Lenovo W520 Owner's Thread

I find that second part surprising. My 2620M Turbos fine on battery. And the only time I've seen my power draw climb to 100W-ish (and that means like, 98W) was when I was running Furmark + Linpack on it, for over an hour, never saw anything above 100W. So that means that there should be plenty of power for the quad cores to Turbo as they only use 10W more, as long as you are not stressing the CPU too.

 

Both games run extremely smooth on the 2000m with high settings.

 

Bad company dont require that much gpu power but benifit a whole lot from quad core cpus!

 

I would like to share my experience with throughput using eSATAp versus eSATA + power over USB cable, screenshots are attached.
Setup:
- VERTEX3 PRO 240 GB SSD
- Delock external HDD enclosure with eSATAp (Amazon.com: 2.5" USB 2.0/eSATA Aluminum External SATA Hard Drive Enclosure (Black) - Supports up to 500GB!: Electronics) with eSATAp cable
- RaidSonic ICE BOX enternal HDD enclosure with eSATA IB-266StUS-B (RaidSonic IB-266STUS-B Festplatten-Gehäuse 6,4 cm: Amazon.de: Computer & Zubehör)
- W7 test on NTFS
- Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit tests on NTFS and EXT4.
Generic statement: meanwhile it should be clear that eSATA port on W520 supports only SATA II, i.e. up to 3GB/s.
Test conclusions:
- eSATA + power over USB is far superior then eSATAp, ICY BOX with eSATA + power over USB delivers double the speed in comparison to Delock with eSATAp.
- in one test previous posted the USB 3 did not perform well too, similar to eSATAp.
- Therefore my choice for external HDD enclosure is still RaidSonic ICE BOX IB-266StUS-B with EXT4 for better write speed. My 2nd Vertex3 Pro in caddy is also partitioned to EXT4.
- as expected, under Linux the read speed from NTFS partition is comparable to those under W7 but the write speed is ~50 MB/s.
- NTFS partition provides (little) more usable space from the Vertex3 Pro 240 GB SSD - 223 GB, EXT4 with some tweaking (sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdXY will free up the Linux reserved space in sdXY) 219 GB.

 

This is not good news!

When I bought my W520, I was not told that it would not work with TurboBoost in battery mode.

The original thread with //JameZ (Lenovo)'s answer can be found here:
W520 TurboBOOST not working on battery or after up... - Page 19 - Lenovo Community

Thank you for sharing these benchmarks. That's good to know.
I am using the Accomdata eSata enclosure and it works great
Amazon.com: Acomdata 2.5" Tango USB/eSATA Hard Drive Enclosure Kit
Have you done any tests with it?

 

I just started setting up my new W520 and installed a 80Gb mSSD two days ago and then did a little trimming of unwanted programs. My screen is showing 52.5Gb free of 73.3Gb

 

huberth, I do not have that one HD enclosure. Could you be so kind to perform a test and share the results, i.e. what read and write speed over eSATA do you get?

 

My W520 i7-2820 works fine on battery with TurboBoost even with BIOS 1.22. Why would Lenovo want to disable it?

Instead of disabling TurboBoost, Lenovo should give the user the option to turn it (and other power saving features) on or off.

I am VERY disappointed.

Come on Lenovo engineers! You are "the inspired thinkers who roll up their sleeves and make things happen."
Lenovo: "For Those Who Do": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJJJaDMpCn0

 

i'd take his advice on this. i have a vertex 3 and have just ordered a 250gb intel 510 to replace it. have spent the last several weeks trying to keep the v3 working without bsod's and freezes and have not been able to keep it stable. will post pcvantage results next week when 510 comes in

 

I know this has probably been beaten to death, but here another discussion on the Intel 510 vs OCZ Vertex 3 which helps explain why the Intel 510 has better performance in real world applications.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...510-120gb-sata-iii-m17x-r3-2.html#post7354820

In the end, the real world differences are negligible so why not go with the brand that has a better reputation for reliability?