Created frankenpad: T42 with ATI 9600 in R52 chassis.

[thinkpadcollection]

Worked great, This is one of rarest moment when IBM/Lenovo made sense using consumer GPUs rather than business-rated GPUs. Thus I chose T42 with ATI 9600 64MB GPU motherboard. Too bad that was no SVGA 15" with x600 instead of lousy x300. (Dell is easier to get; just get D810 with x600, or 17" with 7800 GTX with pentium m.
But I wanted 4:3 or 5:4 LCD computer.

Specs is fully upgraded configuration:

Stock R52 chassis SVGA LCD, long heatsink, had to bid on a R52 notebook to get long heatsink and decided to use it instead of R51 for creating a frankenpad.
T42 motherboard P-M 2.0 (had it on hand), 2GB micron DDR400, 100GB Hitachi 7200rpm. All the standard of R52 is reused except wireless is left out.

This concept is for old software games and other items.

R51 is kept intact for now, motherboard is integrated GPU.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[kfzhu1229]

Instead of getting a 9600 you can get a FireGL in the p models, and idk about 9600, but my x300 from T43 seemed to struggle with UXGA display of mine with laggy animations, but unfortunately, T42 won't run any OS starting from Windows 8 consumer preview. Also isn't it impossible for you to get a SVGA display (800x600) for any T series? They only come with XGA (14.1", 15"), SXGA+ (14.1", 15"), UXGA (15"), and QXGA (15", very rare).

[brchan]

If you want to run a lower resolution than the native resolution on a display without losing sharpness, you can disable display scaling. Instead of stretching out the pixels, only the specified amount of pixels will be displayed. The tradeoff is that you will end up with black borders at the edges of the display and the image will be smaller. I doubt the old drivers in Windows will have this feature, but this is supported by xrandr in Linux for some years now.

[kfzhu1229]

You don't even need to go for drivers, there is an option in BIOS called screen expansion. But who uses SVGA by any chance... My UXGA display on my T43 can fit 4 SVGAs

[thinkpadcollection]

FireGL T2 is 9600. Which is a amazingly perfect vs for vs that I rarely see anywhere.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[TPFanatic]

Apparently the ATI Mobility FireGL V3200 from T43p is the X600. In Z60m at least, the X600 comes with 128mb vram versus 64mb X300 and 64mb 9600.

Whether X600/V3200 is better than 9600/T2, that I don't know.

I did a lot of low settings gaming and 3D designing on a T42p FireGL T2 as a FireGL T2, since 9600 is the same I'd agree you've got good stuff.

[kfzhu1229]

I don't actually know how the FireGL V3200 with UXGA IPS stacks up against x300 XGA in terms of fluidity though. But X300 lags a lot in UXGA with Win7 and Win10 than in XGA it is almost perfectly smooth if not butter smooth.

[brchan]

X300 will lag under SXGA+ if power mode is not set to performance. Even then, some pdf or web pages will scroll poorly so the only real solution is to overclock the gpu. This made the system much smoother for me. Just make sure that you have proper thermal paste applied and a clean fan, and temps won't really be a problem.

[dr_st]

Whether X600/V3200 is better than 9600/T2, that I don't know.

A little bit. 9600 is roughly on par with the X300. X600 is a bit better (it's basically the same GPU as X300 but with higher clocks and more RAM, AFAIK).

[thinkpadcollection]

x1400 replaces x600 which is kind of lame since there is no next gen directx support, it is still 9c for those, x1400, x1300 and x600, x300 and 9600 are 9c. Also x1600, x1700 as well. What a shame really. But yet nice to play old stuff on faster GPU like x1400, V5200 (modded to x1600), V5250 as modded x1700 drivers. I have yet to find concrete info and downloads to get these modded drivers for those V5200/V5250. But nice thing is C2D vs Pentium M and twice as fast.

Reason for this had T60 rebuilt with replacement x1400 board then it has bad ethernet port which I found out later. That was to replace dead x1300. I purchased yet another board which turned out to be T60 w/ x1300 board thinking was T60p due to his seller's photo ditto with correct T60p heatsink but wrong heatsink too. >:(

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[kfzhu1229]

X300 will lag under SXGA+ if power mode is not set to performance. Even then, some pdf or web pages will scroll poorly so the only real solution is to overclock the gpu. This made the system much smoother for me. Just make sure that you have proper thermal paste applied and a clean fan, and temps won't really be a problem.

