Thinkpads Forum

I think it's time to upgrade the processor from a t2200 cpu to a t7200 cpu.

I'm tempted to upgrade to a t7600 cpu, but the costs just don't justify it.

And I don't think that there is much of a difference between t7200 and t7600. The fact that it has 4mb of L2 Cache is more important right?

But I'm wondering if it's safe to buy china sourced t7200 cpu's.

I'm more trusting of working pulls, and have heard the occasional story of counterfit cpu's.

I'm just sort of weary that all the cheapest listings are all from china.

Counterfeit, or working pulls from ewaste shipped to china?

Buying something expensive from overseas can be a fairly risky endeavor. However, with the cost of the T7200 CPU down around US$15, it doesn't seem that much (to me anyway). Looking at ebay.ca, there several chips available from the US that cost less than CDN$20. Buy one from a seller that guarantees the item (14-30 day return privilege), document the opening of the package, proper handling of the CPU (anti-static strap!) and installation to your motherboard. You can run a tool like CPU-Z and it should give you all of the information that will identify exactly what you have. If you have a copy of PC Doctor, you can run the CPU tests to make sure everything is functional.

Counterfeit CPUs have been sold before but I'm guessing that it's not that common a problem anymore. "Engineering samples" have also been sold as "regular" CPUs; they could have known defects (i.e., alpha designs or early steppings) or they may not operate at all margins of the specifications.

Some Chinese sellers sell BGA CPUs to which they solder a pin board (using some specialty equipment) as PGA. This allows them to sell them for lower prices, since BGA CPUs are available for less to begin with.

This has been the case several years ago, when those CPUs were new at least.

Nowadays, with the processors being so old, I tend to agree that it should always be fairly easy to find a used one cheaply locally. With the exception of T7600 that is top-of-the-line and therefore keeps its value, the rest of the C2D T60 processors have dropped in price significantly.

T7200 should be okay, it's not worth the time and money to do anything fraudulent on it always pick a seller with higher than 98% feedback at least

there are BGA to PGA versions, but those are easily identifiable (have a solder point covered by green paint) But I can't see a big problem

TBH what I'd recommend is to get a T61 motherboard, T7200 isn't a big improvement upon your original CPU

P.S. 1. the price for T7200 should be ~ 4-6GBP in China (original fully working PGA) without postage. Yeah, it's pulled from nth handed laptops from western countries, sometimes a container of laptops worth about 3000 GBP. So computer parts are much wider in varieties and much cheaper in prices in China. e.g. a QX9300 is about 80-90GBP
2. still, I recommend giving up 945 chipset and switch to 965, simply because on 965 chipset you have much more choices of CPUs and also, no 3GB RAM limit
3. rememeber NEVER get RAM, HDDs or SSDs from China, they can fake these. Fortunately not CPU