Experimenting with Thermal Switches - Grand Prize Arrives!

It's been way too long since my last posting here at element14 ... but I suppose that's not unexpected as I've just been flat-out busy with work and a myriad of other commitments. Just recently, I put quite a bit of time into reviewing a Rohde & Schwarz LCX200 LCR Meter, and submitting a few RoadTest/Design Challenge applications. Much that is happening isn't "visible", but there is plenty of stuff in-progress too that may see the light of day later this year ...

But alas, this post is about a joyous event - one which has literally been months in the making, with thanks to danzima, rscasny and the team at element14. It was back in April when I was announced as the grand prize winner for Experimenting with Thermal Switches and for that, I was given the choice of two prizes -

The choice for me was an easy one. I've been fortunate enough to have a plentiful supply of oscilloscopes, not least because of my RoadTest reviews of the Rohde & Schwarz RTM3004, Picoscope 2205A, Digilent Analog Discovery Pro ADP3450 and Keysight Smart Bench Essentials kit which included an EDUX1052G.

By contrast, I'm still lugging around the Lenovo E431 that I got back in 2015 as part of the Tektronix RSA306 RoadTest as my primary laptop, with copious upgrades of course. That laptop has seen seven years of hard service in my hands - it's been with me overseas and interstate several times and has been unfaltering with the exception of its battery which rarely lasts even two hours. It was never a perfect laptop to begin with - but many of its issues were fixed over time. The original Samsung 128GB SSD had been swapped out for a Transcend 256GB mSATA SSD + a Sandisk Ultra II 480GB SSD and the optical drive instead houses a caddy with a Crucial M550 960GB SSD to keep my storage requirements satiated. The RAM situation was improved, from 8GB to 16GB by adding a second memory stick. Unfortunately, the 1366x768 screen with terrible colour rendition and relatively hefty weight were not things that could be "fixed" and the wireless card did fail and had to get replaced with a "whitelisted" card so could not reach the "heights" of 802.11ac in the end. I did, however, do the hacks that enabled this "unsupported" platform to receive Windows 11. That did work, but was not without its quirks. To have something more up-to-date to take its place would make a big difference to me.

Having elected for Option B, I was excited to finally get an upgrade, but alas I didn't count on one thing - the chip shortage / supply-chain issues! This has been the dreaded thing to hear, as it has ruined many of my projects and otherwise made the lives of many electronics engineers a bit of a game of "substitution whack-a-mole". At the time, I was told that things would take two months, but that was an at least two months ... the staff weren't sure whether it was worth waiting given the uncertainty so I was given the option to look for an alternative.

The problem? No alternatives existed that were comparable in specification and in-stock or short lead-time. Everywhere I turned, the story was the same - we couldn't even blame the crypto-miners for this! So I decided to wait ...

After a few "false-starts", I finally received this package early this month - it's been cut open, crushed, covered in tape and rounded. I still had hope ... element14 usually knows what to do for packaging!

Indeed, the box inside was undamaged ... or mostly. This laptop comes from Lenovo's gaming range, branded Legion. I wonder who in their marketing department decided on the name, because I certainly am not part of Anonymous. The other thing it reminds me of is of Legionnaires Disease ...

Looking down the side panel of the box, this one has SKU 17ITH6 and it turns out to be an Intel i7-11800H rather than an AMD machine which was my expectation. Perhaps it was mis-ordered, and I am a bit of an AMD supporter so this was a bit of a surprise to me, but the performance is pretty much equivalent, so I decided to accept this anyway. I wasn't going to wait for another build ... nor inflict the pain of having the unit go through the returns process. The advantage of the AMD is the integrated graphics is better, so in hybrid mode, you might expect better battery life and performance. Can't always win though. But it's good to see that it has 16GB RAM (Samsung DDR4 3200MHz), 1TB NVMe SSD (WD SN730), 80Wh battery and Windows 11 Home.

Unboxing the unit, it's the first time I've had a 17" laptop so its size was surprising to me. Part of the reason is just simply the part that juts out of the back of the unit. A vast array of ports are on the rear, which, is my least favourite spot as that's a recipe for "karate-chopping" your cables when you tilt the laptop. But I guess, the truth is that this is more of a desktop replacement than a laptop, so such design choices may be forgiven.

The case has a metallic blue finish - the keyboard is a bit like a "rounded" chiclet keyboard which is not my favourite - the old Thinkpad one still feels better to me, but this one does have a lower profile and LED backlighting, the latter I care little for. For the size of the laptop, I felt the chassis was less sturdy than I had expected. The screen flexes a bit as it is opened and closed ... but this isn't a Thinkpad, so perhaps I'm expecting too much for build quality. Hopefully it will last - if it doesn't, you'll probably be amongst the first to know.

The underside is pretty much designed with ventilation as the primary concern. The rubber feet elevate the underside of the laptop to let it breathe ... while the mesh over the holes allows for free airflow. Two blower-style fans can be seen through the mesh.

When it comes to ports, this laptop has quite a few, which is good. Most interesting, it's the first in the house to have Thunderbolt/USB4.0. That really shows just how I haven't been keeping up with the latest technology - simply because there was no real need for me to have it.

While the body of the laptop weighs just a little more than the Lenovo E431, the power adapter is something else entirely. This 230W power brick is substantially beefier than anything else I've ever held ... and it's also heavier. This means that flying with this laptop and charger on carry-on is going to eat a lot of your allowance!

Powering up, the battery was pretty much flat when it arrived, but it was otherwise functional. The improved colour rendition of the IPS screen was obvious, the full HD resolution was a nice upgrade from the 1366x768 resolution of the old, but I do wish it had a bit more - 2K would have been a more comfortable resolution. Considering it was a prize, it is definitely one of the most awesome I have ever received.

It was then that I realised, sheesh - this laptop is probably going to be faster than my desktop computer! Right now, I'm still running a 4-year-old AMD Ryzen 1700 (overclocked to 3.8GHz), with 64GB DDR4 2666 (overclocked to 2800MHz), GTX1070Ti, 1TB NVMe SSD + 1TB + 256GB SSDs + 2x8TB + 2x10TB HDDs + 2xBD-RE drives and 2 x 27" 4K monitors. This workhorse has been pretty reliable for me and has been quite satisfying speed-wise, but to think this laptop could easily rival or beat my desktop (CPU-wise, at least) was a revelation. I decided I would invest another AU$700 of my own money into it - to bring it up to 64GB RAM (2x32GB modules) and to add another 2TB NVMe SSD to the laptop for a total of 3TB. That would make running all my creative and scientific software much more comfortable, with enough memory to cope with my multiple-VM habits.

The size difference is most apparent with the laptops side-by-side. Let's hope the new one lives a long and productive life, like the old one. But I thought it would be nice to sum up some pros and cons -

In the end, a very happy result ... I now have a powerhouse of a laptop in my hands, and all thanks to element14 and Kemet! But the old Lenovo E431 isn't going to be retired just yet ... it's still got plenty of work to do!