Lenovo ThinkPad T410: Built for Business

ThinkPad. The name ought to ring a bell. It's the quintessential business laptop that everyone has almost certainly seen, very likely used, and possibly owned during the past decade. Originally an IBM product, the ThinkPad line was sold off to Lenovo (along with the rest of the IBM PC division) about six years ago. Despite the change in ownership, the core product remained the same; love it or hate it, ThinkPad is the standard bearer for Lenovo laptops. Today we're looking at the latest representative of the ThinkPad Classic series, the T410.

The construction of the T410 has the famed magnesium alloy chassis with a black rubberized coating on the exterior. It's a solid construction that has proven itself time and again—a friend of mine has a similar ThinkPad design from before the Lenovo buyout, and that Pentium M product is now running Windows 7. ThinkPad's are extremely durable, even if they may not be quite as flashy as other laptops. Case in point, hinges are something that often wears out over the course of a laptop's lifetime, and the classic ThinkPad has shown itself to be very durable, even after more than five years. The T410 also continues the trend of having a latch for the cover, something that many laptops and notebooks now omit, and you can open the LCD past 180 degrees and have the display lie flat on the table if that's something you find useful.

Gallery: Lenovo ThinkPad T410 Exterior

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Even with the solid construction, the ThinkPad T410 still checks in at a relatively light 5.0 lbs. with a 6-cell battery; Lenovo sent us a 9-cell battery to boost battery life, which adds a few ounces while improving battery life by ~50%. 5.0 lbs. certainly isn't going to win the prize for the lightest laptop, but put in perspective the T410 also packs in a speedy Core i5 CPU with a discrete NVIDIA Quadro NVS 3100M graphics card. The construction is also a bit thinner than previous ThinkPad designs, with a flat profile that packs away nicely into a laptop bag. The beveled edge on the palm rest makes the design work without creating a hard angle where your wrists would rest. The speakers are reasonable but not overly loud, but at least they don't distort at higher volumes. ASUS' N61J has some great built-in speakers, but the T410 will work for office presentations in a conference room. If you need more volume, external speakers are the way to go.

The fast CPU and discrete GPU improve performance but also require additional cooling, and the cooling is one area where the T410 excels. Even under maximum load, the fan remains exceptionally quiet compared to the competition. Where plenty of other notebooks will hit 40-42 dB under full load, the T410 in testing topped out at just 33 dB—very impressive considering we're looking at a unit with an i5-540M CPU running at 2.53GHz (with Turbo Mode hitting up to 3.066GHz). If you want a bit more performance, the i7-620M (2.66GHz with 3.33GHz Turbo) is an available upgrade for the T410, showing just how well the cooling works. At idle, the T410 hovers right around the 30dB noise floor of our testing environment. The chassis also remains generally cool, with the hottest spots staying under 38C (100F) during testing in a 20C (68F) environment. To put this in proper perspective, the T410 is actually quieter and cooler than most of the CULV laptops we've tested!

Gallery: Lenovo ThinkPad T410 Parts and Accessories

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The standard pricing on the ThinkPad T410 is higher than competing laptops, but you definitely get better quality. The catch is that right now (through the end of the month), Lenovo has some pretty massive sale prices available—around 25% off! The laptop we received for testing (with extras like the 9-cell battery, fingerprint scanner, webcam, Intel 6200 WiFi, Gobi 2000 3G mobile broadband with GPS, and Bluetooth) normally sells for $1900, but with $446 in savings it's currently available for $1454. If you drop some of those extras like the Gobi 2000, you can easily get the sale price under $1300, or with the base options the T410 with i5-540M and Quadro NVS 3100M starts at $1535 (on sale for $1089). That's a great price for a laptop with some high-end features and a excellent design, but you'll definitely want a few upgrades like 4GB RAM. The base model T410 without discrete graphics starts at $1265 (on sale for $919), but again with extras like 4GB RAM, a 6-cell battery, WXGA+ LCD, fingerprint scanner, and 2MP camera it comes to $1430 ($1084 sale price). We'd like to see a standard warranty that's longer than one year, but Lenovo provides extended warranty options at a reasonable price. A 3-year warranty with ThinkPad Protection (2-way shipping provided) is normally $199, but is on sale for $149; adding onsite support will bump the price up another $100.

