compatability of diffrent FRU system boards.

[winslow]

Was wondering why the different system boards within a series are not interchangable. A couple of years ago I purchased a system board from thinkpadparts.com for a unit I had. The FRU numbers had changed and I accidentally purchased the wrong FRU part number (planer). Other than the fact that some come with a security chip, what else makes the different boards incompatable, or are they actually interchangeable?

Have a brand new 26P8205 planer but was thinking of dumping it if it is not useable with any unit I currently have.

[Harryc]

26P8205 is a T30 system board, in case anyone wanted to guess

[RealBlackStuff]

I'll happily pay shipping costs if you want to dump it my way!

[winslow]

Would that board be compatable with any T30 unit or will it only work with a particular lot of units?

[ajkula66]

That board is fine for the machine in your signature, security chip is really not a big deal one way or another on this generation of the machines.

The only time you want to go to series II planar on a T30 machine is if you're intent on installing the CPU faster that 2.0 Ghz.

[winslow]

How would I distingquish between a series i planer and a series ii planer. Does that mean I wouldn't be able to upgrade my existing unit to 2ghz if I wanted to (and change the fan also)?

[ajkula66]

FRUs are different between series I and series II, don't have the HMM available at this moment but it's all in there...

You'd be OK with 2.0 but not above, I don't know the specific details of what the catch is...

[RealBlackStuff]

Like the man said, RTFM.

[winslow]

Was wondering what the "catch was". I read the FM and although it has all the different FRU's listed it has nothing to offer about the "catch"! Enough said.

[ajkula66]

winslow wrote:

I read the FM and although it has all the different FRU's listed it has nothing to offer about the "catch"! Enough said.

Not really. If you match the model numbers with the boards types, just one or two of them, you will see that all units that went up to 2.2 and 2.4 Ghz were based on type II boards. I'm fairly certain that IBM had a good reason for that, because type I boards were not discontinued when the type II ones were introduced.

To me personally-and I've owned many T30s-anything above 2.0 is an overkill, simply because you're dealing with a 14" frame, and even with the fastest fan, you are looking at high temperatures on 2.4 units. Secondly, it's not the CPU but the GPU that is-and will always remain-the biggest bottleneck on these machines, and there's nothing that can be done about that.