I think you are both talking about the same thing but Brad’s experience is so different from yours that he’s trying to make sense of it by assuming you only meant Qubes that had been created/existed? That’s my attempt to clear it up but hopefully I’m not muddling it further!
Thanks @Qubesthroway for your attempt here. This is hard to explain, and its not really that important.
I have maybe 15 qubes, the default ones that are created on install and the rest I created. Some start automatically when I start qubes up so that, in all, I might have say 8 qubes that have been started. At this point they are, as you say, out of the way. After I start these qubes I might want to access one of these, say ‘banking’ and I launch firefox to do some banking. So then I have one qube that I am using with the other 7 qubes just sitting there out of the way. If I decide then to do some work I can launch my ‘work’ qube by starting say Libre Office writer. So I then have two qubes that I am actively using with 6 sitting there out of the way. This is the thing I am talking about. As I said, depending on what I am doing I can have up to 3 qubes open like this with the others out of the way but open and ready for quick use.
That’s my best shot at explaining it. There is nothing wrong with my x230, it is running perfectly. Maybe my brain with regard to explaining it could use some decent RAM put into it however 
If you’re after something faster than the X230, you can try the W530. Two big benefits here: it has a socketed CPU (X230 is soldered), so the CPU can be upgraded. It’s also possible to neuter Intel ME with 1vyrain on a W530. The other big benefit is it has four RAM slots (only if it originally came with a quad core processor) that can support up to 32 GiB of RAM.
Apart from that, it’s just like a bigger X230.
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I work on W530 already for some years and it’s rather fine (after upgrading the CPU and RAM)
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Thanks for the tip about the W530. The specs say 8gb ram max. I’m assuming that this can be taken to 16gb?
What cpu did you put it in it? Brand/type would be awesome.
Should be 32GB with quad core. I have 32GB even in my W520.
the problem is, that you have the RAM limit in the CPU of the 530w, so it depends on the CPU you have in the W530. I upgraded to the i7-3740QM (it’s the highest possible) and can have up to 32GB (forgot what I do have :D). That’s the point with dual core and quad core.
@qun I would be interested to learn more about the use case you have that requires so much more horsepower. QubesOS is about compartments for digital life in a reasonably secure manner.
Some of the envisaged use cases can be seen in this map.
https://www.qubes-os.org/attachment/site/qubes-partition-data-flows.jpg
more can be read about here
https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/
From a personal perspective, an x230, SSD with 16GB more than satisfies being able to do all of this.
That being said, use cases develop all of the time. Can you let us know more about the uses cases you have that requires more horsepower?
Thanks!
@Plexus sure, for just work purposes I have W530 here and it works very well after upgraded it to i7 quad core and pulled 24GB RAM in to the machine.
A friend of mine thinking about getting a secure machine (coreboot, heads and so on), so I thought about an allrounder, that could have more power (just to have it, without concrete purposes). Is there any possibility to use a better grafic card, for example?
Awesome to hear! Im glad things are working for you.
Ah thats great to hear, I have also been involved with heads for quite some time and the approach is second to none.
Well again that comes down to use case. I mean, it really depends on what the intention is. As I’m sure you know a w530 with i7 and 24Gb and SSD is going to do very well for all of the envisaged use cases I mentioned earlier.
The GPU has always been an interesting conversation with QubesOS. GPU passthrough is an age old topic going back to the start of the project. IOMMU/VT-d/AMD-Vi certainly help, but that is by no means the solution. I don’t see anyone taking up QubesOS wit a view to playing games, so I assume its the number crunching ability that is the topic of conversation in that regard?
The problem is, that I’m not sure, if this friend of mine can manage Qubes for a long time in practice, so in case of he will not manage it for his purposes, I will install something like PureOS or even make a dual boot with windows (dual boot with Qubes does not make sense), if he does need windows for some reasons in future. Thats why I thought about a machine that can even manage video edditing with GTX card or something like that.
Nitropad offers T430 with i7 3840QM (but just with 16GB of RAM, why not 32??). For just Qubes it’s enough.
