Lenovo ThinkPad W510 Notebook

Found on the left hand side of the W510 notebook is a DisplayPort output, VGA output, two USB 3.0 ports, one eSATA/USB combination port, FireWire 400, and a wireless on/off switch.

On the rear of the ThinkPad W510 are one USB port, one modem port, and the DC power supply connection.

Over on the right hand side is an ExpressCard slot, SDHC card reader, optical drive, Gigabit Ethernet, and a Kensington lock slot. From the bottom are the usual compartments for accessing the 2.5-inch Serial ATA drive bay, the screws that keep the keyboard secure, and the RAM slots.

In terms of running Linux on the Lenovo ThinkPad W510, it is actually quite easy and a pleasant experience. After our Windows 7 x64 testing of this notebook was completed, we simply booted Ubuntu 10.04 LTS from a flash drive and proceeded with the installation. Everything had worked "out of the box" just fine with the distribution that is using the Linux 2.6.32 kernel. There was even kernel mode-setting support for the NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M GPU via the Nouveau driver, but no 3D acceleration since Ubuntu does not ship the Nouveau Gallium3D driver at this point. However, when loading up the proprietary NVIDIA driver the Quadro FX 880M worked well with 2D/3D acceleration, VDPAU, power management, and other features of this mobile workstation GPU.

The audio, WiFi, SDHC card reader, 2.0MP web camera, and all other key functionality had worked well too under Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with the stock package set. We have no complaints at all about running Ubuntu Linux on the ThinkPad W510 except for the backlight controls not going into affect until after rebooting the system and suspend-and-resume not working under Ubuntu 10.04. For some more Linux benchmarks from the Lenovo ThinkPad W510 with its Intel Core i7 720QM, 4GB of system memory, 320GB Hitachi HTS72503, and NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M GPU we compared its performance to the recently reviewed ZaReason Verix and an older Lenovo ThinkPad T61.