D830 Owner's Lounge

I just pretty much did the same thing. I had a bunch of D830 spare parts and one broken unit over the holidays and assembled a working laptop from them. This one has the Intel graphics chip and a 2.4 GHz T7700, running Windows 7 Home Premium on a 500GB Momentus XT with 3GB of RAM. Everything's working very well, and I still have a spare working screen and a few other parts, including a board with the Quadro that will output to an external monitor but not the screen.

For those who have tried it or who have a D830 that came with one, is it worth the money to move up from a T7700 to one of the Penryn chips? The X9000's still seem to sell for $140 or more even used, but the T9500 is half of that and the T9300 can be had for about $40 these days. I gave my old lappy away to a friend at Christmas, so I'll be using this D830 for a while. (I understand that the x7900 is compatible but runs way too hot for what it is, correct me if I'm wrong on that one.)

 

Hi, just found this thread. Have been a user of the D830 for ages. Current configuration is T9300 with Intel graphics on 1920x1200 screen. 4GB ram, was running 2x4gb for a while but dodgy ram made system unstable now to expensive to buy. 96GB Kingston ssd with Crunchbang Linux OS. Can swap out drive for 60GB Corsair with win 7. Got docking station off Ebay £12, can't go wrong. I use 3 network in UK for mobile as I think this has better coverage than other networks and sims are cheaper on Ebay.

 

I also have a D830 with the 256MB Nvidia chip, 1920x1280 LCD, 500GB 7200RPM HD, 4GB DDR2 800.

Very nice laptop. I dial down the resolution a bit as it's too much for my eyes. But still a very nice machine.

 

You will love it even more if you replace the 1920x1200 lcd which is fairly dull by an lg xk309 1680x1050 panel. It is more vibrant and has a lower resolution which may be more appropriate for your eyes.


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I could do that. But I won't.

I am going to sell it and my other laptops. I've really fallen in love with my D630. I have a few upgrades planned for it. Maybe get an E6510 or not. But the laptops with 15" LCD's are nice but too heavy to carry around all day. I do IT for a number of organizations which means packing and unpacking my laptop many times per day. Also room can be cramped in some of the server rooms I am in. So the 14" widescreen machines have a lot of appeal to me. The D630 I am using now is a wonderful machine that I actually enjoy using very much. It's been a pain to transfer all my info from the other machines onto this one, but worth it. Now the other machines have blank HD's and will be thrown up on e-bay when I get some free time.

I do know someone who wants to buy the D830 from me, so I know it will be going to a good home with someone who will love it. They owned one before and have told me it was the best computer they ever used. I can totally understand that, I feel the same way about my D630.

 

Just installed an MC7700 broadband card for AT&T 4G lte and it works great even with GPS. I believe I equipped my m4300 (=d830) to the max: 160gb ssd, fingerprint, 4g wwan, 8 GB ram, Blu Ray combo drive, 1680x1050 lg xk309 screen (the best one for this generation I believe). Dual boot win7 mac os x) .Anything I missed?

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It sounds good to me.

 

I'm surprised this thread is still pretty active. If any body can please help, I recently bought this d830 that I'm typing this on right now. I actually got a really good deal for it with the 1200 resolution screen and I put in a Intel SSD G2 I had laying around. I also took the heat sink off to replace the the thermal paste, and was wondering if my temperatures seem normal or at least safe. During idle my T8300 is around 45C, 140M hovers around 60c, Under load the CPU never max out more than 65c and I haven't been able to get the 140M higher than 82c. The screenshot below is after watching full screen HD videos on youtube for about an hour.

 

Those temps are pretty good, though low temps are no guarantee that the NVS140M won't crap out in the future anyway.

 

An active D830 thread, nice! After killing my D830's HDD at the end of 2012, and then making the situation worse after disassembling the motherboard without any knowledge, I used the spare parts from my old laptop to repair several Ebay D830s and resell them. I ended up building one for me after upgrading to an SSD, Windows 7, and a mild overclock, and I was able to sell 2 others, breaking even in the process. My good-as-new D830's specs:

T9500 CPU (OC'd to 2.8 GHz using throttle stop)
4 GB PC2-5300S RAM - I've read the new BIOS will support 8GB, but the old 4GB RAM sticks are prohibitively expensive for a secondary laptop
Nvidia GVS 140M (OC'd to GPU 485/Memory 480/ Shader 980 - anything above this in memory was buggy - using Nvidia inspector)
1920x1200 WUXGA screen - love the extra screen space
Intel wireless, DVD RW, Docking station,
Windows 7 Ultimate
OCZ Vertex 4 120GB SSD (small, but fine for the spare). Love the speed.

I bought an Alienware M17X R4 when I started goofing around with upgrading this machine. I've relegated it to web-surfing, video watching, and travel duties. The Alienware does all the heavy-lifting (video editing, gaming, etc...). The D830 got the job done, back in the day, and I'm happy to have a spare computer. So, the limited SSD space, and the 4 GB RAM are plenty for the light duties. Now, it boots incredibly fast, and is a joy to use.

Windows Experience index scores

..............................Old New
Processor................5.4...6.4
Memory (RAM)........5.0...6.4
Graphics..................3.4...3.5
Gaming Grapics.......4.4...5.4
Primary Hard Disk.....5.9...7.6 (saw as high as 7.8, but couldn't figure out why it jumped up or back down.)

Also, managed a 1943 score on 3dMark06, and a 2748 in GeekBench 3.