Thinkpads Forum

Hello, I am seriously contemplating core 2 quad moding my T601, but I'd like to know what it is like before I go ahead and mod mine. So, what is the experience like?

Still trying to work up the courage to molest my T61 to accept my QX9300.

I'm running about as pimped out a T61 I can without actually taking a soldering iron to anything. I'd feel really bad if I fried the motherboard with it's respun NV GPU. It's why I was kind of happy to see the Quad core mod bioses include undervolting for it, because stock the gpu voltage is just needlessly high.

Honestly though considering the power demands of running a C2Q at the same clock speed as my T9300, I'd likely slow it down and run it at 2 or 2.2ghz.

So it's a, do I run a fast dual core or a slower quad core. Most of the stuff I do on my T61 now wouldn't benefit from the extra cores really.

SaskFellow wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 05, 2018 2:38 pm

Still trying to work up the courage to molest my T61 to accept my QX9300.

I'm running about as pimped out a T61 I can without actually taking a soldering iron to anything. I'd feel really bad if I fried the motherboard with it's respun NV GPU. It's why I was kind of happy to see the Quad core mod bioses include undervolting for it, because stock the gpu voltage is just needlessly high.

Honestly though considering the power demands of running a C2Q at the same clock speed as my T9300, I'd likely slow it down and run it at 2 or 2.2ghz.

So it's a, do I run a fast dual core or a slower quad core. Most of the stuff I do on my T61 now wouldn't benefit from the extra cores really.

Coming from somebody that has a X9000 equipped T61p and a QX9300 equipped Alienware M17x, the processor is not really the choking point on these machines for word processing, internet browsing, even some old school gaming actually benefits from higher speed dual cores than slower speed quad cores. The thorn in all these computers now is the horrendously outdated nvidia gpu that cannot cope with new video codecs and massive amounts of media on webpages now. FX 570M can only decode h.264, nothing new like high profile h.264, VP9, H.265, etc, can be very CPU taxing. RAM can also bottleneck. Biggest bang for buck was definitely the SSD + sata 2 enable in the BIOS. Trimming windows services and features to make it snappier also helps. My T61p is my bedside computer, it does everything I need it to.

Hey,

Yeah, I left mine with it's T9300, and I've got my QX sitting on display on my desk.

Lucky, my NVS140M chokes on basically any video now. I've had to resort to black arts and decoder hardware or else my T61 chokes to death on basically any video. I will agree the best upgrades for me have been, the SATA2 unlock, 840 Pro, 8GB of ram, and a modified bios to undervolt the NVS140M. Well that and upgrading the cooler to the beefier one, with better goo and pads and upgrading from the T7300 to my T9300. Oh and the glorious NMB keyboard. I have 2 BNIB spares that will go with me to my grave for just in case.

I still use mine for browsing and tapping out words, because the keyboard just feels so much nicer than anything that I have which is newer.