Thinkpads Forum

I have a W500 which appears to have a malfunctioning motherboard (see http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=116324 for description of the problem). I am considering a T500 motherboard as a replacement.

I have read in various places (including the maintenance manual) that these are very similar if not identical in shape, the only difference being that the W500 has a different version of the GPU - FireGL V5700 vs the T500's Radeon HD 3650. Since they share the same maintenance manual, I suspect they are interchangeable, but I have not found any source confirming this. My reasons for doing this is that I have no need for the extra features of the W500 motherboard (I only plan to use the Intel GMA 4500MHD), and T500 motherboards appear a lot cheaper on Ebay. (If there is a better source for parts, or if anyone has any, please let me know - I'm new at this.)

Ultimately, my question is: are the motherboards for the T500 and the W500 interchangeable?

The same service manual covers both models. Every specification is identical between them, except for the firmware in the AMD chip, and the amount of ram on the chip. Even the BIOS is identical for both.

They are probably mechanically identical.

^ yep.

Should be a straight swap. Only problem is you'll have a W500 that thinks it's a T500, and you'll have a Radeon HD 3650 instead of the V5700. (Not really different.)

Specs/hardware wise, everything else is exactly the same.

The FireGL v5700 is basically a Radeon HD3650 with more ram and better firmware. Device manager will detect it as an hd3650. If you're doing a lot of CAD or 3D graphics work using openGL the V5700 is a better choice as it has embedded openGL, but the GPU chip itself seems to be identical. The boards are a direct replacement.

You also have the option of the primary Intel HD 4500 graphics on the T500 which is secondary (switchable) on both ATI boards.

Personally I prefer the graphic systems on the T61 series, it was unfortunate they kept producing them for nearly a year knowing they had problems then stopped production just as the problem was fixed and reverted back to ATI gpu chips. The ATI chips have horrible driver support and are abandoned after a couple years as obsolete, but nVidia is still developing driver updates for their chips from this era. I also prefer the X3100 intel graphics over the hd 4500 intel because the latter seems to have compatibility issues. I believe Intel was more concerned with making things smaller and not as concerned with performance as they were moving their integrated gpu chips onto the CPU. This of course is better for things like sub notebooks, palmtops and smaller devices, but on larger laptops it makes no sense to jam the cpu and gpu onto the same chip.

I have all three versions of the 500 series as well as the 61 series and it's my opinion that the 500 series wasn't an upgrade, it was more of a step sideways, better in a couple areas, worse in others.