Ultimately, the ThinkPad T410 isn't what we would call an excellent bargain, unless you can jump on the current sale; either way, you definitely get a high quality product. If you're tired of cheap, plastic cases and hinges that wear out after a couple years, we're confident the ThinkPad T410 will last a long time. As mentioned earlier, the ThinkPad aesthetic is something that you likely either love or hate, and I fall into the former category. If I had to buy a laptop for my own use and I wanted something powerful and durable, the T410 would be near the top of my list. I'd prefer a bit more GPU horsepower to go with the i5 processor, and NVIDIA's Optimus Technology would cement the deal. The reason is simple: Quadro NVS 3100M just doesn't pack quite enough oomph for my purposes, but when running on battery power Intel's IGP is sufficient for my needs, so some form of switchable graphics would be perfect. (The T410s adds switchable graphics but not Optimus and it still uses the relatively underpowered NVS 3100M, and it costs several hundred dollars more than the T410.) Finally, while the LCD resolution and matte coating are great, the contrast ration is disappointing. Those complaints aside, there's still plenty to like, so if you've been looking for a reason to buy a ThinkPad, the current sale makes now an excellent time to take the plunge. With ~25% savings on a high quality product, what's not to like?

NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470: 6 Months Late, Was It Worth the Wait?

Prologue

Because designing GPUs this big is "fucking hard"

-NVIDIA’s VP of Product Marketing Ujesh Desai on GF100

Fermi/GF100/GTX400 has been a long time coming. For an industry where the major players are usually in lockstep with each other in some fashion, this latest cycle has been distinctly out of sync. In September of 2009 we saw AMD launch their Radeon 5000 series, and spend the next 6 months as the performance leader for the discrete graphics market for virtually every price point. NVIDIA on the other hand missed the latest cycle by a mile, and when AMD was delivering 5000 series cards NVIDIA could only talk about the High Performance Computing applications of their next GPU, Fermi. It would be the next big thing, both figuratively and literally.

In January we got the next piece of the Fermi story at CES, when NVIDIA was willing to talk about the gaming-oriented hardware and applications of the first Fermi GPU: GF100. We found out it would be significantly different from the GT200 GPU powering NVIDIA’s GTX200 series, that NVIDIA was going to break up the traditional fixed-function pipeline and at the same time take a particularly keen interest in tessellation. What we didn’t find out is when it would ship.

Much of this has been in NVIDIA’s hands – some of it has not. What’s indisputable is that TSMC, the chip foundry used by both AMD and NVIDIA, was not delivering the kind of yields on their 40nm process that AMD and NVIDIA were expecting. Both of them suffered for it. AMD could not get enough viable chips to meet demand for their 5000 series part, leaving a wake of disappointed gamers who could not get AMD’s latest wonder, and limiting AMD’s ability to profit from one of the few times in AMD/ATI’s history where the company had a clear lead over NVIDIA, and if you ask AMD also limiting their ability to control prices. NVIDIA meanwhile had to deal with the fact that they were trying to produce a very large chip on a low-yielding process, a combination for disaster given that size is the enemy of high yields.

What’s also indisputable is that this 6 month wait has benefited few people. For the observers of an industry where the competition is cut-throat we saw GPU prices rise, when in the last generation AMD and NVIDIA knocked upwards of hundreds of dollars off of each other’s prices practically overnight. It may have been good times overall for AMD, but for buyers the competitive marketplace is sorely missed.

That brings us to today. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel, the end of NVIDIA’s 6 month journey is near. We’ve told you about the compute applications of Fermi, we’ve told you about the gaming applications of Fermi, and now at long last we can tell you about the first products. It’s time to say hello to the GTX 400 series.

Meet the GTX 480 and GTX 470

	GTX 480	GTX 470	GTX 295	GTX 285	9800+ GTX
Stream Processors	480	448	2 x 240	240	128
Texture Address / Filtering	60/60	56/56	2 x 80 / 80	80 / 80	64 / 64
ROPs	48	40	2x 28	32	16
Core Clock	700MHz	607MHz	576MHz	648MHz	738MHz
Shader Clock	1401MHz	1215MHz	1242MHz	1476MHz	1836MHz
Memory Clock	924MHz (3696MHz data rate) GDDR5	837MHz (3348MHz data rate) GDDR5	999MHz (1998MHz data rate) GDDR3	1242MHz (2484MHz data rate) GDDR3	1100MHz (2200MHz data rate) GDDR3
Memory Bus Width	384-bit	320-bit	2 x 448-bit	512-bit	256-bit
Frame Buffer	1.5GB	1.25GB	2 x 896MB	1GB	512MB
Transistor Count	3B	3B	2 x 1.4B	1.4B	754M
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 55nm	TSMC 55nm	TSMC 55nm
Price Point	$499	$349	$500	$400	$150 - 200

