w540 and upgrade or lenovo 720s

[Pandora]

so i recently acquired a lenovo w540 for 300$, its pretty awesome quad core i7 @ 3.7ghz, 16gb of ram, k2100 gpu, 1080p ips screen, cool security features and the rugged body its able to handle just about everything i do. so far i like it. but its heavy, i mean massive granted every millimeter of this laptop is quality but that doesn't help my back. 

 

i recently found out about the lenovo 720s its an "idea pad" and not in the line i usually buy from (i owned quite a few think pads) but at less then half the weight with similar performance and (from what i can tell) similar battery life its tempting to look over at this lower end laptop and wonder "would i be better off with this tiny guy?"

 

the other thing is with the thinkpad i would be saving a bit of money, around 300$ once upgrades are done if i stuck with the w540 (comparing to the r5 2500u model)

 

on paper the specs should be comparable at least cpu wise but i have a feeling that the vega graphics are going to crush the k2100 in gaming performance. 

 

i will mostly use the laptop for school, but i need it to be able to handle 

A light video editing (not really a question for either but the w540 will do better)

B easy to run games such as WOW or similar titles.

 

i really am having a hard time getting over the idea of not using a thinkpad or similar class product.

any recommendations would be great.

[genexis_x]

Keep the Thinkpad nicely and do some upgrades. Also do a repaste

[TheDankKoosh]

18 hours ago, Pandora said:

so i recently acquired a lenovo w540 for 300$, its pretty awesome quad core i7 @ 3.7ghz, 16gb of ram, k2100 gpu, 1080p ips screen, cool security features and the rugged body its able to handle just about everything i do. so far i like it. but its heavy, i mean massive granted every millimeter of this laptop is quality but that doesn't help my back. 

 

i recently found out about the lenovo 720s its an "idea pad" and not in the line i usually buy from (i owned quite a few think pads) but at less then half the weight with similar performance and (from what i can tell) similar battery life its tempting to look over at this lower end laptop and wonder "would i be better off with this tiny guy?"

 

the other thing is with the thinkpad i would be saving a bit of money, around 300$ once upgrades are done if i stuck with the w540 (comparing to the r5 2500u model)

 

on paper the specs should be comparable at least cpu wise but i have a feeling that the vega graphics are going to crush the k2100 in gaming performance. 

 

i will mostly use the laptop for school, but i need it to be able to handle 

A light video editing (not really a question for either but the w540 will do better)

B easy to run games such as WOW or similar titles.

 

i really am having a hard time getting over the idea of not using a thinkpad or similar class product.

any recommendations would be great.

The vega 8 is actually a bit worse than the k2100m according to notebookcheck, also you could flash a new vbios onto the k2100m and get a MASSIVE performance increase, though I would suggest repasting like @ZM Fong said before flashing. You could probably get an extra 25% performance boost from flashing.

[Pandora]

8 minutes ago, TheDankKoosh said:

The vega 8 is actually a bit worse than the k2100m according to notebookcheck, also you could flash a new vbios onto the k2100m and get a MASSIVE performance increase, though I would suggest repasting like @ZM Fong said before flashing. You could probably get an extra 25% performance boost from flashing.

ooh, mind giving me a link to find some information about that flashing?

 

the only bios for the card i can find is for an hp laptop it seems.