Thinkpad E485

[TonyJZX]

Not much action on this part of the forum.

Might just write a little bit about my experiences with the E485 which is their SME line. From the looks of it, the E485 is like half the price of the A485 and for many, its enough.

I ordered mine like 3 weeks ago and its sort of just arrived. I asked for a very basic build, ie. 1 x 8Gb stick, everything else standard. Ryzen 2500 2.0 quad core with HT, boost to 3.6 - Vega 8 gpu, I heard this thing is throttle down hard but the latest Dec 18 bios fixes a lot. Std. dim-ish 14" FHD.

If I had to do it again I'd probably upgrade the SSD. I only got the 128Gb ssd as I though it would be a generic unit but its an M2 NVME unit and these are quite expensive here, around twice the price of a std. sata and the E485 only takes nvme on the m2 slot.

I did three upgrades... I installed a 4gb crucial module to bring it to 12Gb, ditched the QCA435 1x1 wifi for the Intel 9260 (I know the irony but its almost impossible to get the performance of the 9260 from a QCA or BRCM for any price)...

I also put in a old 240Gb sata ssd in the spare 2.5 bay ironically just a cheap crucial. 384Gb is fine for me. The bottom base plate was pretty self explanatory to remove to do the upgrades.

For that its a pretty decent unit for the money. It has a type-c power so I will need some sort of a power pass thru hub if I want to break that out to a HDMI or more usb3.0 etc.

Unit has 1 x powered 3.1, 1 x passive 3.0 and 1 x usb2.0 - its fine for ports really.

I did not like the OEM o/s image so I did a windows reset after upgrades and its clean enough, just has the Lenovo Vantage stuff and McAfee which you can uninstall.

I still hate the island KBD but many times I will be a 101 kbd and usb mouse anyway...