Four and a half years ago I bought basalt,. a Lenovo Thinkpad W520 notebook.
Named for being black and geometrically regular, he was not cheap, but then the hardware was chosen for longevity. He did everything – mostly sitting on the desk being a workstation, for both photo-processing and work, with added portability. And he was fast… very fast.
He’s done sterling service, but the time has come for a bit of an upgrade. Since I haven’t done so for a few years now, I built the replacement workstation by hand.
So, after much shopping (mostly on Amazon with a couple of trips to the local Maplin’s), meet rhyolite – named because the red fan LEDs in the case remind me of the pink granite rock in Glen Etive.
| basalt | rhyolite | |
| RAM | 16G | 64G |
| CPU | i7-2720QM @ 2.20GHz | i7-6800K @ 3.40GHz |
| HD | 1TB 2.5″ | 2*2T SATA, 64GB SSD, 240GB SSD |
| Display | 15″ 1080p | 24″ 4K |
| Time to process one Olympus Pen-F hi-res ORF file from RAW to TIFF | 5min50s | 1min6s |
| Time to rebuild Apache Spark from git source | 28min15s | 6min28s |
It’s funny how oblivious we can be of machines slowing down and software bloating over time, rather like the proverbial boiling lobster and then when I look up, things can be done 4-5x as fast.
It’s really funny when you copy your entire home directory across wholesale and see what used to be a full-screen maximized Firefox window now occupying barely a quarter of the new display.
There’s only one downside: sometimes I miss having a trackpad in the middle of the keyboard area…