Lenovo ThinkPad T61 Review
Overview
Today we have the Santa Rosa-based Lenovo ThinkPad T61 in the hot seat. With all the madness surrounding the release of the Santa Rosa-based laptops, we finally get to see what all the hubbub is about. Our particular T61 came equipped with a 2.40GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7700, 2GB DDR2 667 RAM, 100GB 7200RPM SATA hard drive, dual layer DVD+/-RW drive, nVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M GPU, and a 14.1" WXGA+ LCD with a native resolution of 1440x900.
Will the T61 be another great entry in the famed ThinkPad line, or did Lenovo slip up and buck the trend? Read on to find out!
Design
Portability
Measuring 13.2" x 9.3" x 1.09-1.26" with weight of about 5.2 lbs, the T61 is a powerhouse in a petite package. It's very portable and unobtrusive. I actually toted this sucker around by hand and it was not inconvenient in the least.
Case and Design
It's black. Very black. The T61 repeats the tried and true design of all its ThinkPad predecessors. As I commented in my review of the T60, this isn't really that big a deal because ThinkPads have always been designed with business professionals in mind. Blinding LEDs and color shifting metallic paint may not be the look you're going for when you're sitting down at a cost control meeting
One thing about the T61 that was interesting to see is that this is the first ThinkPad to finally ditch the IBM logo on the lid and palm rest. Even models as recent as the T60 still had IBM branding despite the laptop line being transferred over in 2005.
This one took a little getting used to!
The build quality of the T61 is second to none, as usual. The hinges are great, the latch clicks firmly into place and nothing appears cheap. The rest of the laptop feels very solid and nothing flexes under pressure or seems flimsy.
In previous ThinkPads, Lenovo included a magnesium rollcage surrounding the lower half of the laptop. This time around, there is also a rollcage for the LCD, making the laptop even stronger than before.
Design Continued
Keyboard
There's 89 normal keys on the T61, displayed in 7 rows. The keys are pretty quiet and have great feedback, as is the case with just about all the ThinkPads I've dealt with. My fingers never got tired no matter how long my period of use, which is always a nice feature.
The T61 has the same bunch of ThinkPad function keys that the previous generation T60 has. These keys can be accessed by depressing the Fn key and keys with alternate blue letters on them. These shortcuts include tasks such as locking the laptop, choosing a power scheme, standby, brightness control, and video controls. The complete list is as follows:
Lenovo T61 Keyboard | |
Number of keys | 89 keys |
Number of rows | 7 rows |
Special/Function Keys | Fn+F2: Lock Windows |
One new feature of the T61 that Lenovo included is a spill proof keyboard. Never again will your clumsiness destroy your prized investment's keyboard! In all seriousness, this is a welcome addition. Not too long ago a guy I know spilled coffee into his ThinkPad keyboard, and not only did his system smell like hazelnut for like a month, it ruined his keyboard and he needed to order a new one.
Touchpad/UltraNav
As those of you who read my review of the T60 widescreen may know, I have a borderline sick obsession with ThinkPad's UltraNav TrackPoint (my beloved 'eraserhead'). I simply cannot use touchpads for any period of time; their imprecision and clumsiness drives me insane. If I am using a non-Lenovo laptop, I have to have a USB mouse handy. It's just that simple.
For those of you not familiar with my sweet, sweet eraserhead, I'm talking about the red rubber mouse pointer nestled between the G, H, and B keys. I wish more manufacturers would include one in their systems.
Lenovo also includes software that allows you to enable or disable one of the two pointing devices on the fly, which is a nice touch. If you're like me, one of the first things I did with the clean T61 build was disable the touchpad. You also have the option to have both enabled simultaneously.
Design Continued 2
Connectivity Options
The T61 has most of the ports you would see on the average laptop, except for multimedia ports such as SPDIF, DVI, and a few others. The ThinkPad engineers added a couple of new goodies not seen on previous models, which I will detail below.
