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If I buy a T60 with a core duo (not core 2) T1300, can I drop a core 2duo in there?

zenlunatic wrote:If I buy a T60 with a core duo (not core 2) T1300, can I drop a core 2duo in there?

Any core2 that is compatible with a T60 series as long as you have a reasonably upto date bios installed. Definitely update your bios first, you don't want to attempt that on an unstable system, then you can install a T5500, T7200, T7400, or T7600. I normally have all of these chips available, but the T7600 usually sells as fast as I can get them which is ironic since they are the least efficient upgrade you can do on a cost vs performance basis. The T5500 is a great chip as far as cost goes, giving you 64bit power for well under $20. The T7200 I can get for $40 pulled from a fully working and fully tested corporate laptop. You might find them a few dollars cheaper, but you'll likely be getting one pulled from a dead system, especially if purchased from someone you don't know or an ebay seller. Some people Some people consider a cpu chip as either working or not working, but considering that there are usually over 400 million transistors in these chips and the thermal changes often cause stress each time it heats and cools, you could easily end up with a chip that is less then 100% working and never know it, as they tend to compensate for errors quite well. They are also known to generate "hot spots" within the chip that can cause inaccurate thermal readings leading to thermal throttling that shouldn't be necessary. The bottom line is I prefer to know the history of the chips I use, and avoid buying unknown chips whenever possible.

Your mileage may vary


ps. T1300 is a "core solo" cpu, not a core duo. a core duo would be a huge upgrade too, as well as a core2 duo. The core solo is a single processor similar to the pentium 4 or celeron. running at the same speed. The newer pentium branded chips are dual core chips, probably core2 chips with some of the features and/or cache disabled, most likely due to manufacturing errors. I'm not sure about the core solo, but it may be a core duo that has one faulty core that's been disabled. I also have some core duo chips available very cheap.

I was considering getting a refurbished T60 with a T1300 and put my T7200 and RAM in there since my T60 has a bit of damage on it plus I would like the 1400x1050 upgrade.

zenlunatic wrote:If I buy a T60 with a core duo (not core 2) T1300, can I drop a core 2duo in there?

I have upgraded three T60 Thinkpads with T1300s to T7200 and my two doughters and I are happy. Nice upgrade

remember to flash recent bios first and use arctic silver for heat transfer.

Did you upgrade to SSD?

You can put any Socket M Core 2 Duo in a T60. The bus speed is limited to 667MHz, but as far as I know all Socket M CPUs use that as the upper limit anyway. The fastest you can get is a T7600, which is a Core 2 Duo running at 2.33GHz, however a T7200 at 2GHz is much cheaper.

zenlunatic wrote:Did you upgrade to SSD?

SSD drives in Finland are still fairly expensive compared to US and for the time beeing the T7200 with reasonable HD is more or less fast enough. For work I have T420 with SSD and I do admit it really makes difference but my three T60 will have SSD later.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 on these 3 Thinkpads but if you are planning to run Windows 7 then you might want search a bios with SLIC 2.1.