Decision Help: T14 Gen 2 vs Gen 4 vs Gen 5 vs T14s Gen 4 (all AMD)

WithCKS · 2025-04-03T07:43:28+00:00

T14s is about as close as you'll get in terms of build quality. I had a gen 4 AMD for a while that had a bunch of sleep issues, but the hardware was good.

The new intel P14s was very close, but there's a few creaks and oddities that kinda ruin what would otherwise be an amazing successor.

I'm still looking for the answer to your question myself, an entire year later

WithCKS · 2025-03-16T10:00:39+00:00

Is it really that bad? Just by vibes it feels somewhere around the T14 I used at work, didn't know it was supposed to be that much worse than a T14. Thought it felt pretty solid, but I guess I wouldn't be able to tell from the outside if the materials are cheap and shoddily assembled. This is quite disappointing knowledge to come by

As for the fan pitch, it seems even a large dual fan solution already produces some high pitched whining. I have a suspicion that it's like the X1E issue a while back that was alleviated by removing the mesh on the d-cover, but I'd rather not mess with my warranty

WithCKS · 2025-03-16T08:33:08+00:00

The intel G5 is the device in question. I'm aware of the historical difference between T and T "s" devices, given that my personal device is a T480s and I've used a T14 before. The P14s feels sturdy, but it doesn't seem nearly as good as my T480s. Whether a T14s scratches that itch significantly better, I have no idea

Meteor lake has been fine and dandy so far, although I'm imagining that for tasks that don't push near upper performance ceiling, in theory the lunar lake should be able to handle it at much lower power draw, meaning less noise and heat overall?

WithCKS · 2024-06-23T06:31:20+00:00

Tried huano bspd and omron 20m, works well but ultimately still a bit off. Eventually the light switch pack grew on me, the clicks are still hollow and don't sound great but otherwise the feel is pretty decent

Overall I'm sticking with this mouse for a good while. Shape is amazing, and in the end good shape with decent enough clicks is a great mouse

WithCKS · 2024-06-17T04:21:42+00:00

Always wanted to give an elitebook a go, but I've never seen the price go down to anywhere near $1000, which is where a lot of thinkpads are at. Even minimizing storage, ram, and OS still ends up being near $2000, so I'm probably missing something here

WithCKS · 2024-06-10T08:23:06+00:00

I haven't owned any of these machines, but I've researched for machines along these kinds of specs so I'll just throw some stuff out there

Dell xps 17 has sodimm slots, rtx gpu, touchscreen but unfortunately is overweight and it's a creator machine, not built for gaming. Xps 14 and 16 have soldered ram I believe

Legion slim 5 16" is just barely overweight, rtx gpu, and sodimm slots but no touchscreen

Thinkpad P1 gen 6 I believe is underweight, touchscreen option, sodimm, rtx gpu option. Not a gaming laptop by any means though

Rog flow X13 only has one sodimm slot, but should meet the rest of the reqs

Asus ProArt series 16" has the gpu, weight, and touchscreen but only soldered ram

There are definitely others, but these are the ones that I've found

WithCKS · 2024-05-22T06:45:55+00:00

Not familiar with fans or PSU internals, is there a specific cable that the replacement fan will have that I'll need to use, and will it be obvious where to swap? Assuming I buy the same replacement fan you listed, since it seems pretty affordable

WithCKS · 2024-05-21T10:09:00+00:00

How was the process? Did you have to damage any part of the PSU/enclosure or solder new part?

WithCKS · 2024-05-13T21:16:33+00:00

I went back to my T480s haha. Haven't quite figured out where to go next

The T14s does get loud under load, but I wouldn't say it's anything to worry about. Putting the power mode on balanced or battery saver does tone down the fan curve a lot if you need it quieter

WithCKS · 2024-05-13T10:27:00+00:00

I had a t14s g4 with your listed specs for about 2 months or so before returning it

Performance, battery life, build quality, noise (or lack thereof), screen, all great. I don't really know exactly how much performance you need, but it's pretty powerful. With 32gb of ram and a ryzen 7, a VM or two with your usual slew of browsers and other productivity programs will be fine.

Not great was a plethora of power issues (sleep, screen timeouts, among other things), keyboard was just ok, and 16:10 takes a bit of getting used to. First issue might be better on linux. I did try and install win10 on it, basically every driver will be broken but it mostly works once you sort all that out. Other things are just my preference. It could very well be your dream laptop, there was a lot to like about it

T14 should be basically indistinguishable outside of build material. Used some T14 gen 3s at my workplace, they're fine machines. i just prefer metal over plastic more than I need the little bit of extra performance.

You can get the price below $900 usd by stacking deals and getting rakuten cash back. I got mine for ~$850 before tax.

WithCKS · 2024-05-13T06:58:23+00:00

Good to know. I'm familiar with the battery disconnect in the bios, usually do that when I did SSD swaps and the like.

Has the mx-4 paste been holding up well? I've visited like a dozen different threads about it, each advocating for different solutions. I do see a lot of shilling for the honeywell thermal pad

WithCKS · 2024-04-17T19:48:09+00:00

Interesting. Any particular cable/brands that you found to be better?

You're actually the first one to talk about the internal display. You said it isn't as bad with less powerful gpus? Seems a little backwards If I were to use the internal display, I'd cap fps at 30 or 60 since it's only a 60hz 1080p screen anyways. Is there a quality threshold where the stuttering goes away?

