Renewed Lenovo Thinkpad T430 £288

Kintarō Hattori

The Continental Op wrote: »

Is it going cheap I nearly bought a refurbished one at the beginning of the first lockdown. If I see a X250 for a decent price I'd probably buy it.

Afraid not, it's a great little machine for my needs. I'd happily buy an X250 if I saw one for the right price.

The_Conductor

Something like this would be a better buy imho:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Laptop-Lenovo-Thinkpad-E530-Intel-i7-15-6-500GB-HDD-8-GB-Ram-spots-/294125949956?_trksid=p2385738.m4383.l4275.c10

(Providing you got it at the right price)

Batattackrat

Those old laptops would struggle to play 720 YouTube videos even.

grogi

Batattackrat wrote: »

Those old laptops would struggle to play 720 YouTube videos even.

Don't exaggerate. I also have a E6220 (they I got 6 years ago for 150€) and it's going perfectly fine. Just got a new battery and keyboard this Xmas. I use it daily.

It plays Minecraft, StarCraft remastered and other games well as well.

Homelander

grogi wrote: »

Don't exaggerate. I also have a E6220 (they I got 6 years ago for 150€) and it's going perfectly fine. Just got a new battery and keyboard this Xmas. I use it daily.

It plays Minecraft, StarCraft remastered and other games well as well.

And that's fine, no-one's arguing the laptop in the OP is useless. It'd be grand for the uses he's described, and perfectly good for a few more years even.

The problem is it being described as a "bargain" at the huge €350 price tag.

I mean I bought a Athlon Silver 3050E laptop recently for €330 on sale from Lenovo.

Core performance is very similar to the i5, and the integrated graphics blow it away - not just in games, but also in stuff like hardware decoding and other features.

Not to mention the laptop itself has a better screen, higher resolution, HDMI, and other ports and features that didn't exist when that OP laptop did....in 2013.

So while 720P is obviously an exaggeration, there are tons of things a modern laptop costing less can easily do, that that laptop cannot.

For example mine can decode 4K via GPU effortlessly....the OP's laptop hasn't the faintest chance of running 4K content, and even at that, certain codecs would result in crazy high CPU usage as it massively pre-dates a large number of codecs.

And yeah you can argue "but I don't want to decode 4K" and that's fair enough, but the ultimate point is....why would you pay €350 for a product that delivers a €150 performance/feature-set level.

My own parents laptop is a €150 HP Elitebook with i5-4200U, 4GB and 180GB SSD. It's perfect for them, and a great laptop.

It's not about the laptop being useless or bad, it's about it being terrible value for money compared to other offerings.

The_Conductor

Batattackrat wrote: »

Those old laptops would struggle to play 720 YouTube videos even.

I'm playing Microsoft Flight Simulator medium settings @ 42 fps on a 2012 HP 8770W Elitebook which has an i7-3820QM processor with an 8Gb GTX 980M graphics card.........

It all depends on the specs of the machine- and just because something is 9 or 10 years old, doesn't mean you can't play even brand spanking new games on it.

This machine has 32Gb of RAM and 2 * 2Tb 870 EVOs in it too.........

Different strokes for different folks.........

Note: I wouldn't exactly suggest this machine is mobile..........

Grumpypants

Homelander wrote: »

And that's fine, no-one's arguing the laptop in the OP is useless. It'd be grand for the uses he's described, and perfectly good for a few more years even.

The problem is it being described as a "bargain" at the huge €350 price tag.

I mean I bought a Athlon Silver 3050E laptop recently for €330 on sale from Lenovo.

Core performance is very similar to the i5, and the integrated graphics blow it away - not just in games, but also in stuff like hardware decoding and other features.

Not to mention the laptop itself has a better screen, higher resolution, HDMI, and other ports and features that didn't exist when that OP laptop did....in 2013.

So while 720P is obviously an exaggeration, there are tons of things a modern laptop costing less can easily do, that that laptop cannot.

For example mine can decode 4K via GPU effortlessly....the OP's laptop hasn't the faintest chance of running 4K content, and even at that, certain codecs would result in crazy high CPU usage as it massively pre-dates a large number of codecs.

