Theoretical mod to get 800mhz FSB cpus to work in a T60

[2HD22]

Hello everyone!

I have recently bsel modded my ThinkPad T61 and successfully fitted core 2 duo t9600 in it. I did a bit of a research and figured out how does bsel mod work.
That got me into thinking that maybe fitting 800mhz FSB cpu in a T60 is possible in the same way as fitting 1066mhz cpu into a T61. If we look at the supported cpus list for the desktop 945 chipset we can see, that it supports 800mhz FSB cpus in the same way as desktop 965 chipset supports 1066mhz FSB cpus. So a theoretical modification would include:
1: Tricking chipset into thinking that the cpu FSB is 667mhz by manually wiring the bsel signals.
2: Adding needed microcodes into bios

I unfortunately don't have a T60, maybe you guys could try this theoretical modification? Or this is impossible for some reason which I don't know?

P. S.
Sorry for my bad english.

[TPFanatic]

It is not possible, Socket M (used in T60) and Socket P (used in T61,T500) are inherently different.
What you can do is put a T61 motherboard into the T60 pretty easily. Or just buy a T61,T500,any newer ThinkPad,etc.. Sadly even installing a Socket P would not substantially upgrade a T60, it's best to just enjoy it for what it is.

I believe the most radical mods to do to an old T60 would be installing an NVME 2242 in the WWAN MPCIE slot through an adapter, adding an eGPU through the 2503 Advanced Dock and/or the Expresscard slot, or upgrading to Wifi 802.11ax, 802.11ac, or 802.11n. Sadly lack of hardware decoding means the best media streaming will be by playing DVDs and it won't be efficient. I have tried playing BluRays and YouTube on Z61m (widescreen sister of R60) and it became a slideshow.

[2HD22]

It is not possible, Socket M (used in T60) and Socket P (used in T61,T500) are inherently different.
What you can do is put a T61 motherboard into the T60 pretty easily. Or just buy a T61,T500,any newer ThinkPad,etc.. Sadly even installing a Socket P would not substantially upgrade a T60, it's best to just enjoy it for what it is.

I believe the most radical mods to do to an old T60 would be installing an NVME 2242 in the WWAN MPCIE slot through an adapter, adding an eGPU through the 2503 Advanced Dock and/or the Expresscard slot, or upgrading to Wifi 802.11ax, 802.11ac, or 802.11n. Sadly lack of hardware decoding means the best media streaming will be by playing DVDs and it won't be efficient. I have tried playing BluRays and YouTube on Z61m (widescreen sister of R60) and it became a slideshow.

Yeah, I agree that putting a T61 board in a T60 is much simpler, but in theory this mod can work. As this post shows (https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=127587) there are some pins, which need to be mapped. So combining mapping pins, modding bsel and adding microcdes should allow socket P cpus to work in a T60 or any other board with 945 chipset.
On a T60 this is pretty useless, however this might find a use in something like a z61m (which I have), where you can't simply put in a better motherboard.

[TPFanatic]

From that thread:

Easier to just swap in a T61 board.

4:3 T61 board to 4:3 T60
15.4" T61 board to 15.4" T60

and boom, Socket P capabilities.


May be easier and cheaper to just get a T61.

I'm consistent, heh.

As for Z61m, I have not tried this myself but I believe an R61 15.4" board or T61 4:3 board can be installed with some frame modification and minor case modification, or an R500 board with more extensive case modification (this, I actually did, but I restored it shortly after). There is no point though because the R61 and R500 are the official replacements for the 15.4" Z-series, and are substantially better built machines. 15.4" R61 has everything the Z-series had except the titanium lid gimmick (some of the T4x series had titanium lids). R500 loses S-video but grants Displayport. Z-series only has collector value and that value is best maintained with an aesthetically-stock laptop, which motherboard-retrofitting quickly obliterates.

[unixed]

Having the CPU microcode is necessary but insuffient for supporting the CPU, the 15.0" R61 not being able to run a Penryn CPU with it's correct (7Q) BIOS (even with the microcode added) being a case in point. Fat chance of this proposed mod booting.

[theterminator93]

Even if it could be made to work, the chipset still has a 3 GB user-addressable limit for RAM. That IMHO is a bigger limiting factor than being stuck with a 667 MHz bus Core 2.

