u/Aklwong902

Been trying to get used to my new (to me) P1 G7, there's a lot to like about it. Been slowly trying to transition to turning it into my daily driver, but there's just one irksome (and highly audible thing), and that's the fan curve being trigger-happy and pretty loud under even medium-ish load on eco mode.

Wondering if it's a TIM application thing (temps aren't anything crazy, but I can't say for sure whether the liquid metal is actually doing what its supposed to do), or if there's anything besides "balanced on AC power" in bios and cool/quiet on lap that can help out with this. I would use tpfanctrl but currently seeing if there's a more organic way to go about it, so to speak.

I get that it's going to be loud under load in this form factor, but for the brief time I had a P14s gen 5 intel (same CPU, worse cooling, no liquid metal) and it wasn't nearly this bad when not running demanding stuff. I have a nagging suspicion the vents being blocked by the hinge cover is a flawed design, but I'm not sure if it's actually a major factor

Deliberating between two buying options for a legion pro 7 gen 10. One is still sealed box, standard warranty until next year for ~2200. Another is used and sold locally for a relatively small price difference, and by all accounts was barely used and well taken care of, with ADP + warranty until 2028. Also only has 1tb of storage rather than 2 (I'd use 2tb as is, otherwise I'd populate the empty slot in the used one).

That said, I couldn't find a value for how much it'd actually cost me to upgrade the brand new one for an extra 2-3 years of ADP/warranty. If it's like 300+ bucks (usd), I'm inclined to think the used one would be a substantially better deal and also gives some confirmation that the factory didn't bungle anything. Otherwise, is buying new/sealed the better play here?

I also kinda fumbled this whole process because prices have been on the rise even as the next generation/refresh approaches so... yeah. It wouldn't kill me to wait, but at this point I don't know how long I'd be waiting for a fairly uncertain decrease in price.

On another note, in terms of removing the plate covering the internals to upgrade RAM/storage, I've seen two different ways, one is removing the screws on the 3rd fan (which is how jarrod did it), the other (according to the manual/other videos) is taking it off with the 3rd fan still attached to it. Wondering if there's a preferred way to go about it, since one isn't the "right" way but also avoids dealing with the ribbon cable.

Recently happened upon a gently used P1 gen 7 for a little under $900 USD. I don't know whether this qualifies as a certified heist, but it definitely feels like a steal. I've been slowly setting things up and getting updates installed, but I figured I'd leave some thoughts here as food for thought given that this has been something of a controversial machine, and will steadily become more accessible as gen 9 approaches. Might turn it into a nicer formatted post/video later on. This is from the lens of someone who has used a T480s and T14 gen 2, and some older thinkpads from the early 2010s era before that.

Specs:

ultra 7 165H

64GB ram

2.5k IPS screen

RTX 3000 ada

Starting off with the objectively good things, the screen is great, can't complain. You could nitpick and say it doesn't support VRR, but it's nice. IPS screens generally are very inoffensive even if unremarkable, and this one definitely fits the bill.

Build quality is good, it does collect fingerprints but the chassis is nice. Nothing much else to say there, it's good. No apparent creaks or squeaks. I thought I'd get bothered by the camera bump, but it's honestly fine. If anything, it'll encourage people to open the lid at the correct place.

Speakers are very uncharacteristic, in a good way. They're loud, clear, and overall very solid compared to what you'd expect from a thinkpad. Despite being down-firing, it's actually quite nice.

Performance, I can't really complain. The 3000 ada is basically a (limited tgp) 4070, albeit seemingly not supporting some of the tuning features you'd see on a geforce card. Maybe it's a drivers thing, anyone who has gotten the more "gamer-y" settings working, give me a shout. The meteor lake CPU isn't a world beater, but so far it's demonstrated good performance on decent enough efficiency.

The haptic trackpad is decent. Typically people say it's either great or completely awful, and I think it's fair to say it's somewhere in between. The clicks are actually pretty nice, the trackpad "buttons" that aren't actually buttons are not unusable, but I would agree physical buttons would be better. Double clicking with my thumbs while using the trackpoint is probably the main gripe I've got, perhaps my fingers are a little too accustomed to the physical travel of the button. I haven't had issues with it overall though, haven't observed problems with palm rejection and erratic behavior so far, possibly due to mature drivers at this point in time.

Fan noise. I'm starting to think that it's less of the components being hot necessarily, but the fan curve is definitely aggressive. They'll kick on occasionally regardless of what you're doing, which I feel is a fault of the manufacturer's fan curve more so than excessive heat generation, as temps are pretty reasonable when not doing much. Rather than quiet, medium, loud, the 3 power plans go from loud, louder, loudest under load. The fan noise itself is low enough pitch that it's not some headache inducing whine, but it does get loud. Haven't put it to the test with anything crazy, but when downloading/installing things, fans are slow but on. I did run the Stellar Blade demo just for fun, and the laptop handled it just fine at a variety of different settings/resolutions. From what I could tell, neutering the resolution and playing on efficiency mode didn't really restrain the fans all that much, so at that point you may as well put it on balanced and treat yourself to some better settings. TPfanctrl probably will work wonders here, but I haven't tried it on this machine yet.

Keyboard, while not as good as the 1.8mm travel ones, is good overall. I'm not the biggest fan of the shortened backspace/enter keys on the righthand side. Something else to note is that coming from a 14" laptop, my hand tends to drift to the left of keyboard. While I much prefer being centered over a full numpad, it has been a bit of a quirk where I use the left edge of the laptop to orient my hands, and I'm not used to there being that much of a gap so sometimes my left hand ends up in wrong places while typing. I'd imagine it's just an adjustment period and personal tendency.

Trackpoint feels fine, can't really comment otherwise. No tracking problems, no drifting, and it's not super stiff. It works.

As tuning goes, throttlestop does work for adjusting power limits and whatnot. According to notebookcheck, the PL1 is 70w for the 155H, and for most people it does not need all that.

tl;dr

Build quality, screen, speakers, performance, keyboard, all pretty good.

Trackpad is an acquired taste, but unless you absolutely can't live without the proper feedback from the trackpoint buttons, I don't feel it's something you can't get used to.

The thing is loud under load, unconditionally. Expected, but I would've preferred a quieter efficiency mode, even if it did cost more performance.