Is this the perfect cheap small laptop for me? The ThinkPad X270 (first look and internals)

Is this the perfect cheap small laptop for me? The ThinkPad X270 (first look and internals)

AI-Generated Summary

In this video, the presenter reviews a secondhand Lenovo ThinkPad X270 purchased for ยฃ55 on eBay. Key highlights include its 7th gen Intel i5 processor, 8GB RAM, NVME SSD, and a 1920×1080 screen. The laptop features a removable battery, a backlit UK keyboard, and a fingerprint sensor. The presenter emphasizes the importance of battery life and demonstrates swapping the battery with a higher-capacity one from an X240 model. Performance tests show decent speeds, though thermal paste replacement slightly improved temperatures. The ThinkPadโ€™s build quality, upgradeability, and functionality for light tasks like web browsing and document editing make it a value-for-money choice. The video concludes with a call to subscribe and share thoughts on favorite laptops.

๐Ÿ“œ Full Transcript

Hello. Welcome to another video. I may have found my perfect laptop. Let’s have a look what it is. This was from eBay. It was an auction. And the reason why I have bought this laptop is because the listing says it has fully functioning batteries. And if you’ve guessed what it is yet, you will be right. It is a ThinkPad. This is um a Lenovo ThinkPad and it’s got a removable battery here. And I’ll open it and show you what it is. There we go. It is a Lenovo X270. And it’s got the lightup keyboard. It’s got a trackpad. It’s got a fingerprint sensor that I’m not interested in, but it’s got the UK keyboard with the large enter key and the pound sign here. And it also should have the 1920 screen. So, this was um ยฃ55. It’s an i57th gen. So, the X270 uses the sixth gen and 7th gen Intel chips. The X280 is a big step again up to the eighth gen and eighth gen tend to be sort of twice as powerful as the sixth and seventh gen. So I wanted something as high spec as possible, but I didn’t want an X280 because doesn’t have removable battery and has soldered RAM and things like that. This seemed like a good sort of as higher spec as I could get without going to the X280 while still being affordable. So, let’s see if it switches on. It does. And it’s booting into Windows 11 Pro. And there we are in Windows 11 Pro. That was pretty quick. Let me get rid of some of this dust. And I want to check out the sort of temperature. And on the side of this, we’ve got normal Lenovo power, which is this square block. We’ve also got USBC, which I think it can charge over USBC. Got HDMI out, USB, got a card slot there. And on this side, we have got a memory card reader, SD card, Ethernet, USB, and headphone socket, as well as I think a SIM tray and the Kensington lock. Let’s just check the keyboard lights up. Not sure if you can see that on the camera, but that does indeed light up. So, we should have two batteries in here. Battery one, 94% available. Battery 2, 91% available. And I think if I’m right, I should be able to use my X240 battery in here. And that’s a chunkier one. And in theory, I should be able to take this one out. And then then again, I could be wrong about this. Put this larger battery in. So here we’ve got this Lenovo battery and this one here. Here we go. This is 24 W hours. This one is 72 W hours. So that’s what, three times more powerful. And you can see it’s much like three times as thick as well. Let’s just check this actually fits. And it does. So now I have even better battery life. And I did a video a while ago about how battery life was one of the things that mattered most to me once I reach a certain level of sort of performance and memory configuration. The next thing I’m interested in is how long the battery is going to last. So let’s just have a quick look around this system. The trackpad works. The little thing in the middle works. Right click works. It’s Windows 11, so it’s slower than it needs to be. That’s a bit frustrating if that’s a permanent mark. Not sure I saw that on the listing. And then this system has i57200 which is two cores, four threads, turbos up to 2.5, maybe more. We’ve got 8 GB of RAM. We’ve got an SSD which is an NVME and we’ve got Intel AC graphics 620. So, this is a Toshiba SSVME and they’ve put Chrome and Microsoft Edge. I wonder what this PC does. Oh, it just opens this PC. Fair enough. And let’s have a look at the battery now. So, I think the battery that I’ve added is now charging. Yeah, 32% on the battery I’ve just connected. So, this