On the front of the laptop, you will find the first of the new additions, which is an IEEE 1394a port, positioned next to a switch to enable/disable wireless connectivity, and while not a new feature on ThinkPads, Lenovo moved the headphone and mic jacks from the left side to the front. I have to say I actually like them better in this position. Rounding things out is a lid latch.
The rear of the T61 is pretty bare, except for the battery, AC power connector and one CPU vent.
The right side of the laptop contains the DVD+/-RW drive and a single USB 2.0 port.
On the left side of the T61, you will see a large CPU vent, as well as ports for VGA, modem, Gigabit Ethernet, and dual USB 2.0. The last new addition to the T61 is the 4-in-1 memory card reader placed below the ExpressCard slot. As always, there are push in levers to pop cards out.
Heat and Noise
The T61 runs quietly under normal circumstances. Like the T60 before it, the chipset code of this laptop was too new for any temperature monitoring software to read. I could not get an accurate temperature from Motherboard Monitor, SpeedFan, or Everest. The only temperature that was reported was for the hard drive, and the temperature never fluctuated a degree.
Running the T61 under full Prime95 load, the temperature of the air pouring out of the vents was slightly warm, but not boiling like some other laptops we've tested. The palm rest did not get hot in any spots I'm happy to report.
I was a little disappointed that I couldn't get better results for heat and noise from the T61. Lenovo bills the T61 as its 'quietest, coolest system ever'. They basically revamped the entire cooling system from that of the T60. I had a conference call with Lenovo back in May and they told me that their engineers studied the flapping of an owl's wings and based their new heatsink fans on their feathers, because of how quiet owls can fly. That right there is some crazy stuff!
By doing all of the above, Lenovo claims that there is a drop in temperature by 2 degrees Celsius over the T60 AND that the T61 operates 3dB quieter. I could not substantiate these claims, but judging by the changes they made, I wouldn't doubt it.
Upgrading and Expansion
Upgrading the T61, as is the case with most other manufacturers, is pretty limited. You can upgrade simple things such as RAM, hard drive, wireless adapter, or ExpressCard. Lenovo has icons impressed into the bottom of the chassis to show you which screws keep what attached. This comes in handy when performing these minor upgrades, but it is still easy to put a screw back in the wrong place since they are all the same diameter, but different lengths.
If you need to perform some maintenance (i.e. replace the LCD or keyboard if they break), you will need to completely disassemble the laptop.
Features
Technical Specifications
The Lenovo T61 is built on Intel's Core 2 Duo T7700 dual-core processor, running at 2.40GHz and comes with 2MB L2 cache per core. The T7400 has a TDP (Thermal Design Power, or maximum thermal output) of 34W and is built on Intel's 65nm mobile process. Lenovo offers the T61 with several different CPU options ranging from the Core 2 Duo T7100 (1.80GHz) to the top of the line T7700.
The T61 sports the Intel i965M chipset, and is equipped with the DirectX 10 capable 128MB nVIDIA Quadro NVS 140 graphics card. This is a new offering from nVIDIA, and as such, not much is flying around out there about the card. Based on synthetic benchmarks, the Quadro NVS 140 seems to perform in between a Radeon X1400 and a Radeon X1600. Keeping in mind that although this card is not designed for gaming, most games should be playable at somewhat reduced settings.
The T61 tested for this article was equipped with 2GB of DDR2-667 running in dual channel mode. A new feature included with the T61 (and other Santa Rosa-based laptops) is Intel Turbo Memory, (also known as Robson flash memory). Intel's Robson cache technology attempts to decrease hard drive usage by moving frequently accessed data (such as the operating system and most used programs) over to the flash memory. Because flash memory reacts more quickly than hard drives and requires much less power, the benefit here with laptops, in theory, would be battery savings and increased data access speed. Robson utilizes new features available in Windows Vista, ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive (a hard drive caching solution), allowing both read caching and write caching of data.
