Lenovo ThinkPad W530 - mini review

re: Lenovo ThinkPad W530 - mini review

Joe Anderson — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 15:21:49 GMT

This is by far the best review of the W530 that I have found. I hope you are able, Keith, to provide your follow-up review.

Thank you for your expertise.

Joe

re: Lenovo ThinkPad W530 - mini review

Daniel — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 19:19:49 GMT

are there any news about W2K8/W2k12 Hyper-V issues on the W530 ?

re: Lenovo ThinkPad W530 - mini review

Trino Alfaro — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 08:13:40 GMT

Hi,

I purchased the Lenovo W530 last week for Hyper-V purposes. I can install the role but when I enable the the switches on the BIOS, for Intel VT and Memory Protection, I get a blue screen. If I go back to disable Memory Protection, the laptop boots fine but Hyper-V is not available.

Were you actually able to run a virtual machine on you test ?

re: Lenovo ThinkPad W530 - mini review

Beto — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 23:37:15 GMT

About throttling:

On the W520 the engineers at Lenovo simply miscalculated or just forgot the maximum thermal requirements of the Laptop. So, if You add the TDP of the old Sandybridge CPU and the old nVidia GPU, You would get 90 Watts TDP while the 9-cell battery provided 94Wh. After numerous BIOS-updates, Lenovo decided to throttle the dGPU while on Battery so the CPU can get to 3+ GHz.

The max TDP of the W530 are quite the same (CPU: 45w, GPU: 45w), which makes me believe that Lenovo has made the same mistake as with the W520...

re: Lenovo ThinkPad W530 - mini review

Anthony — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 04:33:45 GMT

Hi, this is a great review. In it you say that there are other people who have hosted reports of running linux on the W530. I am having difficulty finding any of these reports; I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction.

re: Lenovo ThinkPad W530 - mini review

Willem — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 07:08:20 GMT

Hi Keith, will you also be doing a T430s review?

re: Lenovo ThinkPad W530 - mini review

Willem — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 07:07:50 GMT

@Travis: The new Series 3 Plus dock (90/170w) has 2*DVI, just like the old Plus.

support.lenovo.com/.../detail.page

◦Mini Dock: 1x VGA, 1x DVI, 1x DP

The video controller allows for any two video ports to be used simultaneously.

◦Mini Dock Plus (90W & 170W): 1x VGA, 2x DVI, 2x DP

Many systems allow for two of these video ports to be used simultaneously. Select systems, including those with NVIDIA Optimus technology, allow for up to three video ports on the dock to be used simultaneously

re: Lenovo ThinkPad W530 - mini review

Keith Combs — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 17:35:06 GMT

Sorry Travis. I have never tested dual link DVI since my Dell U2711 has DisplayPort. The Series 3 dock I have is the 135W dock I purchased for the ThinkPad W510. I'm a little surprised the ThinkPad W530 worked with it.

Good luck. I suspect you aren't alone so asking in one of the forums is probably your best bet.

re: Lenovo ThinkPad W530 - mini review

Travis — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 17:14:20 GMT

Thanks for the nice review. I have an Apple 30" Cinema HD that needs a dual-link DVI to get the full 2560x1600 resolution. From what I've read, the newer Lenovo docks only allow single-link DVI output. The older docks, such as the advanced mini dock ( support.lenovo.com/.../detail.page ) supposedly allow dual-link dvi output. When I talked with tech at Lenovo, they said that the older dock should work with the w530, but that they've sometimes had problems in the past with older models getting the full resolution 2560x1600. I am not sure if you have the equipment to test my situation, but if you do, that'd be great!

I am also looking at the adapters, but they are sometimes hit and miss according to reviews...

www.monoprice.com/.../product.asp

re: Lenovo ThinkPad W530 - mini review

Kenneth — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:23:40 GMT

Thanks!!

I cannot believe I didn't see that....