"Treating myself"
I don't really have an excuse, but I bought myself a ThinkPad.
Well, technically, the excuse is that I'm going to keep the thing for a good few years since it's durable and performant enough to allow for that. Other than that, however.... nnno, no excuse really.
It's a brick of a thing, let me tell you... people were right, it's properly hefty, despite it not being "from the good old days" (in which, to be fair, I would expect they were even more robust). Either way, it feels incredibly solid, the keyboard's amazing and so is the screen, I think it's absolutely worth its price, even if it's still really big to my sensibilities...
More interestingly, I've found that the RTX 500 Ada that's in there is shockingly good for scientific computation specifically... look:
PyMol VAMP benchmark
CPU rendering: >5 minutes
The ThinkPad's integrated Intel Arc graphics: 55ish seconds
RTX 3060 Laptop: 2.2-2.5 seconds
RTX 500 Ada (ThinkPad): 1.13-1.18 seconds
RTX 4070 Super: 0.7-0.73 seconds
What you're looking at are the results of a benchmark that I like to do because it's pretty simple to set up, even though it takes a few runs to make sure they're consistent. It's by no means scientific, but still. You're looking at the render time of a protein-membrane complex in PyMol with its raytracing option, rendered on the components specified next to them, at 1920x1080 in a constant and controlled position and angle.
And yeah, I was just as surprised as you (probably), it's "supposed" to be on the level of a mobile 1660 or something, and here it is trading blows with some pretty serious hardware, all while sipping power and not really heating up that much under prolonged loads.
I hate NVidia as much as the next pretentious linux user, but since I've switched to Fedora and the driver issues magically went away (I can't recommend Fedora enough), being on NVidia has been shockingly pleasurable. Optimus works great, too, meaning that the card isn't even on unless I specifically launch a program on it!
Anyway, if you're the type of person who would think about getting a ThinkPad, do it. Seriously. You're not gonna regret it. Just make sure it's a T- or P-series, check the 🌐 Lenovo Product Specification Reference for the case materials, internals and whatnot, and get it. They're amazing.
(Just don't forget to install a real OS on it if it comes with Windows from the factory like mine did, pffhehe)