There was 1GB of Intel Turbo Memory on board in the T61. I have to say I noticed very little difference in both boot up times and battery life (more on that later) than other ThinkPads, such as the T60. One thing that I absolutely hated about the Turbo Memory was the way that Microsoft handled it in Vista. Since Microsoft loves to give you those oh-so-helpful balloon tips, Vista pops up a 'low disk space' error CONSTANTLY. What is so annoying about this pop up is that Microsoft could have and should have issued some kind of fix to flag Turbo Memory as a 'non-traditional' hard drive that would not be subjected to these error messages. BY DESIGN Turbo Memory is supposed to be full, ALL THE TIME, because it is caching your OS and most used programs. So unless you want to do a BIOS tweak, prepare to be annoyed by this disk space pop up, which is yet another reason why Vista sucks. If you scroll down on this page to the 'Display' section, you will see a shot of the display, and yup, you guessed it, this friggin' pop up is visible in the picture.
Moving right along, the T61 we received came with a 100GB Hitachi TravelStar 7200RPM 8MB cache SATA hard drive, the same as our T61 test unit. Just like the T61, Lenovo has implemented an anti-shock mechanism in the hard drive that will make the drive stop spinning momentarily if the system detects any jarring movement. This is an innovative and very helpful feature since it will prevent your hard drive arm from slamming into the platter and causing physical damage.
For audio, the T61 is equipped with two speakers on top of the keyboard (one on either side), which is nice because some laptops that have them on the bottom suffer from smothered sound. The sound quality was decent on the T61, not much different sounding than the previous generation. The volume was not all that loud but a booming home theater system was not Lenovo's intention.
The default installation of Windows Vista Business was pretty well free of clutter on the desktop, i.e. free ISP trials, etc. What there were a lot of was system tray icons; half of them are Lenovo's own programs, but they still extend to almost a quarter of the screen. At least you have the option to hide inactive icons!
Part of the Centrino Pro platform is the ability to carefully manage systems deployed in your enterprise. I would have loved to have played with these features, because with a background in IT, I've dealt with these issues before and realize they are of the utmost importance to any company. Unfortunately, since I'm not running a large domain with multiple T61's out of my basement, I wasn't able to see this in action.
The centralized console for Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) is called LanDesk, and provides IT admins inventory management capabilities and a way to isolate problem systems. According to Intel, AMT allows you to:
- Discover: Intel AMT stores hardware and software information in non-volatile memory. With built-in manageability, Intel AMT allows IT to discover the assets, even while PCs are powered off. With Intel AMT, remote consoles do not rely on local software agents, helping to avoid accidental data loss.
- Heal: The built-in manageability of Intel AMT provides out-of-band management capabilities to allow IT to remotely heal systems after OS failures. Alerting and event logging help IT detect problems quickly to reduce downtime.
- Protect: Intel AMT System Defense Feature protects your network from threats at the source by proactively blocking incoming threats, reactively containing infected clients before they impact the network, and proactively alerting IT when critical software agents are removed. Intel AMT also helps to protect your network by making it easier to keep software and virus protection consistent and up-to-date across the enterprise. Third-party software can store version numbers or policy data in non-volatile memory for off-hours retrieval or updates.
Sounds pretty damn cool, right?
Display
The T61's physical screen looked great- very bright and sharp. Native resolution weighs in at 1440x900 (WXGA+) and looks well-matched to the system. One thing I don't like is when the resolution is too small for the size screen it is on (for example, 15' LCDs with 1680x1050). Lenovo found the sweet spot here, BUT there was one issue that I had with the LCD, and it's probably the only serious blight on the entire T61 system. Here it is: for whatever reason, Lenovo did not make the LCD centered. It's kind of shifted to the right, which was highly annoying. You should be able to see what I'm talking about in the picture below. Add to this the fact that the top and left bezel seemed excessively thick. The bezels look like they belong on a ThinkPad from the mid-90s, not Lenovo's latest and greatest.
The T61's optical drive supports the CD-RW and Dual Layer DVD+/-RW formats. Noise levels of the drive are pretty close to what you would get from most other drives.
