51nb.com released T50 (= new mobo for T4x's) in Shenzhen

[lazycat]

The Big News:

2013/11/30, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, People’s Republic of China, http://www.51nb.com, the most famous and biggest Thinkpad forum in mainland China, announced the 51nb-custom-built T50 mainboard for T4x series Thinkpad on the 12th anniversary of the forum.

The idea of making a customized mainbord supporting the first generation Core i3/i5/i7 series CPU to upgrade the old T4x series was proposed by HOPE, the webmaster of http://www.51nb.com , in early 2012. He then organized a team to design, assemble and test the T50 mainbord. After one and half years’ anxiously waiting, Thinkpad fans are gladly to see their old T4x now can have a second new life.

The boards were manufactured by an OEM factory near Shenzhen, and the quantity of first production batch might be 100-200 pieces. 51nb.com also announced that these boards have already tested OK in headquarters of the website, and delivery could begin in next week to those who need an upgrade of their T4x Thinkpad.

The details of the assembling of T50 can be seen on forum page http://forum.51nb.com/thread-1418147-1-1.html or webpage http://www.51nb.com/viewnews-87854.html and http://www.51nb.com/viewnews-87855.html .

For more information, please check http://www.51nb.com and contact the webmaster HOPE or the forum moderator and engineer aq5200.

See an image of the new board here.

[Johan]

Welcome the the forum, and especially welcome with such good news!

We (= us on this forum) have already heard of this highly interesting project some time ago; see the thread Don't throw away your T4x, The new mobo is coming![Lots PIC] but since the nb51-forum is in the Chinese language this unfortunately mean, that only very few people (here, on this forum!) are able to read and understand what's going on, and what is the status of the project?

Do you have any idea of how to order these boards? How many can be purchased; is one-by-one orders accepted, or do we perhaps need to pool up here on this forum, and try put together a "group order"? Any idea of the cost of the board?

In any case, thanks very much for bringing this VERY good news to us here on forum.thinkpads.com and please (!!) be kind to keep us (who cannot read Chinese!) updated, if you have the time.

PS: The image you had included in your post didn't show up here (using Firefox 25.01), so I turned it into a link - which works OK. Hope you don't mind...

Best regards,

Johan

[lazycat]

Welcome the the forum, and especially welcome with such good news!

Johan

Thanks Johan.

i'll deliver your infomation to the webmaster HOPE and suggest him if he could make an english page about the T50 mainboard on there site. as it's midnight in china and i doubt those guys are all drunk (they had a big celebration for the 12th anniversary last night in shenzhen), maybe there wouldn't be any response until tomorrow afternoon

[Johan]

Wow, truly great and VERY friendly of you to try help us (on this forum), lazycat!

Your help - to try put "us" in contact with some of the central persons in the project team - would certainly be tremendously appreciated. I am completely confident that there is surely also an interesting market for these boards outside China... and this market may probably easier be reached via some English-language site, such as e.g. forum.thinkpads.com

One thing only is a bit sad, however... this: That we "over here" couldn't have been part of the party in Shenzhen last night! I tell you, lazycat, a lot of the T4x/p enthusiasts on this forum, who are following this project, SURELY would no doubt have been happy to buy quite a few rounds to the brave boys on the "T50-team"... they certainly deserve it!!

Thanks, again - and wonderful to have you "on board" over here!

Best regards,

Johan

[lazycat]

Johan,

As I'm not very experienced of post pictures here, please help me to attach these pictures of T50:

The front of the mainboard
The back of the board

The CPU SOCKET
The CD interface and SATA hardisk interface
The BT and DIMM2
The CPU and memory on board
The SD interface
The board on the backplane
The screen attached
Bluetooth moved to the base interface position

The BIOS screen (1)
The BIOS screen (2)

The system information

The finish picture (1)
The finish picture (2)
The finish picture (3)

Moderator edit: Made links to images as requested.

[DRobinson]

wts - large stack of cosmetically perfect t4x machines with bad mainboards. (just kidding)

I can not wait to hear more.

