T510 aftermarket CPU upgrade?

Hello,

I'll purchase a T510 shortly but am not sure about which configuration. There's a good deal for about 1011 Euro (i5-520M, 2GB RAM, w/o OS), and a more complete package for 1370 Euro (i7-620M, 4GB, Win7 64bit). Btw educational models only come pre-configured in Germany.

I'd like to spend less, since I can get Windows from my university, but how much slower is the i5? Is the CPU something that I can upgrade later by myself? Does it make sense at all to plan this?

Thanks in advance!

 

It depends on your uses - if you constantly stress your CPU at max load for certain purposes (ie: video encoding), then the slightly-faster i7-620M may be worth it. But overall, in normal use, you will not be able to tell the difference between the i5-520M and the i7-620M.

Also note that a CPU upgrade will void your warranty, but as there are no "warranty void if removed" stickers in Thinkpads, theoretically you could just replace your upgraded CPU with the original one if your T510 ever does need to be sent in for service.

 

as long as you don't wipe off the dotted thermal paste pattern on the cpu heatsink, then they may not able to tell that you have removed the CPU before.

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

ThinkPad CPUs are bar-coded, which is how they can tell if you've swapped it. I don't think the paste matters much one way or the other. I'll say what I always say, upgrading the CPU is almost never worth the time/effort. A SSD if you can live with the smaller storage, is most likely a better upgrade.

 

I think you should just stick with the i5, the proformance is very similar especially when you taken into consideration turbo boost.

 

But they would know whether you removed the heatsink or not. One of my friend nearly got his warranty voided around 2 months ago, because they tried to refuse him warranty when he reapplied the thermal paste.

After a long phone discussion with the Customer Satisfaction team from IBM, he was able to convince them that they should not void the warranty on the system.

 

There have been some good replies on this thread. Yes, the i7-620 will be a bit quicker than an i5-520, but in most day to day tasks you'll never notice the difference. Also, the i7 uses more power and will drain your battery quicker and produce more heat than the i5.

I agree with the sentiment that an SSD will give you significantly faster day to day computing, since the HDD is generally the bottleneck for most tasks (not all, of course).

 

Thanks everybody.

I think I'm gonna take your advice and go with the i5 deal. I don't want the 9-cell in the i7-package to stick out of the machine anyway. With the "saving" I could even actually get that SSD everyone is talking about

Which one do you recommend? Intel X25-M G2 Postville seems to be very popular. Does it work well in a T510?

 

for an OS/Programs disk, you can do no better than the intel g2

 

Intel x25-M G2 one the best, if you haven't read any review of yet, here is a good review on it

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3607