The supported read and write capabilities are as follows:
- Read: 24X CD-ROM/CD-R, 24X CD-RW, 8X DVD-ROM, 8X DVD+/-R, 4X DVD+/-RW
- Write: 24X CD-R, 4-16X CD-RW, 8X DVD+/-R, 4X DVD+/-RW, 2.4X DL DVD+RW
Features Continued
Wi-Fi
The T61 uses Intel's new Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN. The 'AGN' implies that the supported network protocols are 802.11a, g, and Draft-N. Wireless connectivity worked great as I effortlessly connected to my wireless network. I can't really say if the Draft-N was any faster than an ordinary 'G' network as my router does not support 'N' yet. It did seem to have comparable speeds to what I am used to on 'G'.
One neat feature that more and more manufacturers are including these days is an on/off switch on the front of the laptop chassis that allows you to enable or disable the wireless adapter. Bluetooth also was included with the T61, and WWAN (Wireless WAN) is an available option offered through Verizon or AT&T.
Each time I review a ThinkPad I feel it is worth mentioning Lenovo's awesome Access Connections software. In the Connection Manager, you are able to create profiles based on your location, so, for example, if you had an account on your corporate wireless network as well as your home, you would no longer need to manually change all of the network information (IP address, WPA or WEP key, etc) every time you were at the office or at home to connect. Just select the profile from the list and you're connected.
Battery
There are two battery options for the T61. The standard battery is a 10.8V 4 cell battery with 56.15 watt-hours of capacity that sits flush against the back of the laptop. There is an extended life 5200mAh 6 cell battery operating at 10.8V, that protrudes out of the back of the laptop, providing a nice handle to grab on to when you're moving the T61 around. This 6 cell battery also operates at 10.8V and has 84.24 watt-hours of capacity. The T61 used in this review had the 6 cell battery installed in it.
AC Adapter
The T61's AC adapter is an average sized power brick, and it looks similar to other ThinkPad AC adapters of years past. There is one large difference however, and that is the actual connector is fatter and the tip is now male whereas in previous ThinkPads the end of the cable was female. The T61 shares the same AC adapter as the T60 widescreen reviewed previously. The adapter's cords are of decent length, with both exceeding a combined ten feet. Kudos to Lenovo for including an attached piece of Velcro to keep cables nice and tidy. I've found that the Velcro works better in containing wires than the straps and snaps of other manufacturers.
The T61's AC adapter compared to a Nokia 8801.
Biometrics
If you lower your gaze to just below the arrow keys, you will see a small strip, just above the ThinkPad logo. This strip is a biometric fingerprint scanner, which you can associate with your user ID and password. Lenovo's included software allows you to scan three different fingers and save them into a profile.
Speaking from experience, Lenovo has greatly improved this scanner, starting with the T60. I used to own a T42 with a biometric scanner, and I would have to swipe my finger an average of 5-6 times every time I logged in because it was unable to read my print. It was actually faster to just type my password in than to bother with the fingerprint scanner. Now, just like with the T60, first swipe, BAM! I'm in. Rarely do I need to try a second time. If for some reason it doesn't accept, a message will flash onscreen telling you to swipe slower or move to the left a little. This is a great security feature and works exceptionally well in a domain environment similar to what you'd find in a business.
ThinkLight
Lenovo includes a cool light built into the top of the LCD that shines down onto the keyboard when enabled. This feature would be good for red eye flights or working while someone is sleeping next to you (wife, baby, you fill in the blank). Turn on the light, see the keys. Pretty straightforward but cool nonetheless.
Setup Method
The T61 was set to run at full performance by setting the power scheme set to Home/Office Desk with the AC plugged in, meaning that the CPU will not underclock while running the tests. For the battery performance test, the power scheme was set to Portable/Laptop. Each test was repeated 3 times to ensure accuracy. Before each test was run, the laptop was rebooted and its hard drive defragmented.
BAPCo SYSmark2004SE is popular benchmark suite consists of two different performance scenarios and generates an overall score by taking the geometric mean of the individual scores.
