AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U Linux Performance

[Brane215]

As people observed here, Lenovo has totally ruined ThinkPad line. It used to stand out and mean something. It was known for its robustness ( spill-proof, shock-proof etc), uncompromising keyboard ( so not just "great" keyboard) and repairability and extensibility.

Now 99% of that is gone. ThinkPad came to the point, where it's hard to tell it apart from IdeaPad.

I'm totally sure that, had they staid on that original trajectory, Thikpads would have as die-hard public as Apple has.
EVEN TODAY, people are looking for used prehistoric Thinkpads ( T430 etc) just because of old keyboard.

Who cares about even 5mm more or extra lbs on such machine ?

[krzyzowiec]

5.5 W is not really good, on Windows these laptops reach idle times of 14h and more and work times around 8-10 hours.

What are you smoking? 5.5W power consumption at idle is very good. I’m not sure if anything below 3W is even doable when a display can consume 1W on its own…

[mireq]

I have model 21A00003CK (with UHD screen). Idle power consumption is 3.1 W with 10% brightness and enabled wifi (replaced with AX 210). Tested with gentoo, awesome WM, custom kernel with enabled psr and amd pstate driver. Idle SoC power is 0.73 W and core power reported by ryzen_monitor (SVI2) is 0.1W.

[pegasus]

No mention of battery drain during sleep/suspend? my T14 looses 10% overnight in both s3/sI0x sleep modes

Yes this is a problem. Mine drains battery after less than 3 days in suspend. Not sure linux can do anything here, this sounds more like bios/firmware thing.

[klapaucius]

When you are buying the laptop you select the amount of RAM, screen resolution and etc. Options for the latter depend on the former.

Oh I see what you mean. Although it's not exactly like that, as I ordered my T14 Gen1 with the highest amount of RAM available (32GB) and the monitor resolution is still 1920x1080. I don't even think there are T14 models with higher resolutions.

[shmerl]

Oh I see what you mean. Although it's not exactly like that, as I ordered my T14 Gen1 with the highest amount of RAM available (32GB) and the monitor resolution is still 1920x1080. I don't even think there are T14 models with higher resolutions.

There are for T14 Gen 2 (AMD), you can check their site.

[Anux]

EVEN TODAY, people are looking for used prehistoric Thinkpads ( T430 etc) just because of old keyboard.

T430 was the first model with the new Keyboard, but you can put the old T420/410 Keyboard in with a small mod.

[linuxgeex]

[...] to render graphics at a higher resolution than the actual display, do some vendors use this feature to lie to customers and to tell them their machines have a "4K display", when it is really an FHD display. If you tolerate such bullshit then you will soon hear them say they have 8K and 16K displays. [snip] Just to be clear, any PC these days with a somewhat recent graphics card can do this.

Indeed I happily ran Xfce at 3840x2160 scaled to 1920x1080 output on my Sony VAIO SVS-15 with Intel 3210M, 24GB RAM, 256GB SSD for 5 years before my car was broken into and it was stolen on my birthday 2018. This allowed me to comfortably have my browser, IDE, shells and more all on the 15.5" display at the same time, and when I hooked it up to my 50" TV it was highly legible even without my $1200 Nikkor glasses. And in the few cases where I needed to see individual pixels for gif art, I would just use ALT-Scroll to zoom in.

I do the same on my Acer C720 Chromebook - I run that at 2277x1280 rendered and 1366x768 output so I can happily have a FHD Google Chrome browser, with an admittedly more lightweight development environment since it has only 2GB RAM and 112GB SSD.

I think anything higher than 1440p is utterly pointless on a 13" display. At 17" 4k gets meaningful, but who wants to lug that hunk of portable desktop around? lol.

How did I achieve that high-quality rendering mode?

xrandr --output $PRIMARY --fb 3840x2160 --pos 0x0 --mode "1920x1080" --scale 2x2
xrandr --output $PRIMARY --primary --panning 0x0 --pos 0x0 --set "Broadcast RGB" "Full"

Note: if you run multi-monitor you'll need to increase the --fb framebuffer size, and then you'll need to map the second display to its position relative to the first. Unfortunately xrandr only allows you to scale one of your monitors, so the second one needs to be of a size/resolution which matches the scaled physical DPI of the primary. ie I have a 23" portrait monitor beside my TV and if I run it native and the 50" TV scaled to 2x pixel density, they are pleasingly similar physical DPI and I can view movies spread across both, and mouse movements are well aligned.

There's also bugs in the some of the DRM drivers which can cause the scaling to suddenly revert if --fb resolution is != scaled primary resolution, and/or panning is enabled. If you do fractional scaling you have to fiddle with the pixel widths until you find one which it doesn't barf on.

Oh yeah - and don't forget to turn off LCD sub-pixel rendering in the desktop font management settings. Set it to greyscale, medium hint. If you send screencaps to be printed or rendered on other people's displays, ie for the Web, this will also save you from appalling font fringing artefacts!

[Mez']

Sadly:
- Thinkpads look terrible, they should really stop re-awakening the IBM look of 2005.
- Ctrl and Fn reverted make this absolutely unusable (using Ctrl more often, it's easier to just pick the last key than the before-to-last)
- The prominent mouse buttons are a total bother when typing. It's just an involuntary click fest (and often it selects text that the next key stroke in your typing momentum somehow deletes, so frustrating)

Worst laptops I've ever had in my hands. And an expensive one at it.

[Anux]

Sadly:
- Thinkpads look terrible, they should really stop re-awakening the IBM look of 2005.
- Ctrl and Fn reverted make this absolutely unusable (using Ctrl more often, it's easier to just pick the last key than the before-to-last)
- The prominent mouse buttons are a total bother when typing. It's just an involuntary click fest (and often it selects text that the next key stroke in your typing momentum somehow deletes, so frustrating)

Worst laptops I've ever had in my hands. And an expensive one at it.

I don't really care about looks, more about features on a laptop. Ctrl and Fn are easily swapped in BIOS. Maybe you had a T440, it's the worst Thinkpad to this date. It had a touchpad so bad that even a random 200$ laptop is to be prefered.