Thinkpads Forum

Hello

Well I just finished testing if my W510 which was born with a quad core CPU, would accept a dual core i7 620m.

And it did not work, the system refuses to even start, I just get a blink from the thinklight and power LED.
I tried putting the memory sticks in to different sockets, it made no difference, I tried without memory at all, and it exhibited the same behavior.

It does not work, don't try it, it's a waste of time, maybe a BIOS mod is required.

Might be obvious and a shot in the dark but have you pulled the CMOS battery for a few minutes and then attempted another power-on?

Nope, but once I put the old CPU back, everything behaved normally again.
I have never experienced the behavior I got with the dual core CPU before, so I blame the CPU/BIOS, maybe mobo infrastructure, who knows.

My understanding - which might be incorrect - goes along these lines:

The 1st generation QC i7 CPUs require a dedicated GPU which is supplied on your W510 by some version of nVidia chip, usually FX880M.

However, the i5 from the same era already sports an Intel GPU "on the die" and I believe that's where the conflict is coming from. BIOS is not liking what it's seeing, and the machine refuses to boot.

Yes, that makes sense, I think it might be possible to fix it with a BIOS mod, but it could be that the W510 mobo for quad core, needs physical changes to accept a CPU with integrated graphics.
The W510 version with dual core CPU's use a different mobo, with only two memory sockets.