[Johan]

Johan,

As I'm not very experienced of post pictures here, please help me to attach these pictures of T50

lazycat: Perfect, really, to post links as you just did - also since some users (on this forum) are still browsing using slow dial-up modems (which is why there is a 50 kB limit to inline-images; as explained in the forum posting rules These are the RULES of this ROAD - READ ME NOW).

Moreover, to be honest, I don't understand why the inline image in your first post (inserted in your original post as "[imgxx]http://www.51nb.com/batch.download.php?aid=64195[/imgxx]" without the xx's) didn't show up (in Firefox), which I why I took the liberty to convert it into a link.

Anyway, in an attempt to perhaps make reading (of your prior "picture-rich" post) a bit easier, I converted all images to links.

Thanks very much for posting these additional images - and man, it's going to be a very nice Christmas this year for us old T4x/p'ers!

Now to bed with you, too, lazycat - and we are absolutely looking forward to see you here again, soon!

Best regards,

Johan

[RealBlackStuff]

Shoot, all picture links initially gave a 502 Bad Gateway error!
But the news is fabulous!

Edit: after the umpteenth try, finally got pix.

[Cigarguy]

^^ Works for me on Firefox 25.0.1. I think I just drool all over my keyboard. Great news!

[Neil]

Great News! And a big welcome to thinkpads.com to lazycat! Thank you so much for acting as a mediator for us, we have eagerly been anticipating the opportunity to get our hands on one (or more) of these boards for what seems to have been a very long time.

I fear that even if the initial run was 200, they will all be snapped up within China, and we will have to wait for later production run. I was hoping for an initial run of maybe 10X that amount. But please keep us posted on how the project progresses.

[Medessec]

Wow... this is amazing news to hear. I'll have to let my roommate know, he has a UXGA T43p he bought from me nearly 6 months ago.

I guess I'll have to pay attention to what goes on- and see if some of these boards find their way into North American or European hands...

[Frotz]

Some questions:
1) What is supposed to go just southeast of the CPU socket?
2) Since it appears that the bluetooth interface will be right where the docking port is, will some sort of filler panel be provided?
3) Will my existing fan and heatsink fit and work?

[Medessec]

Some questions:
1) What is supposed to go just southeast of the CPU socket?
2) Since it appears that the bluetooth interface will be right where the docking port is, will some sort of filler panel be provided?
3) Will my existing fan and heatsink fit and work?

1) That looks like a solder point for a dedicated graphics chip- you see similar markings on a lot of mainboards for new laptops, especially lower-end ones where dedicated graphics is an option. I'm not sure if they ever will actually release a board with a dedicated graphics chip installed, but it seems they put everything there to support it. If you look above the square solder point for the graphics chip, you'll see 4 smaller similar squares- that's where the chip's VRAM would be soldered.

2) Not completely sure about that... but because of the nature of these boards I doubt they'll supply paneling to make your laptop look neater.

3) Well-seems in all the pictures they have, they're using the original IBM heatsinks. I don't see any reason they wouldn't work-they're of better design than current laptop heatsinks.

[600X]

I have been waiting for this project to be released for quite some time now as well. Really glad to see that the guys over at nb51 were able to pull this off! I'm already on the look out for some nice T40's.

I live in Germany and am very active on thinkpad-forum.de. If anyone decides to do a group order I'm definitely in on it. Does anyone already know how/where to order one of these boards if you live in the western world?

[Brad]

Nothing short of spectacular!

[lophiomys]

If I did get that right, reading on 51nb with Google Translator,
then HOPE wrote, that selling would not start before one week from now.

Anyway I am queuing for those boards as long as it takes.
For a compatible docking connector I would pay extra.

Keep up the good work.

[irus]

awesome news!

will this accept sata 3 ssds?

and where is the link to place orders?

im in for the group order if any is going from here.

[JohnD.]

This is great news! Currently I am getting my T43 fixed with a fan and CPU replacement. I am looking forward to hear more news about purchasing this board! Yahoo! Thank you LazyCat for letting use know what is going on! Also, thank you for the pictures also.

