Announcing ThinkPad P-Series - P50 and P70

January ? wow I hope thats not true, of course for me its not 100% I will purchase it because if something else is comparable and is available for the Holidays. I may have another option however if not man I hope that rep is wrong.

 

Anybody knows if the P70 can accept GTX MXM cards?

 

I am seriously considering the P50 for CAD applications. My one hesitation though is the atrocious reviews that Lenovo receives for its customer support and service. I wouldn't hesitate to purchase the additional 3 year onsite warranty, but from what I've read that doesn't seem to improve repair response significantly. Thoughts?

 

The answer to this question will largely depend on your specific area and the subcontractors that IBM - which is still in charge of onsite support - uses there. My experiences have been excellent over the past 13 years, in one metro and two rural areas here in the U.S.

Obviously, YMMV.

 

Interesting, I'm primarily in Boone, North Carolina - roughly 2 hours north of Charlotte though I will be traveling back and forth to Asheville each week, hence the need for a mobile workstation Any source for checking Lenovo service quality for a particular area?

 

Well, the North American headquarters for Lenovo is in Morrisville, NC just outside Raleigh and it looks like they have an excellent customer center where I can get my hands on the P50 to test out before buying. That is encouraging.

 

I'd venture a guess that you're close enough to Lenovo's HQ to be in the clear, but that's just a guess.

Not really, apart from people living/working in the given area who have this type of coverage. Do bear in mind that subcontractors who perform the onsite work in the area are usually the same for all of the "big three".

 

Still no concrete info on the P70 release date.

 

Nvidia mobile Quadro lineup just announced...wondering how Lenovo will apportion them...

 

P70 will be available with a range of GPUs up to the M5000M, the P50 should be available with up to the M2000M.

 

Availability for P50 still around December? Dell just announced Precision 5000 and 7000 series that will have Xeon/Skylake/MxxxxM etc; available later this month apparently. Need to get a new workstation so I'm anxious for these machines to become available.

 

That would work for me on the P50. Seems a good compromise on price and power use. Main app for me these days is Lightroom/photoshop, no gaming.

 

P50 should be available later this month as well, P70 in December.

 

By available later this month, perhaps that means that it's available to order (or pre-order) maybe the last week of October with two- to three-week build times until P50s start actually shipping out.

I was initially considering the P50 when the announcement happened in August, but I decided subsequently to purchase a 440p. There's not a lot of choice these days when looking for a non-gaming quad-core CPU in a 14" or 15" laptop.

I might have waited for the P50, but was skeptical as to:

1) how long it would really take to get one in my hands after it became available to order, and
2) whether Lenovo can pull off this product's launch without significant quality issues, since these models incorporate so many substantial new technologies compared to their current lineup of laptops.

So I'll have to live vicariously through you early adopters, and will be eagerly watching the roll-out of these new machines, as they really look like big improvements over current Windows notebook offerings. Gook luck to all!

 

I need it now thought.

 

The W541 is a pretty compelling choice then. What else are you considering?

 

Ok, in a recent leaked Lenovo PDF, I have read that P50 might be available in December indeed. At least in the US. For Germany, the original date still is October. Weird.

P70 on the other hand might be earlier than I though...we will see.

 

Very interesting indeed. Thanks for the update.

 

New Dell Precision 7710 (waiting for that too) or an HP ZBook 17 G2 refresh (probably called a G3)

 

I would think the P70 should be first too. They already have 15" model available.

 

Stole this from the XPS forums:

http://www.winbeta.org/news/microsoft-announces-partner-events-october-share-exciting-news

Looks like Microsoft is holding partner events with OEMs. Dell's is October 8, and Lenovo's is October 19th (bunch more too with Asus, HP, etc.). Maybe its a potential launch date for the P50 (unless the delay comes true).

 

I don't care if its 3" thick and has 10 minutes of battery life. I want power and excellent cooling. All I need is a 17" non-glossy, high color gamut, IPS screen and a dock port. Come on P70!

 

I also wonder if it's possible to put something like a GTX 960M or even 970M in the P50.

Looking for a slim/portable 15 inch quad core laptop.

Looking at the new XPS 15, Precision 15 5510, MSI Ghost Pro, etc.

