Hello dear community!
I’m about to switch to a t14s gen 3 notebook but I’m unsure whether to buy the Intel or AMD version.
I’d really like to go with AMD, but there are some people complaining about high battery drain in suspend and high battery drain in general.
Is anybody here running a machine like this and can give some insights about the situation with the latest kernel and such?
Sorry if this is the wrong subforum.
Thank you!
Edit: Of course I mean running EOS. 
I think @tlmiller76 have some of those, maybe he’ll have some advice 
You are correct, I do indeed.
So I have the T14s Gen3 AMD, have had it for CLOSE to a year now.
I also hae the T14 (no S) Gen3 Intel, have had it for just over a month.
CURRENTLY, they’re both actually running the same OS (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) so they’ve got exactly the same packages installed outside of AMD/Intel differences.
The T14s AMD DOES have the 400-nit LCD and a Ryzen 7 6850U, while the T14 Intel has the inferior 300-nit LCD, and only has a i5, which definitely does impact battery life, but not drastically (in a week the T14 Intel should have the 400-nit LCD too, it’s on it’s way to me).
The only other stat of consequence here, is the T14 is a 52.5 WH battery, while the T14s does get a 57 WH battery. Not drastic difference, but again, 4.5 WH will have an impact.
So the T14s DID experience battery drain when I first got it. Luckily, unlike the A485 they fixed it with either the first or second BIOS update they released. Since then it’s ran like a champion, and running with 40% brightness and doing nothing more strenuous than surfing the internet I can JUST ABOUT get 9 hours. Given how thin and light this thing is, I’m fairly impressed.
The T14s is the more powerful system overall. However, it’s not by very much. Quite frankly, that Alder lake Mobile is a FAST MoFo. Beats most of my PRIOR R7’s in benchmarks!!! And even with the 6000-series, it manages to beat it single threaded benchmarks, but loses I think due to being hampered with DDR 4800 whereas the AMD has the LPDDR 6400 when doing highly multithreaded tasks.
But battery life…another story. I can get just over 5 hours on the Intel with the same usage and brightness set to 55% (resulting in about the same overall brightness level for the LCD’s while working). Massively less efficient. I expect the 400-nit LCD will be able to help probably 1/2 hour, 45 minutes additional runtime, but I doubt more than that.
So there’s the $.50 review of these compared with Linux.
If you get the intel, it requires the sof-firmware package for sound. I had never owned anything that required that before, and took me longer to figure out than I’m proud to admit.
That’s a damn solid review. Well worth the $0.50 I didn’t pay.
AMD all the way.
That was me last night. One of my vendors took me out for dinner. Man, I probably ate $200 worth of food and booze.
Thank you for your extremely detailed review! <3
So you’ll get some of dem t14s gen 3 AMD and update BIOS?
What exactly do you mean? 
Usually I try to run lastest BIOS.
That, to get rid of those drains
BIOS update in EOS with fwupd is possible?
AFAIK it is machine dependent.
I don’t know, depends on manufacturer…I’d say Lenovo is likely yes, but if not from bootable USB drive
Yes, I have done so from both the T14s Gen3 AMD and T14 Gen3 Intel.
What are your experiences about the things mentioned in the GPU section?
There are a number of frequency-scaling issues surrounding ACPI-cpufreq causing the internal GPU to reset at seemingly random times. GPU resets are infrequent, but should be considered prior to purchase of laptop if intending to stick with the ACPI-cpufreq performance scaling driver. The resets cause the screen to turn black, forcing the user to either reboot or relogin via a login manager. Switching to a TTY during a GPU reset is sometimes possible.
To follow these issues, see:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213145
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1974
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/2068
The overvolting workaround provided does not affect the ThinkPad T14s Gen 3 (AMD) processors because ultrabook processors are unable to be overvolted.
If using ACPI-cpufreq is not a requirement, it is possible to use the experimental amd-pstate frequency-scaling driver, by adding the amd_pstate=passive kernel parameter. Note that the kernel parameter is only available for kernel versions 5.17 and up. This driver appears to be more stable than the ACPI-cpufreq driver, not only reducing the number of GPU resets, but also lowering idle CPU temperatures. However, AMD still does not recommend enabling this driver, as it is not complete.
I’ve literally never used acpi-cpufreq on this laptop, been using amd-pstate since day 1.
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