And yeah you can argue "but I don't want to decode 4K" and that's fair enough, but the ultimate point is....why would you pay €350 for a product that delivers a €150 performance/feature-set level.

My own parents laptop is a €150 HP Elitebook with i5-4200U, 4GB and 180GB SSD. It's perfect for them, and a great laptop.

It's not about the laptop being useless or bad, it's about it being terrible value for money compared to other offerings.

Literally no one outside the first post is saying it is good value at 330. We are saying the ThinkPads are great machines but you sould pay about 2-250 on eBay and that would get you the higher spec'd T440p that has 1080p screen, HDMI and it has a DVD drive which most new laptops don't have.

I've bought 3 or 4 for people. They are great. I can throw pretty much anything at it and it runs it.

No reason to play 4k content on a laptop that doesn't have a 4k screen.

Homelander

The_Conductor wrote: »

I'm playing Microsoft Flight Simulator medium settings @ 42 fps on a 2012 HP 8770W Elitebook which has an i7-3820QM processor with an 8Gb GTX 980M graphics card.........

The 980M is from 2015, and was very high end at that time. It wouldn't have been included in that configuration orignally surely. Also very different scenario, obviously a €2K laptop from 2013 will age better than a €1k laptop from 2013.

No reason to play 4k content on a laptop that doesn't have a 4k screen.

Loads of people connect their laptops to their external monitors and TV's. It doesn't even have to be 4K.

Or even for example if you were playing a 1080P x265 file. On a modern laptop, no problem at all at low CPU usage.

On an old laptop like the OP, it would rely on brute CPU power to playback the file because there is no hardware decoding support, leading to high CPU usage, high fan noise, temps, etc.

_Kaiser_

Have to agree with most of the posters above. The T430 was good in its day but that day is long past. For what it is now, it's ridiculously overpriced.

Thinkpads of that era were always more expensive and less specced than the equivalent Dell Latitude. No HDMI, crap screen, low resolutions etc

Even if this was half the price it wouldn't be worth it IMO

The Continental Op

The_Conductor wrote: »

Something like this would be a better buy imho:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Laptop-Lenovo-Thinkpad-E530-Intel-i7-15-6-500GB-HDD-8-GB-Ram-spots-/294125949956?_trksid=p2385738.m4383.l4275.c10

(Providing you got it at the right price)

Went for €201, but didn't bid as it was too late (2minutes left) to contact the seller for a cost for delivery.

Grab All Association

The_Conductor wrote: »

This particular one is an i5-3320M- which is a dual core part, with HT enabled.
The advertisement suggests its a quadcore- its not.
It is a 2.6Ghz processor, and its well capable of running W10Pro (and indeed VLC, Open Office or whatever you'd like to throw at it).

The main reason for buying this- is to get a Thinkpad- and indeed, even with a weaker processor it is a desirable proposition- its well built and so so serviceable- its a doddle to upgrade the wifi or any other components in it- if you are happy messing with your laptop, you'll love a Thinkpad.

Note- the memory is *under* the keyboard- aka you'll have to take the keyboard off if you want to upgrade the 4Gb module there (it does support 2 * 8Gb DDR3 modules).

The big issue with this- is the price, its simply priced far too high. Take a hundred quid off the asking and its a no brainer- but at the current price, its kind of hard to justify it.

Agree it’s Overpriced, but at least it’s PGA socketed and not BGA. Iirc these can be upgraded to a quad core i7-3820QM processor.

The Alienware Area 51m and a Clevo (sold under various brand names) are the only laptops on the market that have an upgradable/downgradable LGA socketed desktop processors. I have the 9th generation A51M, best machine I ever owned. I recently seen a dead (out of warranty) Dell XPS as a paperweight in a friends house. Soldered RAM, SSD etc. At least with the A51M, Clevo etc you could salvage the RAM, nvme ssd, processor etc.

shanec1928

Kintarō Hattori wrote: »

Afraid not, it's a great little machine for my needs. I'd happily buy an X250 if I saw one for the right price.

The x230 is a great machine. We have a spare one here that’s had everything upgraded. We deployed 100’s of these in work. Possibly one of the most reliable laptops going and our would have had a hard life!

For anyone searching skip the x240’s crap trackpad.