My Frankenpad experience.

[Banshee365]

I've been active the past several weeks on this forum starting with my 14.1" 4:3 T61p failing (case not electronics.) I purchased a 15" 4:3 T60p off eBay for a great price with the Hydis UXGA IPS screen. I loved the feel, build quality, and screen of the machine. I found that my T60p ran pretty hot and a lot louder than my T61p with nVidia graphics. The GPU on the T60p ran in the 80's all the time while watching any video or doing video chat. Heat problems with the T60p's GPU are well documented on this board. My machine arrived with a broken roll cage. The seller is sending me a good roll cage out of his inventory. While mine was broke I decided that I may as well go ahead and cut out the modem card attach point and trim the other screw post to allow my T61p board to fit. When the new roll cage arrives I'll store my original T60p parts in it in case the nVidia graphics on this T61p board decide to die like many before it has. I JB Welded the break in the roll cage between the VGA port and fan. I let it sit overnight and it seems pretty solid so far. I wanted to be able to put this machine totally back to stock if I wanted to. I just fired it up and I'm typing on it while monitoring temps right now:

1.) I had all of the parts from my T61p so I always had 2 options on parts to use. This came in handy for the PC Card bay as they are different.

2.) I reused the wireless card from the T60p for now. Works fine. May update to the atheros card later.

3.) I read of someone having issues with the palm rest not having a perfect fit afterwards. I don't see how this could be caused by Frankpading your machine. I didn't have them problem. Ensure that the grooves where the keyboard slide in under the screen do not have wires in them. This will cause the keyboard to not fit properly and therefore the palm rest will not fit right.

4.) I reused the hold down clip for the heatsink from the T60p with my discrete graphics heatsink from the T61p. The 2 clips from the T61p will NOT work. Not even close, screw locations aren't there. One concern of mine is that the roll cage at the right side of the clip flexes up with the clip screwed down because the motherboard lacks the hole for that part of the frame to screw down through the motherboard. It doesn't hold as tight as it would if the frame didn't flex. This should only effect the pressure on the GPU side of the heatsink. Right now I'm just typing on here and TPFanControl say's the GPU is running at 47* with the fan set manually at 2 (2600 rpm.)

5.) I installed the HDD from my trashed T61p and fired it up for the first time a few minutes ago. It started right up with no problems and booted straight into 1600x1200 on the IPS screen. It looks GREAT! It had to search for the wireless card but that didn't take long. This is all on Windows 7.


This isn't very hard to do and if I didn't have to let the JB Weld dry I would have completed the entire process in only an hour or 2 and that is going slow and taking my time. The motherboard is missing one screw that doesn't line up with the T60 frame but I do not feel that this effects anything as there are many other screws keeping things in place.

[Banshee365]

I just ran the video card stability test from: http://freestone-group.com/video-card-s ... y-test.htm and it ran it at 90 fps. I'm not sure if the resolution of the screen effect it at all. The results page from the creator of the app shows the FX570m should run it at 120 or so. The T60p ran it in the low 70's. I set the power manager to max performance and TPFC to level 7 fan speed. The GPU didn't go over 61* on brand new Arctic Silver 5 paste. The T60p hovered around 90* with that test.

[ajkula66]

Thanks for sharing, it's an inspiring post for anyone interested in T6x FrankenPadding...