Thinkpads Forum

Hello everyone,

I have very theoretical question:

Would it be possibile to input processor from X61s (L7500) into X300

Thanks for your opinions.

Regards,

the L7100 in the X300 is in a thinner format and has a smaller footprint than any other L-series ULV C2D processor.   afaik, the only processor that might work is the 1.6GHz from the macbook air.   besides needing professional soldering skills to remove/replace the CPU, you'd need both a thinner and more efficient heatsink and modified BIOS to make it all work.

if you need more horsepower than the X300 provides then it simply isn't the machine to get.   suffice to say, i'm using mine with photoshop and illustrator and have no major complaints except when dealing with large files or heavy design processes.   it's running server 2008 EE x86 with 4GB.

unless someone told me it was a 1.2GHz ridiculously-low-voltage processor, i probably wouldn't notice it right away.

I was doing some video editing yesterday and was actually very surprised how well it went. it's not the same as my workstation of course, but for such a small computer and given the processor it has and no discrete graphics - better than expected.

img]http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/33446.jpg[/img]

Well as far as i know the x300 uses the same CPU (albeit slower version) as the Macbook Air. It was specially designed for the MBA to fit in confined spaces of those super thing laptops.

While i'm not sure if the above CPU is from the desktop or mobile version, the MBA CPU is tons (60%) smaller and therefore still wouldn't fit.

The MBA and X300 use the same form factor. The smaller size wasn't a special design for either the MBA or X300, but it was originally scheduled to be released mid-2008 with the Montevina chipset.


http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08 ... olved.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/len ... 917-2.html

erik wrote:  it's running server 2008 EE x86 with 4GB.

I wonder if you would be so kind as to comment on how 2008 server is running on your X300.

In particular:

-What exact version
-How is battery life & compared to XP if you know
-Boot time
-Utilities and thinkpad keys - wifi, brighness, volume, thinkvantage etc.

-General pros/cons XP vs Vista vs Server 2008

I have XP and am considering switching to Server 2008. Battery life and speed are the main reasons I am not using Vista.

jflamm,

since this is a bit off-topic, i might split this question into a new thread depending on how in-depth the discussion gets.

i'm using 2008 enterprise edition 32-bit (hence the 2008 EE x86 abbreviation above).   32-bit server 2008 has been tested to run faster on average than 64-bit, plus it's more compatible with applications and supports up to 32GB system memory.

battery life is about 5 hours on the 3-cell main + 3-cell bay battery during normal use with wifi turned on, a few light apps open (browser, ms office, etc.), and the display at 3-4 clicks from maximum.   i've never used XP on the X300 to know how it compares.

cold boot time is about one minute to reach a working desktop.   server boots slower because it starts/loads services with heavier rights/permissions checks.   shutdown only takes about 6 seconds on average after some tweaks.

all of the thinkvantage apps/utilities work just like they would under vista.   2008 and vista + SP1 share the same kernel so the apps usually can't tell the difference.   driver installers can be a pain but i found that thinkvantage system update is compatible with 2008 enterprise 32-bit.   i had to manually install drivers for bluetooth and WUSB but all of the radio indicators work as advertised along with all of the on-screen indicators.

the pro of 2008 is that it's rock-solid.   i haven't had any major issues with it and it runs extremely fast.   every once in a while i'll get a minor failure of something like acrobat's tray app, the display driver, or something insignificant.   it's mostly because these aren't made to work in a server environment.   one pro of 32-bit is that it takes up about 4GB less driver space than 64-bit.

the negatives are that there are still some apps/drivers which won't install under 2008 no matter what you do.   sleep is an issue and on a fresh boot it will immediately wake back up from going into standby because a server isn't meant to sleep.   the second time you invoke sleep it will finally stay in standby mode.   hibernation, the one time i tried it, caused a major crash.   these are major nuisances, especially when traveling.

i made quite a few comments about 2008 on my X300 in this thread: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=59154

hope that helps answer some of your questions.

jamess wrote:I was doing some video editing yesterday and was actually very surprised how well it went. it's not the same as my workstation of course, but for such a small computer and given the processor it has and no discrete graphics - better than expected.

I agree. In my opinion, concerns about a "weak" CPU in the X300 are misplaced. I've been running MATLAB computation on the X300 and it's doing very well. I re-ran some dual threaded wPrime32M benchmarks and got 68 secs on the X300 (it was previously 94, dual threaded as far as I remember, and I've no idea why it dropped---Vista SP1, Bios 1.03b?) as against 38 secs on my workstation with a T7400 2.18GHz core 2 duo. So it seems like in floating point operations the X300 low voltage core 2 duo perform pretty much like a regular core 2 duo with a 1.2 GHz frequency, which is still pretty fast.

If there is a bottleneck in the X300, it's the integrated graphics. I found that upgrading from 2Gb to 4Gb of ram had a significant effect on graphics scores (though not on CPU performance) e.g. the 3dMark06 benchmark went from about 420 to 540 and the WPI graphics index went from 3.0 to 3.5. I suppose this is because of the shared system memory used by the X3100 (though I would've thought 2Gb of Ram, even running Vista, was enough to provide that).

And, also a bit off-topic here, I'm still a bit confused by how the memory limitations work in 32bit Vista. If the OS can access a maximum of 4Gb and the X3100 graphics uses up to 384Mb of shared memory, then I assume that the graphics is using part of the installed RAM, which seems good. On the other hand, Vista says it only recognizes 3Gb of total physical memory. Does this mean that, with the shared graphics, it's actually using 3.384Gb or is it 3Gb? And shouldn't even a 32bit system be able to recognize up to about 3.5Gb of physical memory after accounting for whatever other memory addresses it has to use.

erik wrote:
hope that helps answer some of your questions.

Thanks! You saved me a lot of time in experimenting with this - as I probably would not be happy with the suspend which I use quite a lot. Seems like you are getting very good battery life though!