What do you mean by thermal pasting the GPU? Remove its rubber pad and replace it with Arctic Silver V?

[brchan]

What do you mean by thermal pasting the GPU? Remove its rubber pad and replace it with Arctic Silver V?

Out of curiosity, I took the gpu thermal pad off and applied a thin layer of thermal paste directly to the gpu. To my surprise, the heatsink easily made 90% contact without even pressing much ontop of it. Only the right outer edge wasn't touching. Next, I took the thermal pad and placed it directly on top of the gpu part of the heatsink. This would apply preassure and help eliminate any air gaps once the keyboard was screwed back in.

The result was a 10 - 12C decrease in temps and no more overheating. I was using the 26R9074 long fan.

[kfzhu1229]

Thanks I will try that since my T43 ATI Radeon x300 heats up to 60 degrees in idle due to its UXGA display

[kfzhu1229]

Well this trick made the CPU temp and GPU temp very close which means it is harder to warm up and it is harder to cool down. I reapplied the thermal paste on the CPU as well because the CPU goes to 50 degrees in idle. I used Arctic Silver 5 for both of them and the fan finally blow out large amounts of hot air...

[brchan]

For comparison, what are your load temps? My 2ghz PM 760 will max out at ~87C with 100% cpu load and a decently overclocked X300. Before this mod, it would easily hit 95+. Also, my system seems to cool pretty quickly once returning to idle, so I am not seeing that symptom.

After the break in period of AS5 (I used Tuniq TX4), temps will be even lower.

[kfzhu1229]

The system I am dealing with right now is a ThinkPad T43 2668 with following upgrades:
Fully upgraded Intel Pentium M 780 processor @ 2.26ghz
Fully upgraded 2GB DDR2
Fully upgraded Hitachi 160gb IDE HDD (The largest you can get without bios mod or err 2010)
Fully upgraded UXGA display
Heatsink & compound replaced with Arctic Silver 5 (The original heatsink was loud)
Fully upgraded Windows 10 10586
in Idle, it gets around 45-55 degrees
under full load, it gets 90+ so I have to use fan 64 mode in TPFanControl which brings it down to 86
It takes around 5-7 minutes to get back to around 60 degrees right after full load
My test for full load is Full HD video playback, very simple and effective
This is much hotter than my T42 which stays around 35-55 degrees most of the time
My A30 goes up to 67 degrees under full load if you use fan 7

[brchan]

Taking 5-6 minutes to return to normal temps is strange, but at least its cooler than it was before?

W10 did run a bit hotter than arch linux + icewm on my T61 when I tested it out, so if minimum temps are a top priority, switching over would be necessary.

[kfzhu1229]

Well X300 with UXGA may take the blame.
It takes around 10 seconds to go down by one degree.
GPU was cooler than before though.
Good thing is that I did not buy the 2048x1536 panel or else X300 would burn itself to death (with 1600x1200 it is pretty struggling)

[thinkpadcollection]

Solved the "tight cardbus condition"; it was non-firewire keyboard/palmrest bezel. T42 came with firewire & R52 chassis is firewire, I swapped for non-firewire dual cardbus cage which is the problem and everything house moved to R51 chassis because had cracked R52 battery compartment next to power connector.

Solution is non-firewire palmrest or keep T42's cardbus cage with T42 motherboard if R51 has firewire originally. Cannot move the firewire bracket due to spot welded together. The firewire bracket has a metal screw spacer or longer piece on palmrest for non-firewire models.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection.

[kfzhu1229]

Where is the firewire you are talking about on T42?

[ajkula66]

Where is the firewire you are talking about on T42?

There isn't one. None of the T4x series had it, while some of the R5x units did.

[kfzhu1229]

You can just chop the firewire piece out. Nobody uses firewire now. It is long obselete

[thinkpadcollection]

You can just chop the firewire piece out. Nobody uses firewire now. It is long obselete

Would not do that. Need the metal bracket with screw spacer if the chassis was equipped with firewire or find a way to break the spot welds.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection