X62: First impressions (updated w/ pic links)
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2016 8:24 pm
UPDATE: The WiFi switch seems cheap, already broke it. Don't think I manhandled it, but that's always possible. Never happened with the old boards though, see pictures
FACTOID: CrystalDiskMark returns 530+ MB/s for the SSD (Crucial M500)
UPDATE: I'm starting to think that the USB / sound board was either an afterthought / hasty design or done by someone else. As noted below it's got issues with the USB height and bottom hole offset, but another thing is that the other two "correct" mounting holes are huge, as if the keyboard support post is supposed to go right through. That would be fine, but it turns out that if you crank down the keyboard screws, you actually bend the keyboard down a full few mm. In that case you end up with a huge valley near the arrow keys compared to the rest of the keys; the temporary solution was not to tighten the screws all the way. I'll probably end up adding a washer or something to keep the post from passing through the hole, seems to me like it was supposed to sit ON the board in the original design, hence the room to bend.
UPDATE: Installed Win 7, working on acquiring all the drivers. It's sooooo fast and snappy! This is amazing.
Further observations: The WWAN and WLAN lights are always on, even if the machine is off. Very odd.
Updates see above:
=============================================================================
Original post see below:
Hi there!
I just received and installed by X62 board!! I feel like a kid at Christmas...
I thought I'd give you all my thoughts so far, even though it's literally only been a few minutes. I'm actually typing this on the new machine, more about that later.
Mechanical assembly:
- The X62 comes with three boards; (1) motherboard, (2) right-side sound and USB ports and (3) a small HDD-bay / power adapter.
- The motherboard fits where it ought to, that's pretty straightforward. I did notice a few slight issues, namely: The left-side USB port seems to be too "tall" for where it's supposed to go, it keeps the keyboard bezel lifted up a tad. To solve that, I trimmed off one of the lips that "guide" the port on the underside of the bezel. It still needed some force to mate properly, but otherwise it fits.
- The biggest issue so far is with the sound board. It's got two holes and a half-cutout for the frame / keyboard screws, but the half-cutout doesn't actually line up with its hole by about 1/3 of it's diameter. I had to trim off some PCB (luckily it'so only ground plane around the hole) to make it fit. Further, the audio jacks don't "sit down" fully in their slots. After lots of poking and fiddling, it seems that the 2 USB ports and the audio jacks aren't relatively at the correct heights (USB seems to sit higher), which means you can't quite fully mate the bezel / keyboard together when the screws tighten. My solution to that was to trim away the vertical posts at the edge of the bezel by the USB ports, making the audio jacks fit but the USB ports ride "up" just sightly (~0.5mm) past the edge of the frame. That doesn't cause any issues with plugging devices in though, so it's a fine solution for me.
- Speaker plug confuses me. It seems like it's stereo now; there are 4 pins. Prodding around 51nb for some pictures, it looks like the speaker connects to the right two pins. HOWEVER, so far the speaker doesn't work but I'll look at driver updates first (I'm currently in Ubuntu).
- They include two thick plastic stickers that are supposed to be "functional". One is for the new display connectors; since they don't take up the full space the VGA port used to, they provided a sticker that DOES cover the whole opening with two punchouts for each new connector. It's a neat idea, but sketchy at best. I'll give it a week before it falls out. The other one seems to be for where the dock connector hole, but I'm not sure where / how to attach it (i.e inside or just patched over the hole)
Function
- I put in 2x4GB RAM from my X201, so far so good.
- BIOS actually reports that this is an i7-5600u, not 5500u.
- Apparently there are 4 (!) SATA ports, I'm curious where the other two are and whether they're available
- Out of curiosity, I just put in my mSATA SSD from my X61, which had a Win7 / Ubuntu / Hackintosh triple boot not really expecting it to work. The bootloader doesn't seem to mind, and Ubuntu started right up. That boot was wicked fast, and it's how I'm typing this post.
- Windows of course refused to boot, it made it up to the login screen then gave me a cursor on black screen. I didn't even bother trying the Hackintosh. My next step is to blank the disk and reinstall Windows.
- The fan is surprisingly loud. It's more noticeable than before, and it also seems to pulse on and off occasionally. I haven't played with any kind of control software yet.
- RJ45 port doesn't have activity LEDs. Built-in Ethernet also didn't work by default, so I grabbed install files for the WiFi off a USB drive and installed that first.
Thinklight, screen brightness, and volume buttons all work fine.
