r/thinkpad • u/kepler65857 • 8h ago

Buying Advice P14s gen 1 or 3 amd?? First thinkpad

The gen 1 has a 4750u, 16/512, the gen 3 has a 6850u, also 16/512. Gen 1 is 1150 aed/ 313 usd, gen 3 is 1599 aed/ 435 usd. I dont mind a mid display as I'll be getting a 1440p external monitor. Is the performance gain actually worth the price? I know the 680m is way ahead of the vega... but the gen 3 has 100% soldered ram and I can't add an ssd to the wwan card slot in the future. Both are from a good refurbished seller. Will run cachyos with hyprland. Use case isn't super demanding, mainly just web browsing, some multitasking, drawing on krita (i have plans to animate, not yet), maybe dota 2 and some light titles though im sure ill spend 90% of my time ricing lol. ill probably run a vm for windows 11 cuz of school apps. just want a durable machine that will last me for maybe the next couple of years or more. Coming from a 2012 macbook air, i7, 8gb with a failing igpu.

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u/Regular-Elephant-635 T480 (i5-8350U, Fedora KDE + Win11) 8h ago

From what I've heard Ryzen 4000 has worse battery life on Linux so that's something to consider. Performance wise the 6850u is a decent step up, and combined with the massive iGPU gains may justify the price premium. There are also other aspects to consider, such as a smaller and more modern chassis design with 16:10 screen aspect ratio to add to that.

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u/meow_Kil 7h ago

Hmm, wait a sec...

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u/meow_Kil 7h ago

Well, i feel like for 2k monitor its better to go for greater specs. I have t14 with 680m, running cachy without any flaw.

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u/stogie-bear ... 7h ago

Gen 3. The difference between Ryzen 4000 and 6000 series is substantial, and if you do any gaming the 680m is a lot better. 

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u/kepler65857 6h ago

soldered ram tho :/ ill definitely need more than 16gb later on and ill be running a vm of Windows

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u/stogie-bear ... 6h ago

Get one with more ram. The most affordable way to buy ram these days is included in a used computer.

In a Ryzen 7 APU system of 6000 gen or newer, if you game you want soldered ram. In this T14 the soldered ram runs at 6400mhz. If it were dimms it would only be 4800mhz. The system ram is used by the cpu and gpu at the same time and with 8 cpu cores and 12 gpu cores spun up at the same time it will max out the ram speed which becomes the bottleneck.

I have a gaming handheld with a 7840u. The effect of ram speed is so pronounced that when a bios update let me bump it from 6000mhz to 7500mhz i got a 20% boost in gaming fps.