T430 Quad upgrade observations

[astral]

I recently did the final big upgrade I had planned for my T430 - installing an i7-3840QM. This was an upgrade I had been somewhat hesitant about, mainly because I was worried about thermals and noise. The fan in my T430 was already not super quiet, but it didn't spin up to high RPM very often with the i5-3320M so it didn't bother me much.
I can say after upgrading that I've been pleasantly surprised by the outcome.

I got the CPU in along with the dedicated GPU heatsink upgrade, paired with an iGPU board of course. I'd like to upgrade to PTM 7950 at some point but for now I just used Arctic MX-6.
I also applied a bit of thermal paste BETWEEN the two thinly separated heatpipes to encourage more thermal transfer to the unused GPU heat pipe.

I tested thermals under load with Prime95 running before and after and I'm very happy to say that at most it runs 5 degrees hotter under full load. I ran these tests about a month ago so I don't remember the specifics but it was between 80-85C under full load, I think.
Fan noise has gone up a bit, but isn't bad at all.
Battery life likely took a hit but it wasn't any good to begin with. I have a depleted 9 cell installed at about 59% health. I think I get around 2 hours out of it. If I ever feel like spending the money, I'll get it rebuilt. Not going to chance it will a garbage generic.

That pretty much concludes my T430 upgrades. As it stands now:
i7-3840QM, 16GB RAM, LG 1080p IPS LCD, NMB 7-row keyboard, 1TB SSD, dual boot Windows 7 and Kubuntu.
Really the only possible future upgrades are a newer WiFi card and a rebuilt battery. I can't think of much else I'd like to do, and I'm not planning on anything for a while.
Of course, none of these upgrades make any sense when you can just get a T480 for under $200, but eh, I don't really care. Was fun and makes a laptop in the end that's better in many ways than modern stuff.

I'm just happy the quad upgrade turned out well. People really talk up the thermal issues these can have, so I was expecting worse.