I'll add an update once I have a clean copy of Windows, but meanwhile let me know if you'd like to know anything specific!
R
FACTOID: CrystalDiskMark returns 530+ MB/s for the SSD (Crucial M500)
UPDATE: I'm starting to think that the USB / sound board was either an afterthought / hasty design or done by someone else. As noted below it's got issues with the USB height and bottom hole offset, but another thing is that the other two "correct" mounting holes are huge, as if the keyboard support post is supposed to go right through. That would be fine, but it turns out that if you crank down the keyboard screws, you actually bend the keyboard down a full few mm. In that case you end up with a huge valley near the arrow keys compared to the rest of the keys; the temporary solution was not to tighten the screws all the way. I'll probably end up adding a washer or something to keep the post from passing through the hole, seems to me like it was supposed to sit ON the board in the original design, hence the room to bend.
UPDATE: Installed Win 7, working on acquiring all the drivers. It's sooooo fast and snappy! This is amazing.
Further observations: The WWAN and WLAN lights are always on, even if the machine is off. Very odd.
Updates see above:
=============================================================================
Original post see below:
Hi there!
I just received and installed by X62 board!! I feel like a kid at Christmas...
I thought I'd give you all my thoughts so far, even though it's literally only been a few minutes. I'm actually typing this on the new machine, more about that later.
Mechanical assembly:
- The X62 comes with three boards; (1) motherboard, (2) right-side sound and USB ports and (3) a small HDD-bay / power adapter.
- The motherboard fits where it ought to, that's pretty straightforward. I did notice a few slight issues, namely: The left-side USB port seems to be too "tall" for where it's supposed to go, it keeps the keyboard bezel lifted up a tad. To solve that, I trimmed off one of the lips that "guide" the port on the underside of the bezel. It still needed some force to mate properly, but otherwise it fits.
- The biggest issue so far is with the sound board. It's got two holes and a half-cutout for the frame / keyboard screws, but the half-cutout doesn't actually line up with its hole by about 1/3 of it's diameter. I had to trim off some PCB (luckily it'so only ground plane around the hole) to make it fit. Further, the audio jacks don't "sit down" fully in their slots. After lots of poking and fiddling, it seems that the 2 USB ports and the audio jacks aren't relatively at the correct heights (USB seems to sit higher), which means you can't quite fully mate the bezel / keyboard together when the screws tighten. My solution to that was to trim away the vertical posts at the edge of the bezel by the USB ports, making the audio jacks fit but the USB ports ride "up" just sightly (~0.5mm) past the edge of the frame. That doesn't cause any issues with plugging devices in though, so it's a fine solution for me.
- Speaker plug confuses me. It seems like it's stereo now; there are 4 pins. Prodding around 51nb for some pictures, it looks like the speaker connects to the right two pins. HOWEVER, so far the speaker doesn't work but I'll look at driver updates first (I'm currently in Ubuntu).
- They include two thick plastic stickers that are supposed to be "functional". One is for the new display connectors; since they don't take up the full space the VGA port used to, they provided a sticker that DOES cover the whole opening with two punchouts for each new connector. It's a neat idea, but sketchy at best. I'll give it a week before it falls out. The other one seems to be for where the dock connector hole, but I'm not sure where / how to attach it (i.e inside or just patched over the hole)
Function
- I put in 2x4GB RAM from my X201, so far so good.
- BIOS actually reports that this is an i7-5600u, not 5500u.
- Apparently there are 4 (!) SATA ports, I'm curious where the other two are and whether they're available
- Out of curiosity, I just put in my mSATA SSD from my X61, which had a Win7 / Ubuntu / Hackintosh triple boot not really expecting it to work. The bootloader doesn't seem to mind, and Ubuntu started right up. That boot was wicked fast, and it's how I'm typing this post.
- Windows of course refused to boot, it made it up to the login screen then gave me a cursor on black screen. I didn't even bother trying the Hackintosh. My next step is to blank the disk and reinstall Windows.
- The fan is surprisingly loud. It's more noticeable than before, and it also seems to pulse on and off occasionally. I haven't played with any kind of control software yet.
- RJ45 port doesn't have activity LEDs. Built-in Ethernet also didn't work by default, so I grabbed install files for the WiFi off a USB drive and installed that first.
Thinklight, screen brightness, and volume buttons all work fine.
I'll add an update once I have a clean copy of Windows, but meanwhile let me know if you'd like to know anything specific!
R
Note the broken tab at left...
