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Ask HN: Lenovo laptop with decent 4K support

2 points by gituliar ↗ HN
I bought Lenovo P14s Gen1 around a year ago with intention to use its Nvidia P520 card with external 4K monitor and get decent 4K experience.

What was a surprise when I realized that Nvidia card is not wired to any external port. Hence I should either (1) use only integrated Intel video OR (2) render in P520 and copy into Intel card (in practice this is slow). I do not mention even using two 4K monitors.

Can you recommend Lenovo laptop with a decent card that renders directly to external video port(s) ?

What are opinions about AMD chips and its integrated video card ?

5 comments

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okasaki
The gaming laptops (Lenovo Legion) at least have this. The outputs are wired to the discrete card and I think they support 8k60 and 4k120.
rmedaer
I own a ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6 with a 11th Generation Intel® Core™ i7 and an integrated Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics. I'm not playing games. I use an external "5K2K" LG monitor (basically 2x 4K monitor) through Thunderbolt 4 port.

Really happy with this setup.

gituliar
My ThinkPad P14s Gen1 has 10th Gen i7 with Intel UHD GPU, which is 2x slower than Iris Xe.

I do not play either. Most noticeable lags I have are 4K youtube videos. Is it OK for you ?

rmedaer
No lag at all on Firefox. Still have some unsupported GPU related features on Chrome.
saltcured
It's hard to know what you are seeking. What is "decent 4K experience"?

Many have all worked fine for me with desktop/office work on Linux. But I have older Dell monitors that can only do 30 Hz at 4K and I was not bothered by this. And I do not use the internal laptop screen when using an external monitor, so I have no concern for mixed/high-dpi scenarios. I use a 1080p internal display and 4K desktops with identical dot pitch, and see the 4K monitor as just more real estate for exactly the same font sizes I would use on the smaller laptop screen.

I used to use the same monitor model with a desktop NVIDIA Titan X GPU for scientific work. The experience for regular desktop/browsing was identical, and only differed if I launched an 3D app that really had a use for the extra horsepower. I would suggest that no laptop GPU is really going to both drive 4K at good high frame rates comparable to a modern desktop GPU. There will be some inevitable limits due to the thermal/power design. These days, I think more about idle power and quiet operation, and don't miss having the Xeon + Titan X workstation howling in my office.

I have a T495 with a prior generation AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 3700U that has a Vega iGPU. I've driven a 4K TV or a 4K monitor with its HDMI port at different times, with no drama. It is the best performing graphics I have ever used on a laptop, but is of course limited compared to a desktop GPU since it uses the dual-channel system RAM and has less bandwidth. I don't think you'd play a game at 4K with it, but at 1080p it could perform pretty well.

I've driven a 4K display via displayport and Intel integrated graphics in Thinkpads even from 2015 or earlier. I did this on a T440p (which had an NVIDIA GPU that I learned to ignore, favoring the Intel iGPU). I think I even enabled MST to daisy chain two displays off the single displayport as a test once, using two monitors with the appropriate displayport mode settings in their menus.

My wife has used a T460s for years with a 4K monitor. I think that had a displayport and an HDMI port and both worked fine with 4K, though I don't know if she ever tries using them simultaneously.

I assume the newer models are even better. Going all the way back to the T20 and X20, I've never really seen a backwards step with upgrades to subsequent Thinkpad generations, other than realizing most dGPU choices for Thinkpads were anemic and not worth the bother.