Thinkpads Forum

Hi, I just bought a T500 on eBay for parts, i’m Planning to repair it and boost its performance to the best, I’m also planning to use Libreboot BIOS, I have a tight budget(as I want to buy a Galaxy S2 for Replicant).

I want to chose which can be the best bang for my buck, buying a Samsung 860 EVO (or any 500GB class SSD with DRAM and Caché) or buying a Q9100 and making the Quad Core mod.

If I buy SSD, I fear not seeing a Q9100 again, and if I buy the processor, I can still get a SSD, but where I live you can only get Kingston A200 and Teamgroup GX1 for double the online price.

Any response is thanked, English is not my native Language, feel free to suggestions(except Mac processors and el-cheapo SSDs)

PS. Keyboard condition is unknown, seller cannot test beyond BIOS, do I have to buy a new keyboard?

Best bang for the buck in terms of things you'll notice, IMHO, is an SSD. The CPU will help with response times when browsing the web/loading graphics and video, but the SSD will help with program load times and cache performance when there are many tabs open in your browser.

If the system booted to BIOS, it's safe to assume the keyboard is functional (you need to be able to use the keyboard to get to BIOS - unless they used an external keyboard to do it). Usually "boots to BIOS" just means they don't have a HDD/OS to test the system with beyond power up/display tests.

theterminator93 wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 16, 2021 11:31 pm

Best bang for the buck in terms of things you'll notice, IMHO, is an SSD. The CPU will help with response times when browsing the web/loading graphics and video, but the SSD will help with program load times and cache performance when there are many tabs open in your browser.

If the system booted to BIOS, it's safe to assume the keyboard is functional (you need to be able to use the keyboard to get to BIOS - unless they used an external keyboard to do it). Usually "boots to BIOS" just means they don't have a HDD/OS to test the system with beyond power up/display tests.

Thanks, that was I suspected, thanks for the fact with "Boots to BIOS" I'm going to buy an SSD, now which, I stand between 860 EVO(everybody says is the best SSD) and Crucial MX500(is what Libreboot developer uses, sells and recommends)

Both are useable disks. Samsung is a better brand and SSD is overall nice. On the other hand T500 can't utilise its full speed due to SATA version so I'm not sure it is actually going to be faster than MX500. I've made a rule for myself to only buy Samsung disks these days. They generally "just work". No experience with MX500.

Have an X220 has a Crucial MX500 1TB, no problems. Dad's X220 has the 500GB version, also no problems.

But if you can afford a Samsung, why not?

A slightly cheaper but still decent option would be WD Blue. Have upgraded some of my clients' laptops with WD Blue 250GB and 500GB SSDs and they seem to run well.

We have both WD Blue and MX500s in computers we've upgraded for clients over the last few years. Probably 100-200 of them installed; no issues so far. So either will be fine.

The SSD upgrade is easy. The quadcore mod takes some work:
1) You need to either modify the CPU socket and isolate a few CPU pins, or break pins off the CPU.
2) Solder a wire between 2 small pads on the back of the CPU socket. It took me a few attempts to get this right.
3) I recommend using the dGPU heatsink. If you're using a non-dGPU motherboard you'll need to desolder and remove the modem plug from the motherboard to get the dGPU heatsink to fit.
4) The official Libreboot builds don't support quadcores yet. I'm helping Leah a little bit with this but I don't have much time to devote to it. The latest testing build will boot, but my machine is stuck at 1.6ghz and speedstep doesn't work. I'm using a custom blobless Coreboot build on my machine and have speedstep working (QX9300).

I used to have a desktop (ATX) motherboard for Pentium M CPUs. I think it was 915GM based, with PCI Express ports, SATA and all. I do remember that I installed a 1.8 or 2.0 GHz version of the CPU, raised the FSB and got like 2.4 GHz out of it. Not sure if it required a small bump in voltage; it was long time ago. I do remember that I had to cut a tiny wire, bend it up and electrically join two adjacent pin holes in the socket. My brother used that machine for years without issues.

Honestly, in retrospective, I think more RAM and specially a SSD would have been more noticeable back then. It was never CPU bottle-necked to begin with. And consider it was a desktop; the small increase in power draw had negligible effects on stability and such. With a laptop, more cores always implies more power consumption, power that must go through the (limited) cooling system. I'd say it's not worth the trouble, but if you're doing it just for fun...