M2000M seems seriously underpowered compared to the GTX cards.
I don't need any of the certification etc.

Decent quad core 15 inch laptops do seem hard to come by for some reason.

Yet Macbook Pros sell really well it seems. Odd.

Shame it's 16:9 as well. What's up with that? They'd have space for a larger battery if it were 16:10 too.
It's like Apple and Microsoft are the only ones doing non mainstream aspect ratios. Pretty sad that Thinkpads don't have 16:10.

P50 does look good though. Graphics seem a bit limiting though.

 

New xps 15 should be 5510 clone.
If you oc the quadro card, they perform the same as gtx counter part.

Sent from my 306SH

 

The M2000M is roughly the equivalent of the GTX950 (or 960 maybe... some gray area). This is about equivalent of what Apple puts in their Macbook Pros. On paper, the M2000M is a huge improvement from the K2100M (which is what they are using in the current high-end W-series.

 

Well I don't want to have a 100W graphics card in a laptop because of the heat and power consumption problems. Laptops which consume a lot of power seems to be short lived because the high currents through the cheap components. My laptops that doesn't consume a lot of power seem to last forever. The Quadro M2000M at 55W seems to be a nice compromise. However, the M3000M at 75W got double the bandwidth which would be nice. I wonder if they will put that one in the 15" model.

 

I don´t think so. The M3000M is not meant for 15" Workstations, and as far as I know, M2000M is the maximum for the P50.

 

Indeed. I am debating with myself whether I want to buy the P70 or P50. I think I will wait out some initial reviews, see if they have MXM or embedded GPUs, and other stuff before I make a decision.

 

Looking forward to the P50. I run Qubes OS (heavy virtual environment that runs several VMs) and I think the P50 is ideal for that type of load.

The graphics card being a quadro here is definitely a help since Qubes runs a Xen virtualization environment https://rafalcieslak.wordpress.com/...ics-performance-in-a-vm-with-vga-passthrough/
The ability to run PCIe SSDs with large amounts of RAM is also very attractive for this application.

I am not sure why there is all this comparison between the quadro and gtx, they are designed for different things.

 

It's true that Quadro and GeForce graphics cards are designed and optimized for different tasks, but they can still be used for the tasks that the other series of graphics card is designed for (although Quadro is typically much better at games than GeForce is at professional applications). There is also a market for powerful, well-built systems with few compromises among those (like me) who value and own mobile workstations despite not having a workload tailored for professional graphics.

 

I was suspecting that. None the less, I must buy the P50 as I am strongly against having a DVD drive in the computer and 3.4 kg is too much by today's standard. Apple has really set a new standard here with their 2.08 kg MacBook Pros.

Judging this picture:

http://17c4dcd7f91259d8cc66-f5932f6...n.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/DSC02588.jpg

On the P50, the GPU is soldered on the motherboard.

 

I hadn't seen that picture before. Might end up going P70 then. Portability isn't terribly important for me since while I do take my laptop to and from work I used to lug a Precision M4700 around, which was a heavy tank of a laptop as it was and I didn't care much (I certainly understand why many wouldn't want to deal with that though).

Thanks

 

Some news:

• ThinkPad P50 is coming mid November
• ThinkPad P70 is coming late October

Also, as I have heard, the P50 will be able to dock not only onto the new ThinkPad Performance Dock (which is specific to the P-Series), but also with the existing ThinkPad Pro, Utra and Basic docks (with an adapter, though). P70 will need the new dock.

 

Is there some additional spec related info or info on the new docks? Good news on the release date though!

 

Ibmthink: Thank you for that piece of information. Today, I went to a local shop to try the T450 keyboard, thinking that I could "give in", provided that it wasn't too bad. The keys felt cheap and plastic-like, much worse than the T520 NMB keyboard.

What I wonder is (since you have tried the P70) if the feel of P70 is similar? I also tried the E550, which felt less plastic-like, but also more rough/stiff (which I don't like). Is the feel of the P50/P70 more close to the T450, to the E550, to the T520 NMB, or to the T60 NMB (more rough/stiff than the T520 NMB)?

 

The Performance Dock has the same ports as the ThinkPad Ultra Dock (they could not fit USB Type C or Thunderbolt 3 on here because of the cross-compatibility with the older docks).

