Cheapest quad-core upgrade without having to buy an ES chip.

For those of you interested in upgrading your T420/T420S/T520/W520 without having to break the bank and buy a Core i7-2720QM at retail for $400, some retailers are selling the 2630QM for just $260!

And yes, that is an OEM chip. It is clocked 200 MHz slower than the 2720QM, doesn't have VT-d, vPro, or TXT, but has everything else that the 2720QM has.

You can see the chip here, being sold by Superbiiz.

I am hesitant to buy ES chips because the possibility of getting a lemon is high, but I didn't want to pay $400 for a quad-core chip, either. $260 is a steal, at any rate.

 

I thought the T420/T420s were soldered on the mobo

 

The T420s has it soldered, not the T420.

 

They are not. Only the X is.

 

So you lose battery life, most of the virtualization features and gain a couple of cores. Doesn't seem like much of a win unless you're absolutely certain the software you use regularly can actually benefit from the cores. I'm all for 'more is better' but in a laptop there's more to be considered than just a hamstrung processor.

 

Well I'll have to pull open my T420s and check then... I'd pick up a 2720QM for sure if it would work. Loved that processor on my W520.

 

Can a 14 inch, especially the "thin" T420s, handle the thermal output of a 2720QM? Seems unlikely...

 

I think you might want to disable TurboBoost just in case.

 

I have the i7-2720QM in my T420 as an experiment and to be honest the standard T420 model really does have a hard time cooling down the Quad Core during stress let alone being inside the T420s. I did summarise my experience in the T420 thread:

It's probably only worth having a Quad Core if you got 15"+ models such as the T520/W520 as their thermal engineering are designed to cope with such processor while the 14" notebooks are not really optimised for this setup in the first place.

 

the CPU on the T420s are soldered, due to thinness of the machine.

If you are already spending 260 dollars, the extra 140 dollars wouldn't be that much of an investment for peace of mind. If money is that much of an issue, then why not just stick to the CPU that ships with your system.