Today NVIDIA is launching two cards: the GeForce GTX 480, and the GeForce GTX 470. Both of them are based on GF100, the first and largest member of the Fermi family. Right off the bat, we can tell you that neither card is a complete GF100 chip. We know from NVIDIA’s earlier announcements that a complete GF100 is a 512 SP/core part organized in a 4x16x32 fashion, but these first parts will not have all of GF100’s functional units activated. Instead we’ll be getting a 480 core part for the GTX 480, and a 448 core part for the GTX 470. Ultimately we will not be seeing the full power of GF100 right away, but you can be sure that somewhere down the line we’ll see a GTX 485 or GTX 490 with all of GF100’s functional units enabled.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480

What we’re starting out with today at the high-end is the GTX 480, a card based on a GF100 with 1 of the 16 SMs disabled that will sell for $499, making it the primary competitor for the Radeon 5870. The disabled SM has no affect on the ROPs which are part of a separate functional block, but it does cut down on the shading, texturing, and tessellation capabilities of the card compared to where a full GF100 card would be. This gives the GTX 480 the full 48 ROPs and 768KB of L2 cache of GF100, along with 60 texture units, 15 PolyMorph engines, and 480 cores. Although the architectural overhaul means we can’t compare the GTX 480 to the GTX 285 quite as easily as we could the Radeon 5000 series to the Radeon 4000 series, the GTX 480 is still in some ways a doubled-up GTX 285 from a shader standpoint.

The GTX 470 on the other hand is a further cut-down GF100-based product that will sell for $349. As we stated earlier it has only 448 cores, a product of NVIDIA disabling 2 of the 16 SMs. Along with disabling the SMs, NVIDIA also disabled 1 of the 6 ROP clusters, which disables 6 ROPs, 128KB of L2 cache, and 2 of the 32bit memory channels. This leaves us with 448 cores running alongside 40 ROPs, 640KB of L2 cache, all on a 320bit GDDR5 memory bus.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 470

As is usually the case for a harvested part, GTX 470 takes a clockspeed hit compared to GTX 480. The core clock falls 13% to 607MHz, and the shader clock falls the same distance to 1215MHz. The memory clock on the other hand only drops by 10% to 837MHz (3348MHz effective). Overall this gives the GTX 470 around 80% of the shading, texturing, and tessellation capabilities of the GTX 480 and 72% of the ROP capability and memory bandwidth.

One thing that caught our eye with all of this was that NVIDIA’s memory clocks are lower than we had been initially expecting. GDDR5 is readily available up to 5GHz while NVIDIA doesn’t go any higher than 3.7GHz; in fact between the smaller memory bus than the GTX 285 and the lower than expected memory clocks, the GTX 400 series doesn’t have all that much more bandwidth than the GTX 285 did. As it stands the GTX 480 only has 11% more memory bandwidth than the GTX 285, while the GTX 470 has 15% less than the GTX 285.

Given the 384-bit bus, we initially assumed NVIDIA was running in to even greater memory bus issues than AMD ran in to for the 5000 series, but as it turns out that’s not the case. When we asked NVIDIA about working with GDDR5, they told us that their biggest limitation wasn’t the bus like AMD but rather deficiencies in their own I/O controller, which in turn caused them to miss their targeted memory speeds. Unlike AMD who has been using GDDR5 for nearly 2 years, NVIDIA is still relatively new at using GDDR5 (their first product was the GT 240 late last year), so we can’t say we’re completely surprised here. If nothing else, this gives NVIDIA ample room to grow in the future if they can get a 384-bit memory bus up to the same speeds as AMD has gotten their 256-bit bus.

This leaves us with the other elephant in the room: yield on GF100. NVIDIA hasn’t commented specifically on the yields coming out of TSMC but we know even 6 months later that AMD still isn’t satisfied with things, so that should offer some guidance on the situation given NVIDIA’s larger die. As it stands NVIDIA chose to launch their highest end GF100 part with only 15 of 16 SMs in order to reach the “broadest availability”, which is a clear sign that NVIDIA isn’t getting enough full-yielding and high-clocking dies at this time to offer a proper unharvested part.

The power/heat situation also bears mentioning, since it often goes hand-in-hand with yield issues. With a 500mm2+ die on the 40nm process, it should come as no surprise that both the GTX 480 and GTX 470 are hot cards. NVIDIA has to pay the piper for having such a large die, and this is one of the places where they do so. The TDP for the GTX 480 is 250W while it’s 215W for the GTX 470; meanwhile the cards idle at 47W and 33W respectively. NVIDIA’s large die strategy usually leads to them having power-hungry parts, but from a historical perspective the GTX 480 is the hungriest yet for a single-GPU card; even the GTX280 wasn’t quite as high. We’ll get in to this more when we take a look at measured power consumption.