Linux on a Factory seconds I7 1185G7

[Malte_Lenzen]

Hey Folks, your opinion is needed

Just thought about getting one of the Factory seconds, since I don’t want to spend 900€ on a Laptop from the ryzen options.

Since I don’t have so much money right now, I thought it is a good option to get it now and later (~2years) upgrade when they have Ryzen Ai available.

Some questions I still have, next to the general performance of the I7 1185G7:

1. I mainly aim for a Laptop with a long lasting battery for simple university/data science stuff. Does a factory seconds suit that?

2. I would not use Windows. No chance How well does it perform with Ubuntu? Is it lacking something that a 7640U provides?

Thanks for your help everybody!!

Edit: I don’t get if Ports are included or not. Anybody knows more?

[jared_kidd]

Where are you seeing any factory seconds available?

And to answer:

1. Battery is like any laptop, depends on how hard you push the cpu.
2. Ubuntu is officially supported so that should answer this question.

I do not believe any expansion cards are included so you will want to add the ones you need.

[Malte_Lenzen]

In Germany - they have Kits with UK and DE keyboard layout.

[MrTrismegistus]

My first board from FW was an i7 1165. I personally didn’t find the battery life to be great on the 11th gen board; it was better on Windows than Linux, however. Overall I was frustrated enough with the battery life that I upgraded in about a year to an AMD 7840U. Although still not stellar, it was an improvement. Performance was otherwise up to par, and I didn’t find anything the board couldn’t handle.

Battery life has always been a bit of a sore spot on FW’s from what I’ve managed to gather. If you want to run it with Linux, definitely try to couple it with Auto-CPUFreq or another power management option.

[Allenx51]

I started out with the i7 11th gen, it was a solid experience for whatever I threw at it. 4c8ts up to over 4ghz isn’t suddenly useless just because it is a few years older. Keep it cool, and you’ll even get some decent lightweight gaming in on a day off.

Things to keep note of:

• the 11th gen suffers from an RTC battery drain problem, not an issue if you actually use the machine every day, and charge it at least once a week or so.
• The different expansion cards draw more or less power than one another, the USB-C uses the least, the HDMI (?) uses the most.
• Different NVME drives use more or less power.

Your quest for longer battery life will probably lead to the 61wh battery, but I will note that with a “standard” university style use case: note taking, text entry, an IDE or text editor running… You’ll probably still get most of the way through the day on a charge. If you start adding in video, I’d keep one of those small GaN chargers on hand and top off from time to time. (There is a nice anker unit that is 100 watts that will charge a little quicker, and YMMV, but you can trickle charge with a 5v supply as well in a pinch).