Business laptop advice - which thinkpad for £1500?

[Lefty]

I’ve had a Lenovo think pad for 8 years and it’s been great but is getting on a bit now and won’t support windows 11.

Tine for an upgrade. Happy to stay with a thinkpad but the range is rather confusing.

Don’t need a big screen, doesn’t need to be thin and light. I’d rather focus on performance and reliability/longevity.

I work with very large complex spreadsheet models and do a lot of Monte Carlo simulation, again on large complex models.

Any advice on AMD vs Intel? My impression is that RAM is more important than processor speed for MCS but I might be wrong.

Budget fairly open, around £1500 would be fine. I’d really like it to last another 8 years if possible!

Something like this?

https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/configurator/cto/inde...

[Lefty]

I asked chatgpt, it reckons I should go for an Intel HX processor and 64gb of RAM…all sounds good but is more like £2k which I don’t really mind if it makes it more likely the machine will last longer

[captain_cynic]

AMD processors are currently better than Intel's offerings, however we're talking about a laptop so AMD have two drawbacks. They require more power so less battery life and as a result, run hotter so your laptop will be warmer.

If that's an issue an Intel might be better. If not, either will be fine.

However any Ryzen 7 or I7 will do the job just fine. As you've said Excel, what you want is RAM, lots and lots of it. 32 GB is not excessive for your use in the slightest and you want a fast SSD (disk, storage) as well.

[Lefty]

Cheers, yeah I’m not too worried about battery life or heat either, I’ll only rarely be using it away from my office and when I do it’ll just be doing PowerPoint - the big hairy calcs will be done back at base, plugged in and with a couple of monitors so I don’t even care about a large screen or brightness of it.

[Lefty]

This was ChatGPT’s take on it

[Mr Pointy]

Just to be "that guy" if your laptop only needs to be portable to do powerpoint presentations how about spending your money on a desktop where you aren't buying something with a screen you don't need 95% of the time.

[Lefty]

This is a very good point!!

[skyebear]

Regardless of form factor, something with a decent GPU would be ideal for your use.

[wyson]

What the OP linked is more than good enough for a bit of powerpoint.

Would get a P series mobile workstation chunky boi for your desktop bound stuff, but you said no need for the laptop to perform those tasks.

I’m presuming by spreadsheet, you mean Excel? In which case, there is no need to Witness in this thread.

Edited by wyson on Friday 4th July 14:09