is how you run a battery port. Power cfg/batter report and it saves it to an HTML file. So, we’ll have a look at that. Um, the keyboard feels really solid. Feels really nice to type on. Um, let’s just open a web browser and go to this battery report. And I think um okay, here we go. We’ve got battery one, battery two, and so this is the internal battery which has 15700. This is the second larger battery that has actually lost quite a lot of capacity charge 41,000. But that is still more than this other battery that is the smaller battery which is around 20,000. So should still give us better battery life. And I think that’s kind of goes with the territory of buying secondhand laptops is that the batteries are quite old and you don’t necessarily know how much power is left in them. So I also want to check the temperatures of this and see what they’re like and whether I need to replace the thermal paste. It’s always a good idea checking the thermal paste on a secondhand machine. Um, but potentially someone’s already done this. If the company I bought it from are into refurbishing these, then they may have already done that. They may not have, but we can install core temp and then see what kind of temperatures I’m getting and take it from there. The fan is ramping up, but isn’t too loud. The system is using about 41 watts at the moment. So, we’re getting temperatures about 59 max, 42 minimum, and it’s idling at the moment. And we’ll run pass mark as well. I’m also just having a quick look at crystal disc info to see the status of the drive in here. 91% good. And it gives us a temperature, how much it’s been used. Um, and then we’ve also got Crystal Disc Mark to give us a general performance of this drive in here. We can have a look inside this laptop in a little bit. So, that’s a really good uh read speed for the NVME drive. Certainly much faster than if it was just a standard SSD drive. And it’s a good write speed there. And this has got quite a nice little trackpad. It’s got a satisfying click to it. Um, and seems to work really nicely. So, I’ll run through a full performance test passmark benchmark. We’ll have a look at the results as well as the temperatures. They do seem to be climbing a little bit, so I might need to check the thermal paste on this. Okay, we’ve got a pass mark of 1237. Uh CP mark is 3448, 2D graphics 229, 3D graphics 810, memory mark 1758, and disc mark 8,700. So, let’s have a quick look. It wants to send off to the website. Um, dismark read and write are similar to what we saw with Crystal Dismark. Memory mark that is looking like 14 GB a second um or 19. And it’s probably only got one stick of RAM, so it’s probably not running in dual channel. 3D Mark looks reasonable. We might be able to do a little bit of light gaming. Um, and I’ll rerun the CPU mark just to see if that changes as often it does. Okay, so that got 3479. I think that’s fairly comparable to what’s on the CPU benchmark website. Um, the CPU temperatures got up to around 94C, which is a little bit higher than I like. So, let’s have a look at the insides of this and we can check the thermal paste. So, these Lenovo laptops are pretty easy to take apart. They’ve got Phillips screws and there’s about six, seven, eight of them and you can see them quite clearly and they’re also captive so they stay in the frame so you end up not losing them which is helpful. And I’ve used one of these to sort of pry it up and it comes off quite easily. some padding here. And this is where the NVME drive is in the same space as they would have put an SSD drive. This is the second battery. So, this is the internal one. This is a memory. There’s only one slot. And this is PC4 DDR4 2400T. So, it’s got DDR4 RAM, which is going to give slightly better performance than DDR3. Then we’ve got the CPU here. We’ve got an extra slot here. Wi-Fi, uh, battery connector, SD card slot, and all the sort of usual things you’d expect. This speaker placements on these seems a little bit kind of random. Top corner here and over here. Um, there’s a little bit dust, a little bit of dust on this fan. Does seem a little bit loose. Not sure if that’s normal or not. This is the power cable that goes into here. And yeah, it’s quite neatly arranged. Fairly straightforward. And we just want to get under here to have a look at the state of the thermal paste. I mean, it might be fine. Uh, but let’s find out. Okay, so I’ve undone all four screws, and I’m not sure if this is the standard tape or someone has