Lenovo Thinkpad E590T and AMD Radeon RX 550X (Intel UHD Graphics 620)

[Matthias Oestreicher]

Am Freitag, den 14.06.2019, 09:34 +0200 schrieb Trond Endrestøl:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm contemplating buying a Lenovo Thinkpad E590T. I will be 
> dual-booting Windows 10 and FreeBSD stable/12.
Why stable?
> 
> I'm considering adding 16 GiB of memory for a total of 32 GiB, and 
> swap the 512 GB NVMe SSD in favour of a 1 TB NVMe SSD.
> 
> Is this laptop a wise choice?
I'd advice against using a laptop for storage.
> 
> The laptop has both AMD Radeon RX 550X and Intel UHD Graphics 620. I 
> didn't find anything conclusive on https://www.x.org/wiki/radeon/. 
> Maybe I'm simply blind.
Switchable graphics are not supported in FreeBSD. You will hopefully be
able to disable one of the graphic adapters in the laptop's BIOS(UEFI),
but if I where you, I would rather grab a model with Intel integrated
graphics only. Do you want to game on Windows?
> 
> Is the Radeon RX 550X GPU supported by X.org and a particular driver?
The kms drivers graphics/drm-kmod has at least modules for Polaris 12, thats
what the 550x is build upon according to Wikipedia. Looks good.
% ls /boot/modules | grep -i polaris12
amdgpu_polaris12_ce_2_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_ce_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_k_mc_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_k_smc_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_mc_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_me_2_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_me_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_mec_2_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_mec_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_mec2_2_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_mec2_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_pfp_2_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_pfp_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_rlc_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_sdma_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_sdma1_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_smc_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_uvd_bin.ko
amdgpu_polaris12_vce_bin.ko

Though, I don't follow the development and the there may exist issues.
Anyway, most Polaris based graphics cards work very well as far as I know,
but I've seen people complain about issues. Last thing I seen on the forums
was someone had a problem that the screen remained black. That was Polaris 8
on a Ryzen processor, which isn't supported as well as the higher end models
as far as my knowledge goes.

> Does the presence of Intel UHD Graphics 620 cause any known issues?
Well supported by graphics/drm-kmod
> 
> Any other thoughts on Lenovo Thinkpad E590T?
I havn't had any recent Thinkpad models myself, but I would always prefer a
used T-series over a E-series. Even though the E-series should be quite fine
as well compared to all other laptops series from Lenovo which I wouldn't
even touch with pliers.
You will most likely have to swap the wireless device. 😉
>