Honestly, for basic day to day use, we don't even need anything more than a 7th Gen i5 with 8/16GB of RAM and a basic NVMe (going at the typical 2000/1700 RW speeds). It's when we push it that the performance gains start to show. For many people, they do this by gaming. Some others do it in other ways - I'm a casual photographer so from time to time I run photo editing tasks and just prefer the extra performance on hand.
For day to day use, the laptop did feel spiffier than a laptop I previously used (i5-8360). What I did was to rebuild an old Lightroom library for fun (about 9500 raw photos), and run it on 100% load. Definitely felt the process was smoother and faster initially until some throttling kicked in, but still perfectly usable despite it being an old version of Lightroom (v5) that wasn't optimised for Ryzen. The fact that I could fairly smoothly process a few photos with the rebuild in the background was quite something, since previously on the i5-8350U computer it would lag to almost unusable. But even so, the temperatures did not pass a peak of 78degC (my previous i5 ran higher, in fact!), which to me was very good. On touch alone, my old MBP runs hotter in this load than this Ryzen did, so it is quite an improvement imo.
Definitely convinced by Ryzen over Intel.
I do not need the raw power day to day, but that I have it on demand in my main/only machine is something I greatly appreciate.
I got the 400 nit panels - paid the penalty of the WWAN card cos I wanted/needed the better panels. This laptop is my main machine, with my ageing 2011 15" MBP as a retired backup (since it's too heavy to carry around now that I have a bad back due to injury)
Run
HWinfo64. It is listed there under Monitor Name (Manufacturer). Or boot up and F12, run Lenovo Diagnostics. Panel model is listed.
Lenovo uses 4 or 5 panels, and of the 400 nit low power models, the Innolux panel (N140HCG-GQ2) is the model with the least ghosting. (See
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenov...erent-14-inch-LowPower-displays.426538.0.html for more details). As for the 300 nit panels, you will have to do some research. However, I did know that the 300 nit panels were washed out compared to the 400 nit models (imo mine is still a tad washed out but nowhere near as bad as some previous Thinkpads I've ever used.)
No, changing the SSD does not lower the thermals. No correlation there. My bad for the confusion. I was excited and typed it all together and led to confusion.
As for changing the SSD, I had Samsung 970 Plus on hand, so it was definitely cheaper and better than paying for an upgrade I wouldn't use. I took it out immediately, cloned in the original image, and am keeping it in my drawer without using it. My T14s came with a Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) SSD and it was nothing to be happy about imo (reading up, reads are slower than the writes on the 970 Plus). A part of me feels that 2242 SSDs are lower performance, but then again few SSDs come close to the 970 Plus. For most day to day use, it's not really an issue. But when processing photos and videos, then any performance gain is definitely helpful.
All this said, the Ryzen 5 is no slouch either. Repeated benchmarks have shown that it comfortably trounces the i7 in performance, and that says a lot about how behind Intel is for now. I just wanted 32GB of RAM, and that was not an option for the R5 which forced me to do the R7 upgrade. For a while, AMD will hold the performance crown (as it did in the past when it first introduced its budget Duron 600 processors that matched the Intel premium offerings). It was partly out of nostalgia that I went with AMD over Intel this time, like I did all those years ago with my trusty Duron 600. Except that this time for Intel, it is facing pressure from other architectures (Apple M1, Microsoft's rumoured custom ARM, Qualcomm also trying to push their ARM processors onto laptops). We are living in exciting times for computing performance.
that said, for basic home use, i dont see noticeable perf improvement in speed for this R7 32gb ram vs my previous 8th gen i5 