[kfzhu1229]

I have recently bsel modded my ThinkPad T61 and successfully fitted core 2 duo t9600 in it. I did a bit of a research and figured out how does bsel mod work.
That got me into thinking that maybe fitting 800mhz FSB cpu in a T60 is possible in the same way as fitting 1066mhz cpu into a T61. If we look at the supported cpus list for the desktop 945 chipset we can see, that it supports 800mhz FSB cpus in the same way as desktop 965 chipset supports 1066mhz FSB cpus. So a theoretical modification would include:
1: Tricking chipset into thinking that the cpu FSB is 667mhz by manually wiring the bsel signals.
2: Adding needed microcodes into bios

Well I am one who have thoroughly studied these possibilities on my own before and unfortunately I have bad news to bring forth to you. while the 965 mobile express chipset (or even GL960 for that matter) can be perfectly overclocked to handle 1066mhz FSB, from my personal trial on an Inspiron 6400, overclocking a 945GM chipset to 800mhz is ABSOLUTELY no dice!
In fact, even for a Core 2 duo T5300, a Socket M CPU that runs 533Mhz FSB, while you can FSB pin mod it to run on 667mhz FSB, northbridge automatically locks it to the lowest multiplier (but laptop starts up just fine). IF, HOWEVER, you do it like T61 style and mod just the clock generator to run on 667mhz FSB, even that the Northbridge cannot handle it (CPU itself handled that 667mhz FSB just fine and my 2GB stick is straight from my FSB overclocked machines)!
Therefore, my conclusion is that the 945 chipset's silicon is so much worse than the 965's silicon that there is basically zero overclocking room to be had for it to go to 800mhz. (And kinda a shame Intel started locking down FSB overclocking by a naive BSEL jumper mod on laptop chipsets with the 945 mobile series)
In fact, my conclusion is true for GL40 chispet as well.
Oh and also, selection of 667Mhz FSB Socket P CPU's are very limited anyway. Basically any capable Core 2 duo CPU will run on 800Mhz FSB instead.

Then, there is the fact that the 945 mobile express chipset simply has aged very terribly in capabilities. If being stuck on 3GB of RAM (or 3.25GB on Dell and HP's) is not bad enough for you, you will easily notice that any Santa Rosa (or Montevina) laptop running a Core 2 duo T7300 CPU will very easily outperform a 945GM laptop running a Core 2 duo T7400, even if both are on 3GB of RAM and on SATA1 only 7200RPM WD Black drives, in daily tasks of modern standards.
And if that is not bad enough for you, then there is the fact that provided that the motherboard does not fail (which is a big IF here), a late 2006 era Dell Inspiron 1501 or HP Pavilion dv2000/dv6000/tx1000 tablet will also significantly outperform a 945GM laptop with Core 2 duo T7400, if upgraded to Turion 64 X2 TL-60 (65nm Tyler version) 4GB of RAM (up to full 8GB supported on these, surprise) and an SSD. By raw CPU scores the TL-60 is definitely slower than a T7400. But the TL-60 has much higher bandwidth to play with with the Hypertransport link and 800Mhz DDR2 support (if iGPU permits that), much more capable iGPU's and much more capable chipset overall (although still no SATA2 and these chipsets overheat).
Point here is even with the T7400 and T7600 CPU's, it is becoming clear that the 945 platform is holding those CPU's back in fact. Plus, a T7400 on a T60 already runs extremely hot, just like the Turions.

[axur-delmeria]

Too bad most Turion laptops run quite hot. My brother had the infamous HP-Compaq CQ40 AMD Turion model, which died a little after 2 years even with the CPU undervolted and underclocked.

As bad as the 945GM is, there's much worse chipsets out there, like the SiS Mirage series.

[2HD22]

Thanks for you answers guys! Now I see that this mod is really pointless.
Instead of this I will upgrade my 4:3 T61 even further by putting a T61p motherboard in it, which has a much better gpu and mod this board to support core 2 quads(I have done it before). Also I heard that T61can support up to 8gb of ram(with modded bios), but this upgrade won't fit in my budget. Or I will find something different to do(I'm just a bored 15 year old).

