Thinkpads Forum

Hello there!
My T60 runs at 1.6Ghz, would therefore love to speed it up a bit by adding either a T2600 or T2700. Does anybody happen to have one to sell?
Regards,
Mike
P.S. Shipping would have to be to Germany, though. =)

While I don't have a T2600/2700 to offer you, may I ask why you're not going the Core 2 Duo route? CPUs like T5500/5600 are quite inexpensive nowadays.

The T7200 sells for less than T2700, and is a C2D with 4MB cache.

T7400 goes for about as much as T2700.

Just something to consider.

Happy shopping.

How do a find out whether or not it works. I read something about a Revision 3. How can I tell that my notebook can do that?

I have yet to see a T60/p that won't take a Core 2 CPU - presuming you have the latest or at least recent BIOS installed - and I've seen hundreds of these machines...

If you're going to go with a core2 cpu, make sure you update your bios before you begin just to be safe, and make sure the system is running stable. A random crash or thermal shutdown during a bios flash will render your systemboard useless, but I think it would be worth the risk if you want to run a 64bit operating system which the core2 can do, otherwise you should balance the risk against the benefits.

ps. besides the core duo CPUs I mentioned in my PM, I also have some core2 duo available, as I'm sure george does.

I wouldn't upgrade to a Core 2 Duo. Core Duo is much cooler, performance is nearly identical and even though Core 2 Duo supports 64 bit it is meaningless on a T60 because the 945 chipset will limit usable RAM to 3GB anyway.

I had a T7600 in my Precision M90 for a while (came from factory with a T5600) and it didn't really felt much faster. The only difference was on synthetic benchmarks. 1.86 GHz vs 2.33 GHz isn't really that big of a difference to begin with. Long history short, I eventually sold it and replaced it with a T2400 I got for free from the machine I installed the T7600 on. It runs way cooler, 10-15 ºC on average. My machine is worth probably not more than $300 at this point and recovering over $100 sacrificing nearly nothing seemed smart.

This is especially true if you consider how fast Core i processors are and man, we're on third generation already. Even the slowest one will run in circles around that T7600. It's sad but upgrading is usually not a good idea. Unless you apply my rule: it's better to have the slowest processor on a newer generation machine than the best processor on an older model. People tends to disregard the basic models and you can usually purchase them for dirt cheap. Not so with the fastest models which usually are available with a big premium.

mikemex wrote:I wouldn't upgrade to a Core 2 Duo. Core Duo is much cooler, performance is nearly identical

My experience regarding the temperatures has been the exact opposite. Core 2 Duo runs about 8-10C degrees cooler on average when idling.

As for the performance, unless one pushes the machine *really* hard, the difference is hardly noticeable.