Looking for High-End Laptop

[astrohip]

Just pulled the trigger on a Thinkpad P16 Gen 2. Should be here in about two weeks.

 

I appreciate everyone's feedback and help on this!

[1610ftw]

Solid choice - let us know how you like it!

[Bullit]

On 3/4/2025 at 11:06 PM, astrohip said:

I'm also looking at a Lenovo Thinkpad P16 Gen 2. I customized it to:

 

• i9 13950HX
• 64GB DDR5
• (2) 4 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 Opal
• 16" WQUXGA OLED touch, etc etc
• Nvidia RTX 2000

The rest is pretty much std.

 

Thoughts? Is this a good laptop? Is there anything else in the Lenovo line I should be looking at?

 

My criticism of this is the CPU and GPU. The CPU is overpower for chassis - i don't think any laptop can exploit the performance of an I-9.

RTX2000 has generally the performance of a RTX3060 with 8GB VRAM instead of 6GB. For your use it seems non justifiable.

[Bullit]

Duplicated.

[astrohip]

20 hours ago, Bullit said:

 

My criticism of this is the CPU and GPU. The CPU is overpower for chassis - i don't think any laptop can exploit the performance of an I-9.

RTX2000 has generally the performance of a RTX3060 with 8GB VRAM instead of 6GB. For your use it seems non justifiable.

 

You're almost certainly correct. In reality, the entire laptop is probably overkill. But I like a really fast machine, with lots of RAM, and blazing hard drive speed (and space) to spare. I don't have many vices in life, but a supersonic laptop is one.

[1610ftw]

On 3/9/2025 at 2:39 AM, Bullit said:

 

My criticism of this is the CPU and GPU. The CPU is overpower for chassis - i don't think any laptop can exploit the performance of an I-9.

RTX2000 has generally the performance of a RTX3060 with 8GB VRAM instead of 6GB. For your use it seems non justifiable.

 

The CPU is great as he can always run it at lower clock speeds where he will need a lot less power and the GPU will be chugging along.

 

It gives him a nice vapor chamber heatsink and great cooling for his mostly CPU focused use case that obviously includes some degree of multitasking for which it is nice to have lots of cores and it is not like he could save a lot of money while getting the same cooling by going with a lesser CPU/GPU combo.

[Bullit]

The lower clock do not prevent more heat from being a high performance CPU. Maybe the OP have an use case that i-9 would be necessary. If not he will only have laptop with fans working longer or always.

That said I am curious about astrochip review.

[astrohip]

I will post a review when it arrives. I got excited, I rec'd a shipping notice. But then I saw it was for the extra power cord/brick. Still no ship date on the laptop itself, although I expect it will not be long.

 

Use case for an i9? Debatable. But I do a few things that probably take all the CPU I can get, even if it's just for a few seconds. And if it speeds it up by a few split seconds, I'll take it. Much of what I do is also dependent on disk speed, hence my desire for fast SSDs.

 

Sometimes I load 30,000 MP3+ files into a tagger (Mp3tag), all at once. I'm probably using everything the system has--disk, CPU, RAM.  Or I might filter a Quicken report from 200MB of data (250,000+ transactions). Convert video and audio files from format to format. And on and on. Speed helps!

 

But I'm not doing anything like some people, with graphics intensive programs, whether games or 3D modeling. Or huge multi-GB databases. I respect they truly need speed.

[1610ftw]

1 hour ago, Bullit said:

The lower clock do not prevent more heat from being a high performance CPU. Maybe the OP have an use case that i-9 would be necessary. If not he will only have laptop with fans working longer or always.

That said I am curious about astrochip review.

 

Lower clocks result in lower power consumption and at some point we have a 125W CPU that can be handled quite well by the cooling solution provided by Lenovo.

 

Of course you are right that one should make some use of a specific CPU or else save the money and from what @astrohip says he has such a use case where he can complete some of the stuff he does faster while also being able to do other things on the side.

[astrohip]

Shipped! On that slow boat from China...