X300 and mini PCI-E Broadcom HD decoder

Reading some of the reviews of the Atom+Broadcom decoder got me thinking this could also be used in the X300. The 1.2 GHz CPU is unfortunately not enough for 1080p decoding. Decoding 720p makes the CPU so hot the fan has to run very fast and loud.

It seems that the X300 is designed to also support a WAN adapter. If the computer isn't equipped with one, does this mean it has a spare PCI-E slot?

On Ebay the Broadcom decoders are selling for about £15-£20. I wouldn't mind paying that to make it possible to decode 1080p, stop the obnoxious fan and at the same time increase battery life when watching movies.

 

it won't work, since the Lenovo bios whitelist would mean that the broadcom decoder would be useless in the miniPCI slot.

 

I think they make those 34mm express card configuration.

 

Thanks for the information, although it's quite unfortunate to hear
Can the 1802 fix be used to allow this card to be used?

Unfortunately the X300 doesn't have an ExpressCard expansion port.

 

Does it have a 54mm pci slot?

 

I think it has the smaller Mini-PCIe slot inside

 

If Lenovo's whitelisting doesn't halt the boot process, but just disables the port, can try the mPCIe whitelisting workaround. Process can be integrated into XP/W7 bootloader using grub4dos' grldr booting the disk image as explained here so would add another 0.2s to the bootup time. Requires some skill, but entirely possible.

If Lenovo halt the boot process with some error "unsupported wifi card detected", then not feasible without actually bios hacking OR some other crazy workaround like trying to put some PCI reset delay switch running off the mPCIe socket pins so that card isn't seen by bios on bootup.

 

One other thing about Broadcom is it's not very friendly with Linux. If the brand is still on the Whitelist then I'm not sure many people would want to go through a BIOS hack to get it up and running. My Thinkpad experience with Broadcom is that when a miniPCI was insterted the laptop refused to work. Once I removed the miniPCI it let me load into BIOS or straight to my OS.' Many people would like things simply to work out of the box.