New Year, New Hardware

The Tax Man Cometh


I try to set aside money to use on hardware every year, and this year I chose to grab a powerhouse laptop.

The desktop that I built a few years back was starting to feel a little bit creaky. It was easier to buy a better video card and convert it into a gaming rig than try to update various pieces to modernize it.

I’ve long been a fan of ThinkPads, especially the P series of workstations. I’ve got a P51 right now, which I use for general stuff. It’s a powerful laptop, and it was great to travel with and still be able to write and run demos on. Where things get a little trickier is recording/streaming content. If I run any extra spicy demos on here, it impacts everything. Recording and streaming software has to share.

When I had to do that stuff, I used my desktop for demos. This new laptop serves two purposes: it’s a backup in case anything happens to my main laptop, and it’s where I can safely build demos. And hey, maybe someday It’ll be my main laptop, and I’ll have an even crazier laptop for demos.

Eyeball


While watching the Lenovo site for sales, one came along that I couldn’t say no to. I ended up getting about $8500 worth of computer for a shade under $5000.

What’s under the hood?

speccy
garbanzo!

Yes, that is a laptop with 128GB of RAM, and a decent enough graphics card to process video if need be.

Benched


As far as benchmarks go, this thing is plenty speedy.

CPU Z
zoom zoom
CPU Z
testing, testing

This is great for a laptop. No complaints here.

The storage is also pretty sweet.

Crystal Disk Mark
ALL THE IOPS

Comparing my P51 storage to the new P17 storage:

SQL Server Query Plan
1-2, 1-2

I can read the Posts table into memory about 8 seconds faster on the new laptop. Pretty sweet!

Thanks for reading!

Going Further


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