Lenovo W520 Owner's Thread

[drunckenmonkee]

Hello W520 owners
I'm thinking about this system but I would love to get an SSD, for performances but mainly for power consumption (I need longer battery life!).
I found a good offer in a local store for this:

Samsung SSD 128GB 2,5"" (6.3cm) 470 [MZ-5PA128]

Is there someone here that uses this SSD on the W520? Is it a good choice?
Thanks!

To be honest, the SSD isn't going to give you a tremendous amount of additional battery life. The newer HDDs these days have very good power saving features and some SSDs can actually use more power during read/write than some HDDs.

But from a performance standpoint, HDDs cannot compare to SSDs.

[gump124]

Hello W520 owners
I'm thinking about this system but I would love to get an SSD, for performances but mainly for power consumption (I need longer battery life!).
I found a good offer in a local store for this:

Samsung SSD 128GB 2,5"" (6.3cm) 470 [MZ-5PA128]

Is there someone here that uses this SSD on the W520? Is it a good choice?
Thanks!

I ordered my W520 with Lenovo's ssd, which turned out to be the Samsung 470.

Power consumption... not sure if this one will give you more battery life. I get 7 - 8 hours on web browsing and light duty tasks, with medium brightness settings.

Performance... slower than the SATA III ssd's, but miles ahead of the fastest hdd's. I can get to a usable firefox window from using the fingerprint reader to boot, in about 40 seconds. Shut down is about 10 seconds. Everything loads up almost instantly.

Quality... I think it's safe to say that Samsung makes the best ssd's on the market. There's a reason why everyone wants to get their hands on Samsung's new msata ssd. Haven't heard many issues about the 470 series.

If you can get a good deal on the 470, and don't mind the slightly slower speed compared to SATA III ssd's, then pull the trigger and join the ssd movement

[huberth]

I don't NEED the extra performance. However, I am expecting this laptop to last me 3 years through law school and at least my first year as a professional as a work / personal computer.
I am trying to future proof it as much as I can.

It all depends... Let's say you pay 100$ more for a system that is 1% faster and you make $100 per hour with it, the upgrade could have paid for itself in 100 hours!

[kuja01]

Thanks guys, you convinced me (pretty easily )
I will purchase this 470 SSD before the offer expires, I will get the SSD before the W520 eheh :P
The W520 will come with a 500gb, I will probably buy a case an use it as an external backup hard drive.
At first I was thinking about a larger SSD, like 250 gb but I just realized that I live on a 100gb hd and is always half empty lol. The 128gb will be more than enough, I'm so curious to try the SSD difference

[TimmyTwoToes]

Woo hoo!
So I've been following the w520 since it was announced and finally pulled the trigger with the B&N discount, 4th of July Discount and $200 back from Chase I got it down to an affordable bit!
Went with the
Core i7-2720QM
Quadro 2000M
and 1920x1080
options
So I'm stoked! My T61p died last November I had had since it was released... I'm working on a 2004 mac mini now running unbuntu... egh.

But I went with the default 4 gigs of ram with 1 stick stuck in there intending to upgrade to 16 gigs. So my question is as follows:
Does the w520 support pc15000 RAM or pc12800 RAM? I know it takes 10600 RAM...
Has anyone tried this and do they see an appreciable performance boost?
Work on this will be primarily AutoCAD, 3DStudio Max, Photoshop and CDMW3 (some day).
Thanks!
Now the waiting begins!

[liveify]

I'm thinking about buying a W520 this summer with:
Intel Core i7-2720QM Processor (2.20GHz, 6MB L3)1
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 6412
15.6" FHD (1920 x 1080) LED Backlit Anti-Glare Display, Mobile Broadband Ready
NVIDIA Quadro 1000M Graphics with 2GB DDR3 Memory
4 GB DDR3 - 1333MHz (1 DIMM)8
UltraNav with TrackPoint & touchpad plus Fingerprint reader
320 GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm4
DVD recordable multiburner5
9 cell Li-Ion Battery - 55++60
Bluetooth 3.0
Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (3x3 AGN)10
Integrated Mobile Broadband - Upgradable65
4270 : 1 Year Depot Warranty - TopSeller
And the dock

I'm just wondering if the 1000m will be enough to power a Dell U2711 (2560 x 1440) and the built in one at the same time. I'd like to be able to play 1080p videos on both displays at once. I do not want any lag at all. I don't game much at all and if I do it's usually a fairly old game anyway. I do not do much video editing or anything that would like the extra CUDA cores.

How much faster is the 2000m over the 1000m? I've tried to figure this out by searching but I can't seem to find a good answer.

[dimm0k]

So you think the machine came with the wrong population of the 2X2GB Ram? It is possible though.

Here's another confirmation of RAM location... Re: W510 wont detect 16GB RAM - Lenovo Community

[kirayamato26]

I'm thinking about buying a W520 this summer with:
Intel Core i7-2720QM Processor (2.20GHz, 6MB L3)1
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 6412
15.6" FHD (1920 x 1080) LED Backlit Anti-Glare Display, Mobile Broadband Ready
NVIDIA Quadro 1000M Graphics with 2GB DDR3 Memory
4 GB DDR3 - 1333MHz (1 DIMM)8
UltraNav with TrackPoint & touchpad plus Fingerprint reader
320 GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm4
DVD recordable multiburner5
9 cell Li-Ion Battery - 55++60
Bluetooth 3.0
Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (3x3 AGN)10
Integrated Mobile Broadband - Upgradable65
4270 : 1 Year Depot Warranty - TopSeller
And the dock

I'm just wondering if the 1000m will be enough to power a Dell U2711 (2560 x 1440) and the built in one at the same time. I'd like to be able to play 1080p videos on both displays at once. I do not want any lag at all. I don't game much at all and if I do it's usually a fairly old game anyway. I do not do much video editing or anything that would like the extra CUDA cores.

How much faster is the 2000m over the 1000m? I've tried to figure this out by searching but I can't seem to find a good answer.

The 1000M is quite a powerful GPU, slightly faster than the GeForce GT 540M in terms of processing power. I haven't tried that configuration, but I doubt that there will be any problems. In theory, the 2000M has twice the computational power of the 1000M, as it has twice the number of shaders, but other specs are the same, so I'm guessing it is more like a 40 ~ 50% performance increase in games (FPS wise).

[Akora]

Hey guys I was considering ordering the W520 and had a question about the Barnes and Noble Gold Account discount (Lenovo - Barnes and Noble Gold.) I'm not sure if this is the right place for that but hopefully you can help.

I can only find that page through links from forums or other places and not directly from google or lenovo's site. Do I have to actually be a member of some special program to use that discount, because just by creating an account from that link I can access the discount without doing anything to prove I'm part of a program.

[Sharpy1]

Woo hoo!
So I've been following the w520 since it was announced and finally pulled the trigger with the B&N discount, 4th of July Discount and $200 back from Chase I got it down to an affordable bit!
Went with the
Core i7-2720QM
Quadro 2000M
and 1920x1080
options
So I'm stoked! My T61p died last November I had had since it was released... I'm working on a 2004 mac mini now running unbuntu... egh.

But I went with the default 4 gigs of ram with 1 stick stuck in there intending to upgrade to 16 gigs. So my question is as follows:
Does the w520 support pc15000 RAM or pc12800 RAM? I know it takes 10600 RAM...
Has anyone tried this and do they see an appreciable performance boost?
Work on this will be primarily AutoCAD, 3DStudio Max, Photoshop and CDMW3 (some day).
Thanks!
Now the waiting begins!

I'm thinking about pulling the trigger on this too if I can get the price down a little more. How did you get $200 back from Chase?