Thinkpads Forum

Hello, I am new to this forum, although not new to IBM/Lenovo PCs (Have 2 thinkpads) and was wondering exactly how big of a pain it would be to upgrade my A51. Its a 3.0ghz P4, and would like to take it as high as the Mobo will allow me to, although I cant get an answer for that either. Anyway, according to Lenovo's CPU replacement instructions, you shouldnt reuse the old heatsink that comes on the original CPU if you need to swap in a new one. Now Obviously this is leaning towards the fact that IBM wants you to buy a replacement CPU from them, complete with heatsink, and for me that doesnt seem like a worthwhile option. The only reason I could think of them not wanting to reuse the old heatsink is the thermal pad would be stuck to the old one. A little bit of careful elbow grease and that shouldnt be a real big problem I wouldnt think. The other side to this is I dont know what CPU I can upgrade to. Mine has the 530 with one meg of L2 cache. Lenovo has pre-configured models that go up to 3.4ghz still with the 1mb L2. I would like to install a 670 series 3.8ghz cpu, but does anyone know if this would work?

Thanks in advance

Zach

I can't help you with what CPUs an A51 planar can support, but I have swapped CPUs around between M50s while reusing the existing heatskinks without experiencing any problem.

Cheers,

Bill