- Internet Content Creation: In this scenario, the content creator creates a product related website targeting a broadband and narrowband audience. The user first renders a 3D model to a bitmap, while preparing web pages using a web site publishing tool. The user opens a video editing package, creates a movie from several raw input movie cuts and sound cuts and starts exporting it. While waiting on this operation, the user imports the rendered image into an image-processing package; modifies it and saves the results. Back in the 3D modeling software, the user modifies a 3D model and exports it to a vector-graphics format. Once the movie is assembled, the user edits it and creates special effects using one of the modified images as input. The user extracts content from an archive. Meanwhile, he uses an animation creation tool to open the exported 3D vector graphics file. He modifies it by including other pictures and optimizes it for faster animation. The final movie with the special effects is then compressed in a format that can be broadcast over broadband Internet. The web site is given the final touches and the system is scanned for viruses.
- Office Productivity: In this scenario, the office productivity user creates a marketing presentation and supporting documents for a new product. The user receives email containing a collection of documents in a compressed file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while a virus checking software scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed and the user begins creating the collateral documents. The user also accesses a database and runs some queries. A collection of documents are compressed. The queries results are imported into a spreadsheet and used to generate graphical charts. The user then transcribes a document. The user edits and adds elements to a slide show template. Finally, the user looks at the results of his work (both the slide show and the portable document) in an Internet browser.
BAPCo MobileMark 2005 is the latest version of the premier notebook battery life and performance under battery life metric based on real world applications.
- Office Productivity: The workloads in this category model a mobile professional at a fictitious automobile company. The worker creates documents using Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, accesses email, and creates graphics and animation with Photoshop and Flash to include in a multimedia presentation. An Internet browser is used to view presentations. The user also invokes file compression and virus detection in the background.
- DVD Playback: The DVD playback 2005 workload is based on a 1 hours 55 minute movie that BAPCo has created from content provided by BMW. The DVD playback test starts the movie player application, sets up a full screen playback, and the loops over the content on the disk in the DVD player. This playback will continue until system shutdown at battery depletion.
3DMark 2001 SE PRO build 3.3.0 measures graphics performance by benchmarking the CPU, memory, and graphics through a series of 21 tests, including simulated games, theoretical tests, DX8 feature tests, and image quality tests. Resolution was set to 1024x768 with all default settings.
3DMark 2003 build 3.6.0 measures DX9 performance through a series of 3D game based sound, graphics, and CPU tests. Resolution was set to 1024x768 with all default settings.
3DMark2005 build 1.2.0 is a graphics intensive benchmark best suited for the latest generation of DirectX 9.0 graphics cards. It combines high quality 3D tests, CPU tests, and is the first benchmark to require Pixel Shader 2.0 support, making this a highly stressful 3D benchmark.
3DMark2006 build 1.0.2 uses advanced real-time 3D game workloads to measure PC performance using a suite of DirectX 9 3D graphics tests, CPU tests, and 3D feature tests, including HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, advanced SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests.
PCMark 2005 Advanced build 1.1.0 is the latest update to Futuremarks popular overall system benchmarking program. The 2005 version adds multithreading, DirectX 9, Windows Media Player 10, virus scanning, High Definition video playback (WMVHD), and a vast number of other tests to its suite. Testing your computers CPU, RAM, hard drive and graphics card, PCMark05 drives your computer to the max to determine its strengths and weaknesses.
Benchmarking Preface
Before I begin discussing the T61s benchmark results, I would like to state that I had an incredibly difficult time running and completing many of the tests listed above. I would like to make it clear, however, that I believe this to be the fault of Microsoft Vista as opposed to something Lenovo did wrong.
I had the most trouble with BAPCos Sysmark and MobileMark suites. Since both of these suites load individual installations of applications (such as Flash, McAfee, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop, to name a few) the chances that one of these components is not fully Vista compatible is pretty high. For example, Sysmark failed each and every time when the benchmark came to the point where it needed to open Internet Explorer. MobileMark failed every time when it attempted to load Flash. I attempted to use a pre-release Sysmark 2007 that we obtained from BAPCo, but again, no dice. These failures were so predictable and widespread that I simply could not get the tests to complete.
