Hi everyone,
sorry for the wait (trust me, it's been a long wait for me, too).
Finally picked up my Thinkpad R-50 Centrino 1.4 GHz with 512MB Ram and 14.1" 1024x768 display from the warehouse today.
Here are my first impressions:
Physical:
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The R-50 is a very nicely proportioned laptop, and strikes an ideal balance for mainstream laptops. The lines on it are very smooth, with a nice blend of chiselled edges and contours. Of course, it's in the standard IBM matte black.
It has the typical oversized "hood" on the outer edge of the lcd. Love it or hate it, the bevelling does serve a purpose to stiffen the cover. It does not provide any appreciable shading from glare, however. The latch on the lcd is a twin-hook arrangement, but it only needs a single sliding switch to unlock it, and it can be easily opened with one hand. The hinges are solid chunks of metal, and open with a smooth action.
The surface of the R50 has a nice, rubberised feel that is quite easy to grip. The keyboard is full-size, and very tactile. It's missing a Windows button, and it's not for want of space. Credit it to typical IBM stubbornness. IBM list the weight as 2.5 kg, but it is actually lighter than my old
Toshiba Satellite 3000, which was also supposed to be "2.5 kg". It is a comfortable weight, and not burdensome in the least.
In short, one look at this laptop will tell you why NASA only flies with Thinkpads. The build quality is phenomenal.
Shortcomings:
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First, let me talk about the only two failings I can think of with the R50.
One: The screen. It's not bad. It's actually somewhat better than the screen on the old Toshiba, but it's not as nice as Sharp's Actius screens, or
Sony's black lcds... The default settings are lacking in contrast and brightness, and it is easy to imagine the image would get washed out in glare. The vertical viewing angle is a bit small (about 20 degrees before colour and contrast reversal start to happen), but the horizontal viewing angles are fine (about 130 degrees). It was clear this was meant as a no-nonsense business laptop, and not a multimedia machine. Having said that, the display is crisp and sharp for text and CAD work.
Two: No Firewire. OK, "some" models come with IEEE1394. Mine didn't. I'm getting a FiWi PC card tomorrow, so I won't dwell on it.
Usage:
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The R50 is a joy to use. The keys are wonderfully tactile, and the Trackpoint with the new Soft Dome cap is very comfortable to navigate with. The buttons for the Trackpoint are likewise very well designed. The Trackpad does not fare quite as well. For some reason, it always feels a little too small, and the buttons are flush instead of raised, making them harder to click. The motion of the Trackpad is also not quite as satisfying as with the Trackpoint. However, the extra features of the Trackpad are quite convenient - scrolling areas for horizontal and vertical scrolling, and customisable hotspots - I ended up using the top left corner to simulate the Windows key ^_^.
What amazed me most about the R50 in operation was the sheer *silence*. I could not hear the hard drive spinning against ambient noise in my home. Even more impressive, with the R50 on my lap, I could not feel the hard drive or the DVD-ROM spinning! While parked on my lap, the bottom surface of the R50 was never the slightest bit warm during normal usage. It did warm up a bit when running 100% cpu utilisation with consecutive SiSoft Sandra tests, but other than that, it was always comfortably cool to the touch.
The speakers were also quite a bit nicer than I'd expected, especially for a business model. However, I haven't done any real testing with them other than with the wavs that came with Windows.
The much-hyped APS (Active Protection System) on the R50 and T41 models parks the heads of the hard drives when the notebook senses it is falling. I doubt I'll be testing how effective that is in an actual fall (note intentionally, anyway). In practice, I find the program is a little too sensitive, and I miss being able to set sensitivity settings in the software - you get a simple on/off, and another option for ignoring repetitive motions (eg trains, buses). Still, it doesn't cost me any trouble, and the day it saves my data might make it all worthwhile. In the meantime, I amaze and astound my friends with the 3d real-time position readout ^_^
Battery life is another strong point of this laptop. I did not believe the 4 hr+ figures in reviews at first - however, after 3.5 hours of heavy disk usage (installing about 5 Gig of apps, and even a defrag!), the R50 still had 30% of battery life left. And all this with the standard 6-cell battery (there is a 9-cell optioon, and an extra battery that fits into the optical drive bay).
Performance:
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Well, I haven't really stressed it yet, but I did manage to run a few synthetic benchmarks (SiSoft Sandra 2003) with various power settings and in comparison with my desktop PC.
Thinkpad R50 High Battery Performance - Battery
Memory Bandwidth Int 1640 MB/s; FP 1790 MB/s
CPU Arithmetic ALU 1971 MIPS; FPU 789 MFLOPS, SSE2 1167 MFLOPS
CPU/Multimedia Int 3356 it/s; FP 3892 it/s
Thinkpad R50 High System Performance - AC (Performance under high batt settings were identical on AC)
Memory Bandwidth Int 2104 MB/s; FP 2110 MB/s
CPU Arithmetic ALU 4388 MIPS; FPU 1847 MFLOPS, SSE2 2706 MFLOPS
CPU/Multimedia Int 7859 it/s; FP 9118 it/s
Athlon XP3200 424FSB Mem 2-2-3-7 (2.26 GHz), Radeon 9700Pro
Memory Bandwidth Int 3231 MB/s; FP 3054 MB/s
CPU Arithmetic ALU 8304 MIPS; FPU 3392 MFLOPS
CPU/Multimedia Int 12203 it/s; FP 12869 it/s
The Centrino 1.4 is no slouch, but it's not ready to go up against an overclocked Athlon. The memory performance is quite interesting, however, as it is just slightly over the theoretical performance of DDR266 (2100 MB/s), yet shy of the DDR333 that IBM use (2700). *** So it seems as if using 333 Ram instead of 266 Ram might have some minor benefit after all.
Running Catia v5r10 P1 was a little sluggish in battery mode, but definitely acceptable on AC...being very close in responsiveness to the P4 2.0 GHz systems we have at school. However, I didn't have time to build any complex models, so it might chug at more complex files.
Photoshop resizing and filters were likewise very fast - I credit this to the SSE and SSE2 optimisations that have been done with Photoshop. If it was any slower than the Athlon, I couldn't discern it in daily usage.
Well, that about wraps up this installment. I'd like to do some video encoding comparisons with straight Divx and with AVS2.5 filters , but I'll wait until I have the time and am able to grab some new codecs.
In conclusion, I am very happy with the R50 indeed. At the price I got it at (AUD$2133), it was an absolute steal. If you're looking for a no-nonsense notebook for study and/or work, the R50 is the one for you. If you want an all-in-one multimedia notebook to play movies on, try another manufacturer.
Cheers,
Vol.
EDIT: Typos, typos, and more typos. I should not post at 2am EST...:
ADDENDUM: *** The bus speed of the 855 is 400 MHz (100 MHz QDR), not 600 MHz as I incorrectly reported (the problem was SiSoft Sandra 2003 incorrectly reported my bus speeds). The theoretical maximum memory bandwidth of the chipset is 3200 MB/s using DDR400 RAM, but I am not sure if the current versions of the chipset support DDR400. However, there *is* a bandwidth improvement in using DDR333 instead of DDR266. The real-life performance advantage in doing so is likely to be small due to the huge L2 cache (1 MB) of the Pentium-M, though.
IBM Thinkpad R50 Review
. Oh, and before I forget, you can also set up profiles to automatically disable screen-savers/monitor standby - nothing like wading through 10 minutes of presentation and then having your monitor blank out 
