Since
Lenovo
Bought IBM's PC and notebook business, the ThinkPad's iconic design hasn't changed much, and that's a good thing. The Lenovo ThinkPad T510 notebook has the same business look, same rugged build quality, and most Features that set ThinkPads apart from other business laptops. These features include the dual-pointing devices, a backlight and a good keyboard. However, the T510 feels heavy (especially when a 9-cell battery is installed) and leaves not very comfortable to use on the lap.
specifications and performance
The Intel Core i7-620M CPU, which runs at 2.66 GHz and has two cores plus Hyper-Threading, ensures fast performance. It is ideal for multitasking and not only handles office tasks, but also more demanding tasks such as video compression - and it does so with ease. In our Blender 3D rendering and iTunes MP3 encoding tests, the ThinkPad recorded 49s and 54s respectively - fast results, as we expected. In our video encoding test, where we use AutoGordianKnot to transcoding a DVD file to a 1.5GB Xvid file took the ThinkPad just 1 hour and 1 minute. Again, this is a solid result.
Our test notebook came with 2GB of DDR3 SDRAM and the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Professional, but the ThinkPad T510 is only available with 3GB or more RAM. Our review unit also came with a Seagate Momentus 7200rpm hard drive. min and 320 GB. This recorded an average transfer rate of 30.72 megabytes per second in our tests, which is a fast result and better than the 7200 rpm drive in the
HP ProBook 6550b
.
NVIDIA Optimus graphics technology
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the ThinkPad T510 configuration is NVIDIA's Optimus technology. We have a love-hate relationship with Optimus because it works well on some notebooks and not so well on others. It does a very good job with the T510 Fiddle with the graphics card options to get the notebook to use the onboard Intel graphics while running Windows Media Player (like we did with the
MSI FX600
) and that's the way it's supposed to be. Optimus is said to automatically switch between the integrated Intel HD graphics and the discrete 512MB NVIDIA NVS 3100m graphics, depending on the application you're using.
In 3Dmark06, Optimus switched to the NVIDIA card and the notebook got a score of 3671. It's not spectacular, but it indicates a card that can run some games like WoW and StarCraft2. You can even run car racing and sports games (like NBA2K11 ). However, this is not a gaming notebook, so the main advantage of the dedicated card is that graphics tasks can be offloaded to it and the overall system performance is increased.
battery life
You can still have plenty of life away from the outlet with a 9-cell battery that costs $40 more than the 6-cell battery. In our standard battery rundown test, where we disable power management, Enabling Wi-Fi, maxing out the screen brightness, and looping an Xvid-encoded video, the ThinkPad T510 lasted 3 hours 48 minutes. This is a great result for a large 15.6-inch notebook with a bright, high-resolution screen. If we If you have a balanced energy saving plan, a medium screen brightness and only use the notebook for surfing the Internet and for word processing, it lasts for more than six hours.