On the graphics testing front, 3DMark05 mysteriously crashed every time I tried to run it, yielding the following error (yet every other version ran fine):
Lastly, PCMark 2005 would not generate a final score because it couldnt test hard drive or graphics for some reason. Hard drive I can understand because PCMark is probably not fully compatible with Vistas file system and has Turbo Memory to contend with, but I cant quite put my finger on why graphics were unable to be tested, but for whatever reason, they failed.Maybe something to do with DirectX 10? Who knows? PCMark also crashed several times, returning the phantom error "At least Windows Media Player 10 must be installed" even though WMP 11 comes standard with Vista.
Configurations
Specifications | Lenovo ThinkPad T61 | Lenovo ThinkPad T60 widescreen |
Processor | Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7700 (2.4 GHz, 2x2MB L2 Cache, Dual Core) | Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7400 (2.16 GHz, 2x2MB L2 Cache, Dual Core) |
Front Side Bus | 800 MHz | 667 MHz |
Chipset | Intel i965M | Intel i945PM |
Wireless LAN | Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN w/Bluetooth | Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network w/Bluetooth |
LCD | 14.1" WXGA+ TFT LCD (1440x900) | 15.4" WSXGA+ TFT LCD (1680x1050) |
Hard Drive | 100GB Hitachi TravelStar 7200RPM 8MB Cache SATA150 and 1GB Intel Turbo Memory | 100GB Hitachi TravelStar 7200RPM 8MB Cache SATA150 |
Memory | 2GB DDR2 667 PC5400 SDRAM (2 x 1024MB) | 1GB DDR2 667 PC5400 SDRAM (1 x 1024MB) |
Graphics | 128MB nVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M | 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 |
Graphics Interface | VGA-out | VGA-out |
Optical Drive | CD-RW/ DVD+/-RW DL | HL-DT-ST-DVDRAM GSA4083N (CD-RW, DVD+/-RW DL) |
Modem | Integrated V.90 Modem | Integrated V.90 Modem |
Ethernet | Intel PRO/1000 | Intel PRO/1000 PL |
Audio | HD Audio | SoundMAX HD Audio |
Audio Interface | Microphone, two stereo speakers, headphone | Microphone, two stereo speakers, headphone |
Ports | 3 x USB 2.0 IEEE 1394a IR | 3 x USB 2.0 IR |
Weight | 5.23 lbs. with 6-cell battery | 5.1 lbs. with 6-cell battery |
Size (W x D x H) | 13.2" x 9.3" x 1.09-1.26" | 14.1" x 10.0" x 1.1-1.3" |
Operating System | Windows Vista Business | Windows XP Professional |
Battery | 9-cell 7800 mAh | 6-cell 5,200 mAh |
Performance
PCMark05 Advanced
The only benchmark score with PCMark that we are able to compare between the T60 widescreen and the T61 was CPU. Understandably, with the new, more efficient Santa Rosa architecture and increased bus speed, the T61 takes this test by a fairly sizeable margin.
¨PCMark05 | Lenovo ThinkPad T61 | Lenovo ThinkPad T60 Widescreen |
CPU | 5738 | 4189 |
Memory | 4601 | n/a |
Graphics | n/a | n/a |
HDD | n/a | n/a |
3D Performance
3DMark 2001 SE
The T61 falls by a decent amount here, probably because the new GPU of the T61 is relying on immature driver support and a program that is not written to optimize performance on the newer graphics cards. Also, the T60 widescreen was running Windows XP, which has been proven numerous times to be a more gaming friendly platform than Vista.
3DMark 2003
The T61 pulls closer here, now that DirectX 9 benchmarks are incorporated into the test. One thing to bear in mind also is that the nVIDIA Quadro NVS 140 found in the T61 is not designed for gaming, and therefore, its drivers are not optimized for games or gaming benchmarks.
3DMark 2005
This is the test that the T61 would not complete for whatever reason. It would have been nice to see the T61 pull closer or even pass the T60 in this test, now that Shader Model performance is factored in.
3DMark 2006
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