Thinkpads Forum

I have had this laptop for a few months now. I am planning to upgrade the processor. I'm really just looking for a fan/heatsink to combat it's insane heat. Is there even a powerful enough fan, if so will it withstand OC for longer amounts of time. Even 24 hours. Help.

The T520 dedicated heatink has a thicker CPU heatpipe and once modded to fit would be superior to your current heatsink.

If possible to fit, a W-series heatsink would give you two CPU heatpipes. However the W-series heatsinks also have a huge Quadro graphics heatpipe that will do nothing for an integrated T520.

There's also a T530 DGPU heatsink with two CPU heatpipes and a smaller DGPU heatpipe, looking like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-FOR-IBM-Len ... 2144958554

I would advise getting something with two CPU pipes.

Thank You You answered so fast and gave good advice too.

I think for the T530 or W series heatsinks you would need to cut off parts that go for the dedicated graphics, so only proceed if you're comfortable modifying them. Otherwise it may be best to stick with a lower power processor.

Other option is get T530 and get ivy bridge quad with 8MB cache (specifically 45W type) and find T530 3 heatpipes heatsink on ebay and call it a day. Also someone mentioned that GPU width is 128bits instead of T520 64bit wide.

The T520 does not have good heatsink design anyway and does not fit due to mounting locations is slightly different if trying to do with T530 or W520 heatsinks. I did my research on this same topic.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

Good to know the T520 and W520 heatsinks are different. !! Surprising.

Do you know about a W510 heatsink? Its heatpipes are distributed differently than succeeding W series. On W510 they all go left while on W520&W530 they go left and right.