That’s the point, I don’t think, that Qubes will get though to a better GPU. But the problem is, that there are not just people, who want to play games with G/RTX or something like that. There are some, who want to edit videos and photos for there work. On that point Qubes would be a very nice extra on security… but I think, these are wishes that will not come true 
Nitropad offers T430 with i7 3840QM (but just with 16GB of RAM, why not 32??). For just Qubes it’s enough.
The X230/T430/T530 have 2 RAM slots. Only the W530 has 4 RAM slots (32GB = 4 slots x 8GB/slot)
For the W530, the fastest 55W TDP CPU is probably the i7-3940XM, the fastest 45W TDP CPU is i7-3840QM.
or, sure… forgot that.
ah, ok, so i can do another upgrade… but i think, than i need a better cooler
Just doing some surfing around about the w4530. I’m find them on ebay with i7-3820, not the i7-3740QM as suggested above. Is the 3820 an improvement over the 3740?
Have I it right that the w530 has four RAM slots that would take say 4 X 8gb?
I’m giving consideration to maybe getting one if it can get 32gb working.
Yes, i7-3820qm is quad-core and so will have four slots according to the specs:
Thank you very much for that spec sheet
At the moment I am using another laptop for gpu intensive things. I’d rather use a dedicated gaming laptop (not connected to the net) than gaming in Qubes. The same applies for some video/photo related stuff. The basic/normal stuff is also working with Qubes quite well (like editing photos and videos).
As for all the other stuff I use Qubes on an older corebooted Lenovo laptop with 16GB RAM and I am very satisfied. I usually run a dozen Qubes without any problems.
The only problems I have run into in the past related to insufficient memory had to do with a Windows7 Qube. I had allocated half the memory to this Qube in order to try a few things. Other than that I have never had trouble with memory.
Of course, if you’d like to render something in blender or work with certain CAD programmes then you’re more likely to run into trouble at some point. Or it will just take more time, it all depends.
I guess it depends not only on your use case but also expectations/wishes. I’m currently on a dual core i5 2520M with 16GB RAM and SATA SSD and don’t use heavy programs a lot. I can run a lot of qubes at the same time(including memory heavy Windows qubes) without using manual memory management. In that respect it is perfectly fine. However, I would still like a faster CPU with more cores and preferably also a NVME SSD. It takes a few minutes to boot the machine, starting a VM takes some time. A single one is doable, but multiple at the same time or after each other takes too long for my taste. For example, when I want to open Thunderbird, it boots up my VM, then the vault VM with GPG keys and when Thunderbird is finally open and usable, almost a minute has passed. Every time I shut a VM down, the HDD led blinks constantly and my system becomes largely unresponsive, sometimes even more than 10 seconds. Booting a Windows VM can take multiple minutes. Don’t get me wrong, for such an old machine I’m impressed that it can run so many VMs concurrently, also thanks to the optimizations done by Qubes devs. If I were just to run VMware/VirtualBox on a standard Linux or Windows system, it would be impossible. I consider this hardware usable for Qubes OS, but there is a difference between usable and capable of providing a smooth experience. I can get annoyed often at having to wait all the time. Also keep in mind that 2nd and 3d gen Intel i CPU’s are now also EOL and not receiving microcode updates anymore.
Heavily recommended use premium thinkpad workstations if you want something better then ssh in console.
P-series based on Xeon.
I use i7 and 32G ddr4 ram , evo SSD , while no GPU acceleration and not fast CPU, no OpenGL support, it works but not perfect. For example, sluggish web browsing if simple.
Also every each VM need thousand tweaks
grub/sheduler/ram <400mb, modify kernels.
4.1 works more slower than 4.0
what I don’t really understand (even after reading some tutorials) is the allocation of the RAM to the VMs. What does make sense? How much “initial mem” and “max mem” should I give to the VMs? Sure, it depends on what kind of VM it is. Sometimes its a little bit hard to understand, what the VM really needs.
For example untrusted VM for youtube, surfing and such things or VM for just thunderbird and so on.