Problem is, I am sure there are going to be different keyboard manufacturers for the P70, so I can´t make a generalized statement here^^ I also don´t know which T450 keyboard you tried. The feel varies greatly between backlit and non-backlit (smoother vs. rougher keys), as well as manufacturers (LiteOn vs. Chicony).

 

Upon using the parts look up (fortunately, the shop had the machine ID online), I get "CS13T,NO,CHY,Backlit" and "E15_2014,NO,CHY" for T450, and T550, respectively, I guess means Chicony for both. The E550 being non-backlit makes sense because of the rough feeling. My hope then is that the LiteOn keyboard has a more quality-like feel.

I have now looked up a lot of other ThinkPads, and in any case I have got "CHY". Even for the one (T450) tested on Notebookcheck (where the keyboard is praised panegyrically) I get "CHY". Perhaps it doesn't mean Chicony?!

 

Did you use the serial number for parts lookup, or simply the model number?

Chicony keyboards are slightly more widely used it seems, but certainly not on all machines^^ Indeed, the LiteOn backlit keyboards are better in general. But remember, if one likes a keyboard or not is subjective. I might love the LiteOn keyboard, but I also met people who didn´t like them.

P50 and P70 will have new keyboards, so I can´t say anything about them yet. I thought the machines on IFA felt great.

 

Interesting, I thought this would be the other way around with the P50 coming out before the P70. Oh well, just another month to wait.

 

I used the model number.

 

Well, thats the reason there^^ The model number will not give out which parts are built into a specific machine. That is something only the serial number specific to each machine can do.

 

R

Right. I found that strange too, since I got a complete keyboard specification (according to https://www.thinkscopes.com/2014/09...t-version-of-the-thinkpad-precision-keyboard/, "CHY" indeed means "Chicony"). I guess Chicony is always the "default" keyboard for ThinkPads.

Looking at one of your posts on the Liteon keyboard, you state that this is a LiteOn keyboard. But how do you know? I get no results when searcing for 04X0139 in Lenovo's part look-up.

 

Chicony is more often used, but they are not the "default".

Just search in google. Or just take a look at the parts list: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/do...Support:Large Enterprise:Parts|FRU Part Lists

 

Thank you so much for your help, ibmthink.

The P70 is now showing on the Swedish advanced search page Prisjakt.nu. You can look up the model number 20ER000EMS, which gives you 00PA314 PYWL-KBD,SE,CHY,BL (surprise!). But I guess that tells us nothing. P70 is not yet listed in the link you gave me, unfortunately. But I see that the FRU 00PA314 is not common with the T550, having searched in the pdf for that machine.

 

My pleasure.

The P50 and P70 models have different keyboards than T550, W550s etc., so it makes sense that its not the same FRU. 00PA314 is a new FRU.

 

LENOVO ThinkPad P70, i7-6820HQ, 16GB (2x8GB), 512 SSD, NVidia Quadro M3000M-4GB, 17.3" 4k AG IPS, Color Sensor, Smartcard, W7P64 + W10P64 RDVD Flyer (20ER000EMS)

Price 38299 SEK, about 4000€. A real bargain.

Graphics card is NVidia Quadro M3000M-4GB and the higher end graphics cards will be substantially more expensive.

 

One of the lowest prices listed is 38189 kr, which Google tells me is equivalent to 4586 USD. The baseline model is supposed to start at $1999. I'd be surprised if the CPU upgrade were more than $300, a 512 GB SSD goes for under $200, 16 GB of DDR4 goes for $200 (and some of that cost is already included in the $1999). The 4K screen can't be more than a $300 upgrade at this point (and that seems extreme). So I guess the M3000M is going for $1500 on release, in keeping with Nvidia's fine tradition of charging more for Quadro GPUs than most laptops retail for.

 

So the base models wont include discrete graphics?

 

I'm not entirely sure, honestly. I suspect the baseline will have a Quadro M1000M, based on how the W series is listed on the Lenovo website. I'm probably complaining a little too much, since I found a European website selling workstations, and the M3000M goes for about €400 more than the 965M, so figure it perhaps at more than $800. The M5000M, by contrast, goes for over €1700 more than the 965M.