First impressions: Lenovo Thinkpad AMD Ryzen Laptop

I purchased a new laptop in early January 2022, after much deliberation it turned out to be a Ryzen Powered Lenovo Thinkpad E14. Read my first impressions and review of this Linux on Thinkpad. The AMD Ryzen R5 5600U is a snappy processor, and so far I am happy with it* In a way,this beings things back to a full circle: My first laptop back in 2001 was also a Thinkpad. Below are its specifications and benchmark results from the Gen 3 Ryzen powered Lenovo Thinkpad. The machine came pre installed with Windows 11, and I took a dislike to it right away. I partitioned the 512 odd GB NVMe drive into three partitions of almost equal size, and installed Manjaro Linux on one of the partitions. This is my first ever AMD Ryzen powered laptop, and my first experience using Linux on a new Thinkpad. I have not experienced major issues except for the file manager for KDE desktop (Dolphin) which consumes a lot of RAM and crashes often. Manjaro Linux has been running fine so far, with little issues other than occasional hanging when i have too many tabs (or scripts blocked) in Firefox or Chrome. That would be the browser issue and not necessarily operating system issue. Update February 2022: I replaced Manjaro Linux with “Atlantis” version of  Endeavour Os, which is relatively more stable. I had the occasional memory leaks with Firefox, but adding 1 GB of Swap seems to have resolved the issue for now. I plan to up the RAM on this system to 24 GB from existing 8 GB, and add a 500 GB NVMe disk. Both pieces of hardware will be pulled out of the “Kitchen Sink” desktop. This upgrade will change some of the below results. This post will be updated with a more detailed review at that time.

Below are results from benchmarks I ran.

YABS– Yet Another Benchmarking Script

> wget -qO- yabs.sh | bash -s — -i

Tuesday 11 January 2022 06:54:38 AM IST

Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Processor  : AMD Ryzen 5 5600U with Radeon Graphics
CPU cores  : 12 @ 2300.000 MHz
AES-NI     : ✔ Enabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ✔ Enabled
RAM        : 6.7 GiB
Swap       : 0.0 KiB
Disk       : 138.0 GiB

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k            (IOPS) | 64k           (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 475.78 MB/s (118.9k) | 619.38 MB/s   (9.6k)
Write      | 477.03 MB/s (119.2k) | 622.64 MB/s   (9.7k)
Total      | 952.81 MB/s (238.2k) | 1.24 GB/s    (19.4k)
           |                      |
Block Size | 512k          (IOPS) | 1m            (IOPS)
  ------   | ---            ----  | ----           ----
Read       | 780.32 MB/s   (1.5k) | 911.75 MB/s    (890)
Write      | 821.78 MB/s   (1.6k) | 972.47 MB/s    (949)
Total      | 1.60 GB/s     (3.1k) | 1.88 GB/s     (1.8k)

Geekbench 5 Benchmark Test:
---------------------------------
Test            | Value
                |
Single Core     | 1161
Multi Core      | 4065
Full Test       | https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/12098952

 

Thermal Performance

Max CPU temperature I noticed went up to 80 Deg C while running batch process  of converting images  (heic images to jpg), total ~ 10,000 images. On running the ‘sensors’ command in terminal, upon fresh boot, I got 46 degrees C. You can click below to see the results from running the “sensors” command.

>$ sensors

thinkpad-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
fan1:        2200 RPM
CPU:          +46.0°C
GPU:           +0.0°C
temp3:         +0.0°C
temp4:         +0.0°C
temp5:         +0.0°C
temp6:         +0.0°C
temp7:         +0.0°C
temp8:         +0.0°C

nvme-pci-0100
Adapter: PCI adapter
Composite:    +29.9°C  (low  = -273.1°C, high = +75.8°C)
                       (crit = +86.8°C)
Sensor 1:     +29.9°C  (low  = -273.1°C, high = +65261.8°C)

amdgpu-pci-0400
Adapter: PCI adapter
vddgfx:      662.00 mV
vddnb:       693.00 mV
edge:         +44.0°C
power1:        0.00 W

k10temp-pci-00c3
Adapter: PCI adapter
Tctl:         +46.9°C

BAT0-acpi-0
Adapter: ACPI interface
in0:          12.22 V

Feature Image: Lenovo Gen 2 E14 Ryzen shows. Image: Lenovo US.

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_{This post was updated on 2022-02-18}