Thinkpad X230 MB on X220 body. Worth?

[lautr3c]

Hello everybody. Hope you are health and safe.

I have a X220(Core i5 2520M, 8GB RAM), he has been my companion at work for a long time, but now he its very "tired" when i need to watch a video on 720p or higher. It starts to get really hot, no crashes , just high temperature and loud cooler. I had already come here once, I was recommended to apply the thermal paste and clean with "canned air". It made him a lot better, thank you all. But even so I see that he has worrying temperatures, like 75ºC to 80ºC when watching just one stream on twitch.

Straight to the point... its worth to change my x220 (i5 2520m) to a x230(3380m) motherboard? I see Wolfgang making this in his YouTube channel. I just wanted to know, if from your experience there would be any significant changes in these questions that I mentioned earlier. Thanks.

[atagunov]

Been sitting on all hardware required for this mod for a month... Just need to find time and do it.. I am hoping for a slightly longer battery life, we'll see. CPU score is a tiny little bit better too. I'm dreaming of getting a mobo with 4 cores one day from China But it will cost $200+ delivered I think.. You need either help from master Xueyao or go via Taobao for that I think.

I actually did buy a whole lower part of an X230: bottom shell and mobo, they sell some on ebay. The idea is to avoid the gap around mini-display port.. Though probably sugru would fixed it for me?..

[Krissharm]

I have done it - and did the keyboard swap with the classic keyboard. Works a treat. Runs cooler and faster.

[TPFanatic]

I built a unit like this, lower case and board from an X230 with the rest of the parts from an X220. So it looks like an X220 that is ever so slightly more capable, particularly in graphics power. It's definitely doable but it's not a significant upgrade.

[axur-delmeria]

It's definitely doable but it's not a significant upgrade.

For some, the added features (USB 3.0, proper Windows graphics driver, Vulkan support) are enough.

ATM I'm exploring this option as local sources of decently-priced X230's seem to have evaporated due to the pandemic.

[dr_st]

If your X220 is the i7 kind (with USB 3.0), and you run older pre-Win10 versions on it, I guess the upgrade is not really meaningful. In other cases - it may still be meaningful enough.