About halfway through my sabbatical, I needed to visit my parents in Georgia, but I also needed to continue working on my research projects. I didn’t feel safe about lugging my A6000 desktop computer (in checked baggage or shipping), so I followed my own advice and started looking for a used workstation-class laptop.
It took a few weeks, but I landed this awesome, practically new Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 from a seller on eBay. It has a 16″ QHD+ screen (that I scale down to 1080p for my eyes), an i9-11950H (8 core/16 thread) CPU, 64GB DDR4 RAM, 2TB SSD, and an NVIDIA RTX A5000 16GB discrete video card (Stable Diffusion and llamacpp worked without any hiccups).
It plows through all of the work that I throw out at, but it does sound like a jet engine when its two cooling fans spin up. I have found that raising it off the desk by a couple of inches helps tremendously with cooling by increasing air flow. I had been using rigged up stands, but I built a special stand out of LEGO that I will show in detail tomorrow (but there’s a sneak peek in the photos below).
I can’t sing this laptop’s praises loudly enough! It works well with Debian 12 Bookworm, but it does have some issues with power saving/hibernation, which is a known issue and might have some work around that I haven’t tried yet.
The one thing that it can’t do without when doing GPU-focused work is it’s chonky 230 watt external power supply. I bring it with me when I know it will eat through its battery doing jobs. I recently upgraded my backpack to a Mystery Ranch 2-Day Assault Pack, which has a built-in sleeve that easily accommodates 16″ laptops like this one (but it can be tricky to use the laptop side egress slot due to the ThinkPad’s thickness).
Dynamic Subspace 