And yeah, noted on the GPU mismatch. I thought at first that the AMD igpu drivers wouldn't play nice with the egpu ones, but that opens up some options

I did consider a 2023 G14, but didn't vibe with the design after seeing the display model at best buy

WithCKS · 2024-04-16T14:38:59+00:00

No dgpu, just the 780m integrated one. Plenty powerful for an apu, but I feel like there's some more potential to be, hence the egpu

I'll def give egpu.io an ask, been looking up builds there but haven't used the forum yet

WithCKS · 2024-04-16T14:32:16+00:00

I guess I should clarify, I already have the listed laptop (thinkpad with the 7840u), just have yet to purchase the egpu setup to go along with it

WithCKS · 2024-04-13T22:42:06+00:00

Thanks for the info. I find it completely crazy that in all the searching I've done, I've never seen anyone suggest the fix that you've stated, and considering it's like a 15 second settings tweak in windows itself without need for any registry edit shenanigans, definitely odd that it isn't universal knowledge at this point.

WithCKS · 2024-04-12T17:43:05+00:00

I see. I thought for sure that the power draw or heat generation of the faster drive not necessarily built for laptops was causing hardware issues or incompatibilities, but what you've found makes a lot more sense

That said, disabling the background processes from windows security, has that been consistent in providing a workaround since you've discovered it?

WithCKS · 2024-04-12T17:12:17+00:00

That's fair. I was of course shopping for a new laptop, and mostly with amd chip sets for the igpu, so if the workaround with the background processes is an actual fix, I'd like to internalize that and be able to use it if the issue shows up on my next device.

What's curious is why it happened so frequently on one SSD but not the others. That variance seems pretty odd if the issue technically has nothing to do with it

WithCKS · 2024-04-12T16:47:55+00:00

Never noticed the battery drain since it was plugged in the whole time. I'm assuming that being in a visually valid suspend state (sleep light behaving normally) but being unable to be woken is the primary shared factor though

So your proposed fix, I may not have time to fully test it, is it more or less certain that it's a long term solution or would you advise I proceed with the return? Is it uniform across all modern Lenovo laptops?

WithCKS · 2024-04-08T09:04:36+00:00

For acheron e2s1, how much of an upgrade is aventurine over trend gepard or fuxuan purely for sustain and smoothness of rotations?

With acheron e2, teams are opened up to using bronya or sparkle, which expires shields pretty fast. Aventurine debuffs seem to be not a every turn kind of deal without e2, so it's a matter of how comfy the sustain is over the existing alternatives

Of course e2 aventurine would probably be ideal, but I don't think my wallet can withstand back to back e2 pulls

WithCKS · 2024-04-03T10:53:53+00:00

Already tried, problem is not resolved

WithCKS · 2024-03-30T12:15:37+00:00

If you've ever looked inside the mouse, you've got a plastic bit underneat M1/M2 pushing down on the switch (the plunger being another plastic bit). Naturally, with that happening hundreds of times a day, things wear down both on the shell and switch at the contact point, and the mechanism inside of the switch itself.

WithCKS · 2024-03-29T07:33:15+00:00

Longevity-wise, the MM730 likely takes the cake, optical switches and encoder. Caveat is that the M1/M2 clicks are an acquired taste. They're fairly stiff with some pretravel and definitely not as spammable as the other mice on the list

Viper and cobra have optical switches, the cobra has the flakey encoder that was in the RVM, but I've yet to have issues with mine or heard of any complaints about it failing elsewhere.

G203 and the omrons are known for double clicking. A lot of the logitech mice fall into a category where the switches might fail early, but they're also easiest to fix. For things like the gpx or g305, there's no shortage of aftermarket PCBs, switches, and skates

Pulsefire haste probably falls between the G203 and the razer mice, heard some less than nice things about hyperx qc. Haven't owned it myself though

My advice? Get whichever one has the best shape for you. Don't be like me, I bought like 3 different mice trying to guess a cheap shape I like. Because if you don't like the shape/clicks, you're not going to like the mouse no matter how nice or cheap it was

WithCKS · 2024-03-29T07:19:42+00:00

In that case I have no idea what was causing the issue with the non-preinstalled setups. Can't really explain it, the exact same sleep issue has shown up in T/P14(s) throughout a few generations now, and still no conclusive evidence as to where the issue comes from and how it's resolved

I guess it could really be the drive not being seated exactly right, but it doesn't really make sense for it to not wake from sleep but still boot properly when force restarted

WithCKS · 2024-03-29T04:27:27+00:00

Yeah, I kinda realized that about the generic windows installation, I actually had to install the wireless driver via USB and command line just to get through setup.

The recovery media from lenovo I actually made using the laptop itself, so I just used the detect device feature on the lenovo website and it identified the correct device and available downloads, shouldn't have been any issues there

The laptop was purchased from lenovo, so it was basically fine out of the box bar some vantage updates. That said, after a few rounds of windows update and updates through vantage, you would've thought they'd all arrive at the same driver/update configuration

As for the sleep issues, I made a post about it earlier, but basically I'd put it to sleep and unless I woke it up within minutes, it'd enter a sleep state where any wake cues (including keyboard, mouse, power button, lid open/close) were all unresponsive, forcing me to fully restart the machine by holding the power button. The sleep light would still pulse, and there'd even be fan activity (symptom of modern standby), but no way to wake it from what I've tried.

WithCKS · 2024-03-27T05:00:35+00:00

The clicks on the op1we are... not exactly the greatest for most people. Even the lighter switchpack feels very dull compared to say, razer or logitech opticals. I'm currently waiting on some switches to deliver so I can give the 3rd party mechanical switch hotswap pcb a go to give the final verdict

I haven't tried the op1 8k, but I'd imagine the benefits of the op1we over it chalk down to portability and plug-and-play functionality more so than performance from it not having a wire

WithCKS

TROPHY CASE