added that. Um, the cable, power cable goes through this um, fan, which makes this a little bit more awkward. And then there’s also this little ribbon cable for the fan which we’re going to have to remember to reconnect. But it’s really quite delicate looking. So I’m being quite careful with this not to damage it. Um so thermal paste is still a little bit damp on the actual chips but has set hard on these side bits. So, we may as well replace this. Um, see if that helps with the temperatures. Okay, the thermal paste has been replaced. I’ve reattached this. I’ve reconnected this cable. This was the fiddliest bit, I think, this reattaching this. But, it does have a little um plastic tab that you can use that helps you sort of put it in place. So, let’s put it back together and see how it performs now. We’ve got that back together. Let’s power it back up and see what happens. So, I’ll run through this software again and see what the temperature is are like afterwards. So, we’ve rerun that and the score is very similar, but the temperatures are a little bit better. Tiny bit better. This is maximum 91ยฐ C. We were getting 94ยฐ C before we changed the thermal paste. So, there’s a slight improvement. It is a hot day today. The weather has been very hot here recently. Um, so I could, I suppose, look for some better thermal paste and replace it again and try something higher quality paste, but I’ve just used some general thermal paste, thinking that new thermal paste is better than old thermal paste. And it is a little bit a little bit better performance in temperatures there, but still not ideal. That is quite a small heat sink as you saw and it’s quite a small fan. And you know, I don’t think this is anything to worry about too much. I’m not likely to be using this laptop um at 100%. I’m most likely to be using this for light web use, bit of YouTube, um word documents, things like that. So, for me, it should be fine. So, this is a secondhand laptop and I’ve just opened up Edge. Dare we click restore and see what the pages were that the last person had open? Let’s click it and find out. Oh, it was me. It was a battery report. So, yeah, that was me. I was looking at the battery report. How silly of me to forget. Um, let’s have a look at WebGL aquarium. I mean, I’m likely to reinstall Windows on this um or clone another drive onto this. If I upgrade from my X240 onto this laptop, then I’ll be starting from scratch anyway. Um, but this is WebGL Aquarium. We’re getting 60 frames per second. And still if we um go a full screen we’re still getting 60 frames per second even if we sort of increase the fish starts dropping at 5,000 fish. So yeah, this is nice little laptop. It does what I want it to do. Um it should be responsive enough. It should let me do what I need to do in terms of having multiple web browsers and documents open. Um, it’s got enough memory for me for basic use and I can upgrade it if I want to, but I don’t think I will need to. Um, and YouTube of course should be fine as well. So, if you got this far, thank you for watching. Um, if you want to see a video where I compare this. Ah, the speakers are quite loud. Um, if you want to see a video of me comparing this to the X240, make sure you hit that subscribe button. You can join the channel if you want, but pretty much most videos will be free, but you might get early access to videos. Um, and a little bit extra content. And also, thank you for sharing. It is all helpful and comments. Love reading those. But let me know what is your favorite laptop. Is it a Lenovo ThinkPad? Is it something else? Um, is there a specific Lenovo or other laptop that you really like for a specific reason? Um, I quite like that you can fold this screen flat if you want. I mean, it doesn’t benefit me that much, but the option is there. I also quite like the folding laptops. You know, if this was a folding laptop, that’d be useful for videos for my cat to watch because then she wouldn’t be standing on the keyboard. But yeah, let me know what you think in the comments and hit subscribe so you get informed when the next video is and click the all button. Then you’ll get even more. So, thanks for watching. See you in another video. This is video playback. I’m just going to put it up to full HD and we should be able to see how it copes using VP9. Two dropped frames, 28 megabits per second, 35, 37. High good Wi-Fi connection is what I’m trying to say. And it’s having no problems at all playing back this video. Okay, bye.