Take care,
John

[Tasurinchi]

Great news indeed! I'd love to have one, is the selling price known? (Sorry, I was a little bit lazy reading all the posts above)

[Norway Pad]

Great! It's hard to do any research on the Chinese page by yourself, so I hope Lazycat here can provide us with some information when and how it's possible to purchase a board. 100-200 boards seems a little low to me, the expressed interest here, and the size of a potential market i China taken into consideration. So I almost expect to need to wait until a second production is done. Maybe that's all for the best, as minor flaws (If any) from a first production can be corrected before a second production.

To put it short: Let me know the order details when they are ready.

Edit: Looking at the pictures in the other thread, they seem to have deleted the HDMI port that was put where the S-video port is. No big deal for me, the absence of a docking port is a bigger deal. But hey, I am not complaining. Access to 8Gb DDR3 RAM and an i7 in my T43 outweighs those details.

[Medessec]

Yeah-I'm hoping that these first boards that they've released are actually "prototypes", or Revision 1 boards. And after some time passes and more interest develops, they'll add more features and expand on the boards.

I doubt they'll ever add a docking interface, but looking at the pictures they seem to have added solder points for VRAM and a separate dedicated graphics chip, and since they've shown pictures of a board with an HDMI port, there's no reason they couldn't add it again. It was probably suffering some problems they couldn't fix at the time... which could have led to them removing it for this production run. Geez... this is all information that they should have on the 51nb forums, we need a guy who can read Chinese proactively relay all of this on this forum.

But all the help from those who are posting-I give my personal thanks. It's great that we have these pictures, and all the information we've received so far.

[lazycat]

Add two more pics:
the s-video port: http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... 31Nzh4.jpg
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... WVPBYe.jpg

as some guys said, it was a HDMI interface at this position in BETA test board, but was canceled at the released version. i think the reason is 51nb noticed that not all the people who want a T50 are competent to modify the frame of the machine. The also modify tha bios to support as many typies of screen as possible, avoiding the modification of the screen signal pins by short circuit pin3 and pin4.--all these changes are to lower the threshould of DIY.
the hole s-video left was simply sealed with a black waterproof paper，also the place where the docking interface is missing:
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... V087Ym.jpg
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... VfOR8D.jpg

[lazycat]

a small corner of the plastic harddisk frame need to be cut off to fit the mainboard:
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... 8uvqay.jpg
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... UrKv0H.jpg
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... N50M88.jpg

[lazycat]

The PCMCIA is replaced by SD reader, but the PCMCIA frame will still stay there to support the structure:

http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... vtbnW6.jpg
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... lz2Q6H.jpg
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... WkDktY.jpg
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... Y0AOsS.jpg

as shown in aq5200's article, the small part of waterspout under the left palm should be removed. i don't understand why...
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... ZuKj29.jpg
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... tqrPbg.jpg

[lophiomys]

It cannot be said often enough:
Thank you very much lazycat

[RMSMajestic]

So glad that someone can help me with translation etc.etc. lazycat what's your 51nb ID?

[RMSMajestic]

one thing maybe worth mentioning is that bluetooth is at where the ultrabase dock port used to be
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... .thumb.jpg

[lazycat]

So glad that someone can help me with translation etc.etc. lazycat what's your 51nb ID?

lazycat@thainkpas.com=gzjzdavid@51nb.com

[Medessec]

the hole s-video left was simply sealed with a black waterproof paper，also the place where the docking interface is missing:
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... V087Ym.jpg
http://forum.51nb.com/attachments/month ... VfOR8D.jpg

Absolutely gotta love that black waterproof paper. That actually does turn out pretty nice.

And I was pretty certain that the loss of the HDMI port to the production run was a business decision... it would be quite nice to have an HDMI port-but we'll see.

The PCMCIA is replaced by SD reader, but the PCMCIA frame will still stay there to support the structure:

I was kinda figuring this would be the case. There's screws integral to the palmrest's structure that go through the holes on the corners of that PCMCIA frame.

And indeed-appreciate your help in relaying the information. And be sure to vouch for us-we'll be more than happy to snatch up a few of those boards. If those guys at 51nb are wondering about customers over here, then just shout up for interest; a whole lot of us would love to try out one of these boards.

[burns334]

All, has anyone heard a price for this Mobo yet?