D830 Owner's Lounge

Maybe.. Anyway I got 4GB of RAM and the thing is defiantly snappier! I'm ordering an Intel 5300 soon, just waiting to sell some litecoins.
The browsing on the laptop sucks with the stock wifi card

 

My over 6-year-old D830 with the Quadro 140M video accelerator finally gave up tonight. I was using it with mythtv, to watch TV, running Ubuntu. Outputted to an external 24" display (Dell U2410) through a PR01X dock, or alternatively, to a 42" LG TV.

Ironically I was just 2 minutes into an episode of "Big Bang Theory" when it just up and died. Efforts to restart were met with extreme video corruption (even in the BIOS screens).

Based on the hour and cycle counts on the hard drives (and later, SSDs used), the laptop had around 10,000 power cycles, and around 25,000 hours on it. Outliving 3 HDDs (and 1 SSD), 2 Dell 90W PSU's, 4 85Wh batteries, and 1 Dell external LCD that was explicitly bought as an external screen for it (2408WFP).

Not sure what I'm going to do now. I don't really need a laptop for its primary application. Might pick up one of those rumoured $139 Intel Bay Trail NUCs, throw the laptop's SSD in it, and use that instead.

 

I,m surprised there is still a active thread for the D830. Just bought mine Yesterday for $100. Works Great. My system specs are:

D830 T7500 4g ram, Samsung 120G 7200 HD, Nvidia Quadro 140M, WUXGA Monitor, Win 7 Ultimate, Intel 3965 abg, 9 cell bat, 8x Dvd RW.
I plan on doing a few upgrades in the next couple weeks.
A M500 240G SSD, Intel 9300N wireless, 8Gigs Ram and upgrading the CPU it a T9500 Processor. The Processor upgrade(From Merom to Penryn core) is the only upgrade I am not sure will work. I know it fits but will the Bios utilize the benefits up the newer cpu. If it does I get the benefit of longer battery life and the Laptop will run cooler,
Is there any other ugrades anyone can recommend?

 

The D830 will *work* with all Penryn CPUs with 800MHz FSB. For the most part you get all the performance benefits, but I haven't found the power savings to be much. I don't know if there are other Penryn features that the BIOS can't utilize, but if they are I assume they are minor.

 

WellI just finished upgrading with the T9500 Processor, 8 Gigs of Ram, USB 3.0 pci-e card and a corsair M500 SSD. Everything is working great. The one thing I would recommend to everyone is to change the OE thermal paste to a high quality one. I use Coollaboratory Liquid MetalPad and saw the GPU temp drop 6c. Overall I am very happy with the D830.

 

I'm still using my D830 coming up on 6 years as well. Just today put in a new motherboard as the last one which I have had to apply physical pressure to (via pushing down firmly on the keyboard) in order to POST met its end when I tried to reflow the GPU with a heat gun after narrowing it down as the issue. Anyway, $25 later and I'm mostly back in business; hoping I'll get another 6 months out of it.

Also, how much extra battery life can be had from a media bay battery?

 

The media bay battery is good for like 30WHr at full capacity, so it'll add 50% of what you get on a 6-Cell and 33% of what you get on a 9-Cell.

 

What NVS 140M temp should I expect at idle? I feel like my system fan is turning on more since I replaced my motherboard and I'm wondering if it is just because I didn't pay attention to it before or if my pasting job was questionable.

 

Something like 50C to 60C at ~21C ambient? Assuming you're using the stock thermal pads and whatnot.

 

Been a while since I've been on this forum, surprised my account still worked! Last posts I made were in 2007 regarding an Acer Aspire 3690 I was repairing for a friend.

I just pieced together a D830 out of eBay/Amazon parts over Christmas.

Specs:
Intel C2D T7500 @ 2.2 GHz, undervolted to 1.075V
4 GB Kingston PC2-6400 DDR2
160 GB hard drive, partitioned into 2 80 GB partitions
Nvidia Quadro NVS 140M
Dual-boots between Windows 7 64-bit and OpenSUSE 13.1 64-bit

It runs pretty good for what it is, but that 140M runs a bit hotter than I am comfortable with. It runs 63-65 C during browsing sessions. I'm tempted to try the copper shim mod I've been reading about, but I can't find out what size shim I need. I'd like to avoid taking everything apart until I'm ready to put in the shim because it is a bit of a pain to do so. Any ideas?

Casey