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I am looking to get a new laptop for work. I will be mostly programming in Visual Studio 2010 and have 2 options:

  1. ThinkPad W510 with i7-720QM processor
  2. ThinkPad T410 i7-620M (2.66GHz, 4MB L3, 1066MHz FSB)

Any suggestions on which one is better to go with? It will usually be hooked into a docking station in my office, and I don't do much travelling, though I sometimes work from home directly on the laptop.

Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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I'd suggest W510 if you don't move too much. The T series is a business grade travel notebook, so it's more like mobile and YET have enough power to do all the work.

Also, you don't have to worry about the performance. The only bottleneck in the TPs are the HDD. If you install an SSD (Lets say Intel X25M) and put the HDD into the ultrabay, you are ready to code your ass off. (Lightning fast, that is.)

(I'm a ThinkPad T500 owner.)

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    +1 for HD as bottleneck and using Ultrbay for second drive. Makes a huge difference
    – Dave M
    Feb 14, 2011 at 19:20
  • I heard that quad core can have negative effects on performance - is this really true? My concern is that the W510 is quad... Feb 14, 2011 at 19:23
  • @thinking_pad - Uh, quad core HURTING performance? This is news to me.
    – Shinrai
    Feb 14, 2011 at 20:07
  • @Shinrai, @DaveM - See here: forum.notebookreview.com/…, basically each core is slower so if you are using an application that doesn't leverage 4 cores (possibly Visual Studio), it could be slower... Feb 14, 2011 at 20:18
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    @thinking_pad - OH. in the case of these two chips, yeah, okay, raw core for core performance. I was thinking you were saying you'd heard quad core REGARDLESS OF CLOCKSPEED hurt performance haha. That said, I think I still agree with Shiki - the W510 has oomph in other places that you're likely to appreciate, and is a sturdier machine. And the hard drive really IS the bottleneck.
    – Shinrai
    Feb 14, 2011 at 20:55

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