[axur-delmeria]

You don't need a modded BIOS to support 8GB. The modded BIOS enables SATA-2 speed (300 megabytes/sec) on the HDD port and removes the WiFi whitelist.

[TPFanatic]

And you need to be willing to part with $70 or so to get the 8GB. I know I'm insane enough.

[kfzhu1229]

Too bad most Turion laptops run quite hot. My brother had the infamous HP-Compaq CQ40 AMD Turion model, which died a little after 2 years even with the CPU undervolted and underclocked.

I think I know these Turions very well now and they can be categorised into Socket S1G1 S1G2 S1G3 and S1G4 generations (none of these are interchangable). S1G2 and S1G3 are purely AMD playing catchup to the Penryn Core 2 duos, and yours unfortunately have the S1G2, which is barely any better than S1G1 which by then was already near 3 years old...
But S1G1 aged relatively nicely with the TL-60 still being somewhat capable and outperforms the Intel 945GM + T7200 counterpart and both are on 65nm nodes.
S1G4 I find to be interesting too since that's the one where you can get things like a Phenom II X4 P960 - a much cheaper alternative to Q9000 that also runs at about half the TDP, or even one can get a tri core on those and you can get 16GB of RAM. But that's irrelevant here.

As bad as the 945GM is, there's much worse chipsets out there, like the SiS Mirage series.

Yeah that is true, even the ones without the useless integrated graphics suck very bad, my cousin had an Asus F83se with discrete ATI graphics but SiS chipset and those chipsets love to randomly go short themselves and kill the motherboard...

Thanks for you answers guys! Now I see that this mod is really pointless.
Instead of this I will upgrade my 4:3 T61 even further by putting a T61p motherboard in it, which has a much better gpu and mod this board to support core 2 quads(I have done it before). Also I heard that T61can support up to 8gb of ram(with modded bios), but this upgrade won't fit in my budget. Or I will find something different to do(I'm just a bored 15 year old).

Well if a pair of 4GB DDR2 wont fit your budget I am afraid a known good T61p motherboard with safe revision NVS140M won't fit your budget either. Personally there is a point where I draw the line for being good enough with upgrades as opposed to dumping way too money onto it...

[theterminator93]

I don't sweat build dates on nVidia T61 motherboards anymore. At this point, if it's still kicking under a full-load, high-heat stress test then it's good enough for me. I've got a couple safe date systems around here too but IMHO they're all more likely to die of some other component failure before the GPU melts down now that they're 15-16 years old. My T601pF has an early 2008 date code on the GPU and has shown no signs of failure both undervolted and overclocked since I assembled it many years ago.

[axur-delmeria]

I think I know these Turions very well now and they can be categorised into Socket S1G1 S1G2 S1G3 and S1G4 generations (none of these are interchangable).

It had a Turion X2 RM-72, so it's probably S1G2. The AMD 780G chipset with Radeon HD3200 was way ahead of any contemporary Intel graphics though.

[kfzhu1229]

It had a Turion X2 RM-72, so it's probably S1G2. The AMD 780G chipset with Radeon HD3200 was way ahead of any contemporary Intel graphics though.

Yup that is S1G2, and unfortunately it is not a single bit faster than its predecessor. In fact in some motherboards RM-72 can even be slower than my TL-60 equipped Pavilion TX1000 tablet. HD3200 was better in GPU performance but it has no h264 decoding capabilities and software decoding for youtube via the CPU works as "well" or badly as a T7200 on GMA 950 playing youtube today and runs mad hot...

I don't sweat build dates on nVidia T61 motherboards anymore. At this point, if it's still kicking under a full-load, high-heat stress test then it's good enough for me. I've got a couple safe date systems around here too but IMHO they're all more likely to die of some other component failure before the GPU melts down now that they're 15-16 years old.

Yeah that is true and that is what I have come accepted to terms with with the Turion machines. I mod their cooling and make the cooling as efficient as possible and at that point just count me unlucky if it actually dies in my hands

[TuuS]

I appologize for not reading this full thread, but wanted to mention that the T60 motherboard is quite limited in otherways like it's 3gb ram limit, sata1 limit, so even if you were able to use a newer generation of cpu it would still have many other restrictions. A better solution may be to swap in a T61 board then upgrade from there.