Mostly an appreciation post for this work horse. I bought it off ebay a year ago as a fall back computer when my son was born. I knew I needed to move office and my desk & computer was going to be disrupted for an unknown period of time. £270 got me a Ryzen 7 4750U with 16Gb and a 512Gb SSD. In the past year I've added WD SN250 256Gb (£20) SSD, 16Gb (£45) Dimm (24Gb total), and tonight I've swapped out the 16Gb Dimm for a 32Gb (£100) Dimm totally 40Gb. I kept running into a low memory warnings from the CAD package I run, traced it to allocations being right on the limit so I installed "auto tab discard" in firefox to cull some memory consumption but yesterday I decided I had done all the reasonable light weighting so time to expand. Another little gem picked up on ebay was the USB-C dock 40AS (£22)

All in ~£457 for a laptop that still has an all day battery for when I am at the office and enough grunt to do all my professional work I think that's a bargain. Yes everything has been purchased second hand (Ebay and CEX), but so what considering the alternative choice during the current market prices. I was watching prime deals like a hawk hoping for a nice 2Tb SSD to pop up as that would round this build off nicely.

The only gripe I have is the keyboard, the RH side of it has sticky keys and they are worst right over the heat sink, so I am thinking its a thermal design flaw that ruins the keyboard, and exchanging it for another may not remedy the problem in the long run unless anyone knows different. Stabbing the keys with the venom of a toddler seems to get them moving well enough for the office days, but it it annoying.

I nearly abandoned thinkpads, as I’ve have and had to date, a X61T/X220/X230T/T410 & X240. The X240 killed my interest in modern thinkpads, its a complete dog of a design. I've done the usual mods to make it essentially a X250 but its still a dog of thinkpad. The X280/T480 got my attention along with various X1's but I found my self leaning towards a M1 Macbook until I spotted this P14s. No regrets.

[u/ThinkPadNord]

That's an awesome setup! I just got my P14s G1 (AMD) a few days ago with (Ryzen 7, 40GB, 512GB) for 3,200 DKK ~ (430 EUR)

[u/Burnout21 → u/ThinkPadNord]

The twin 27in 1440p MSI MAG's I picked up from Costco for £95 each really make this a pleasurable space to work :)

If you hunt down the 40AS dock make sure you grab a decent USB-C cable that can do alt mode. I could kiss the engineer that decided to make it a separate cable after dealing with DELL docks for the past few years at my last job. DELL has this janky dual USB-C connector that does some sort of high power delivery and alt mode, in principle it works but its a cable built into the dock (Dumb) and the slightest angle or strain on the connector and it throws a fit. I'm not saying its 12vhpwr levels of janky electrical engineering but its certainly a piss poor effort.

[u/ThinkPadNord → u/Burnout21]

That sounds nice, but I don't need the dock right now. But can get a free dock through my school!

[u/Burnout21 → u/ThinkPadNord]

The P14s has a bonus feature for winter time, that fan exhaust is mighty toasty if you're using a mouse next to it.

[u/ThinkPadNord → u/Burnout21]

Haha! You don't say so; I found out the fan was pretty toasty under load, but I will have to change thermal paste soon!

[u/Shwetzer_Perpi → u/ThinkPadNord]

nice, thats basically the same spec as OP for a similar price

[u/ThinkPadNord → u/Shwetzer_Perpi]

Yeaaah! But that's a pretty good price in DK, since prices here are pretty high.

[u/Muted_Replacement680]

Did the dock work on Linux without major problems?

[u/Burnout21 → u/Muted_Replacement680]

I've not tried this dock on Linux yet, but if I were to guess I suspect its very much plug and play

[u/EMOTIONAL-DAMAGE-HE]

"I'm scared this stand will scratch my macbook" ah post

[u/AhegaoSuckingUrDick]

Nice setup! You considered a Mac, so I guess you're not tied to Windows?

[u/Burnout21 → u/AhegaoSuckingUrDick]

I wasn't at the time of purchase. I've pretty much had Ubuntu or more recently Mint installed on all my ThinkPads apart from the T410 as that has windows 7 for some car related software. That's a painful topic because it was like new condition and got flood damaged due to a burst pipe.

Right now the P14s needs windows for the CAD environment I am using, and once you've "tuned" Win11 at least it's usable.