Upgrading a laptop with an Intel Core i7

[Cola]

Wrote this on another forum, thought that some of you guys might be interested too.

Bought a T520i roughly a month ago. It was specced with an Intel Core i3-2350M running at 2.3GHz with its two cores. It does feature HyperThreading, but no Turboboost. The laptop had 4 gigs of DDR3 RAM running at 1066MHz. Sporting an onboard graphics chip and a 1600x900 230 NIT display to keep the eyes happy and a 320GB Harddrive. Condition is great overall, nice tight hinges, no bald spots on either palmrest or keyboard. The build quality seems slightly worse than on my previous T410, as the T520i has a plastic case, while the previous version was a metal case.

Anyway, here's a picture of it:




I quickly got the thought that I wanted a bit more power, as I use the laptop for CAD work with AutoCAD and Revit, but also other heavy programs such as Photoshop and Sony Vegas. I started looking for the price of a new CPU, but they were all in the $100 dollar range here, which I thought was too much, considering I only paid around $320 for the T520i. A friend of mine told me that the screen of his Dell laptop had gone bust, so after an insurance claim and a new laptop, he sold me his old Dell XPS L502x for a mere $80. Sporting an Intel Core i7-2630QM running at 2GHz with all four cores, this was an ideal solution for my problem. Furthermore, the Dell had 6GB of RAM, a 500GB Hard drive and an Nvidia GT540M, so should be easy to sell on once I exchanged the CPU's.

Here's a picture of the Dell, condition is fine, although used. The screen is as beforementioned, busted:




As I began disassembling the Dell to retrieve the i7, I quickly started appreciating the ease of disassembling the Thinkpads. Here is a picture of the Dell XPS L502x next to the Thinkpad T520i once the keyboard and palmrest had been removed. As you can see, I still have to get through another layer to get to the CPU on the Dell, while on the Lenovo I simply had to remove the heatsink:




After disassembling both laptops until I got down to the CPU (note: The Dell required me to actually remove then entire display assembly just to get to the CPU!), I cleaned off all the old solidified cooling paste from both CPU's and heatsinks. - I used turpentine to initially loosen it, then moved on to ordinary household spirit to cleanse off the last of it. Finally dried it off with a dry piece of paper. Below are two pictures, first one with the solidified cooling paste on, followed by one of a cleaned CPU:






Next problem was that the heatsink of the T520i's surface was too small to actually cover the entire face of the new i7-2630QM, therefore I had to cut off some of the black plastic.
Before:


After:




ASAP I started assembling the T520i again, powered right up with just the keyboard connected without the surrounding bezel and palmrest, and after a quick boot into BIOS it showed up fine with no errors or anything at all :thumbs-UP::




Afterwards I put the rest of it back together and replaced the 2x2GB RAM with a faster set of 2x4GB 1333MHz DDR3 RAM I had, and I also installed my 120GB OCZ SSD in it to make it noticably faster. It runs very fine and stable with good temperatures on the standard heatsink with Arctic Cooling Silver 5 cooling paste on the CPU. Around 40-45ºC in idle, and peaks at 80ºC while at Full load for 30 mins in Prime95. Never gets over 76ºC on all four cores, so I am very happy with the standard cooling solution in this laptop, even though I discovered that the rear exhaust vent is actually blocked by a piece of plastic in the i-version of the T520.





So, what I have now, is a T520-not-so-i. The only valuable upgrades left being a Full HD 270 NIT display and the NVS 4200 graphics card, although it would hardly be worth it for me, as I would then need a completely different motherboard too. But this laptop with maxed out RAM and a lightning fast SSD is certainly not anymore a low-end budget Thinkpad!



Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed as much as I did while both performing this upgrade and writing this thread.

[Old Engine]

Nice work, Cola! Did it take much time to complete as i am interesting in doing something like this my self?

[Cola]

Thanks, no I spent around 2 hours in total, but I guess it depends on how much experience you have, and whether you can find a manual for your laptop or not. Lenovo supplies Hardware Maintanence Manuals (HMM's) for all their notebooks. The HMM's describe in detail how to disassemble every part of the PC and how to put it back together. Dell has a similar system, so this was rather easy for me.

If you try to take a laptop apart simply by trying your luck, you are gonna have a bad time. Feel free to ask me more questions if/when you choose to do this yourself

[Owl]

Here's me being a nub with laptops thinking the CPU is soldered onto the mobo.
Good tutorial/guide/experiment there though Cola.
Good job!

~Skoda

[Cola]

Thanks! You are correct though, some laptops the CPU is soldered on to the motherboard, not a noobish thought at all. This is seen mostly on slimline models and newer ultrabooks, where also sometimes the RAM are soldered to the motherboard.

[SO•Sebas]

Bought a similar T500 last month. Upgraded the RAM to 4GB and installed a SSD. Its pretty quick now. But you've got me thinking that I might be able to get a better CPU for the board.

Great How-To.

[Cola]

Glad you like it. The older T61p can be flashed to a newer BIOS, allowing for up to a QX9300, but if you aren't going too extreme with it, the Q9000 is a decent quad core cpu for laptops of that age, otherwise have a look at the P9500, very capable dual core CPU clocked at 2.53GHz, also has lower power consumption by all of the T-series CPU's.

Other more powerful options are:
T9600, T9800, T9900, P9600, P9700, X9000, X9100, Q9100

[SO•Sebas]

I'm currently with a very capable T9400. I'll look into the processors you mentionned and see what I can come up with.

Thanks

Quick edit: How do you know if the board is able to support such processors?

[Cola]

First of all, the CPU socket of your motherboard is a PGA, meaning the CPU can be replaced. If it was a BGA type socket, your CPU would've been soldered on, meaning you would not be able to remove it as you would with a normal CPU.

Next off is BIOS compatibility. A T9900 will natively run up to a T9900, but this would only be a 10-15% gain over the T9400. I haven't really looked into the T500 at all, but Thinkpads have a very large fanbase compared to other brands, so have a look at this forum and see if you can find some more info on it, perhaps make a thread in the dedicated T500/T510/T520 subforum
http://forum.thinkpads.com/index.php

The people in there, are very dedicated to the Thinkpads, so some of them should be able to help you along on your project