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.