swap ati 3470 with 3650 to use in T400

I have a T400 as shown in my sig.
I was wondering if i can swap the ATI 3470 card I have in here with an ATI 3650 like the one found in the T500. I did a bit of research and found out both are the same size (MXM II 73mm by 78mm) and I can use the driver from the T500.
Will this work?
I know heat will rise and power consumption will go up too but I only use the dedicated graphics card a few times when I am plugged in and i can use a laptop cooler.

I love the size and battery of the T400 for on the go but when I need that extra graphic performance for 3d programs the 3470 doesn't cut it some times.

Can it be done?

 

Repost this at forum.thinkpads.com. People there are more into Thinkpad hardware, than here.

I think the 3650 chip should work fine in T400. Besides, your power consumption and heat generation will not double or anything, maybe 15% up or so. If you apply good thermal compound you should be fine. The T400 has some room to spare when it comes to cooling.

 

be realistic, not only is the chip not removable. the heat will be too much for a 14.1 inch chassis. i can easily touch 90 degrees c on t500 if i dont underclock my cpu, control fans and provide adequate cooling.

wait for august 11 , i am sure 5470 on T402 will be much faster than a 3870.

 

Oh, if it is not removable I eat my words. The heat of 90* is not normal though, even for a high-end mobile GPU.

 

hey,

where'd this info come from?

thx

 

don't tease me
if you know about a 2009 update to the T400 with better discrete graphics PLEASE GIMME INFO PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

 

I'm gonna call BS on that prediction... even if a HD 5470 comes out, doubt it will even touch HD 3870, since it is 2 tiers below.

 

If the ambient temperature is warm enough, and if you're not propping your laptop up on some stand/cooling pad, the T500's GPU could reach 90 degrees, although that's not ideal. Highest I've hit was 70 degrees, and that was gaming yesterday, in my 80-90 degree room.

No, the replacement would not work. You'd have to replace your motherboard (and somehow find a motherboard with an empty GPU space), and even then, the T400's cooling system may not be adequete.

 

i am talking about 2 years from now. Radeon R800 is coming out next year

look at the way AMD is going, it has migrated to Gddr5 and 40nm process. take a look at the newly released ATI Radeon HD 4770(Rv 740). it has reached radeon 4850 performance on a 128 bit bus.

the review of the new AMD Radeon HD 4890 states that temperature never raises beyond 65c even after heavy gaming even though it has the same performance of 4870.

Beyond all of this is the release of intel westmere in q4 2009. Intel is combining 2 cores, a directx 11 GPU into the same size die as a 2008 45nm processor.

intel has doubled the performance within an year when moving from a 90nm x3100 to a 65nm x4500. just imagine what a similar chip would be like when migrated to 32 nm and put it the same die as the processor

so i am pretty sure if AMD is going to stay in the business of low end discrete gfx card, it will be much faster than an integrated intel chip. take the 3470 which offers twice the performance of the x4500. if the 2011 AMD chip should maintain a similar performance ratio against Intel chip, it needs to reach similar performance of a 2007 3870. i dont think it is a problem with 40nm and GDDR5

 

you are correct, my room temperature is quite high(around 35c). i manage to keep the t500 temp around 70c during gaming by improvising either with a gelpad or by keeping it tilted. i also use the smart mode in TPfan control.

 

Not only is it two tiers below, but being a x4x0, it's probably going to have a 64-bit bus. I can believe a future chipset with a 128-bit bus catching up to the top end of the HD 3000 series in overall performance, but not a gimpy 64-bit offering.

 

Exactly, even if it is on a smaller process and uses GDDR5, it's still only equivalent to a mid ranged 128-bit card. The HD 3870 is a 256-bit card. My 4 year old top of the line video card can still hold beat the snot out of today's low end card, especially noticeable at high resolutions.

Your comparisons are irrelevant because you are comparing current high end cards w/ the last generation high end cards. Have you even looked at current low end cards? The X4500 still sucks. It might be 2x as good as the X3100, but even 9400M G and HD 3200 (both integrated) easily own it in all aspects.

 

Looking back on this thread, I'm not even sure how the heck we got to discussing purely speculative roadmaps of video chipsets that don't even exist yet. I'll break this up pretty simply as far as it relates to Lenovo using past history. The T61p had the NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M, which performs nearly identical to the ATI Mobility FireGL V5700 in the W500, which performs nearly identical to the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 in the T500.

It's going to be a long time before the 14" T-series refresh gets something that can pass for decent mainstream graphics when the 15.4" T-series is firmly entrenched in graphics mediocrity. The T400's HD 3470 is marginally better the NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M in the T61. They're not putting anything that can be confused as a middle- to high-end card in the 14" ThinkPad. They never have and there's no reason to believe that they will. These are still business laptops after all.

I would not feel uncomfortable making a guarantee that a future 64-bit HD 5470 isn't going to come close to touching a 256-bit HD 3870.

 

if you have not noticed, a desktop 128 bit Rv740(4770) has already beaten a Highend HD 3850 from nov 2007.

x4500 sucks today, but it is decent enough to play HD video and some games with low resolution. the lineup is getting better with each release. with the current way of doubling the performance each year, we can expect a decent 5K+ in 3dsmax within two years. AMD's low gen cards will have to be much better than that to even stay in the competition. If Intel offers a decent IGP comparable to the low end competition, it would force the Gfx makers to bring the medium line down to compete in the low end

if it is all business oriented why did they shift to consumer cards from quadro? the only reason 14.1 inch cards have a 64 bit card is to offer the maximum battery + low heat combination. that will be easily provided by the next gen 40nm, GDDR5, 128/64bit cards.

 

In general with any Thinkpad, you can replace the LCD, keyboard, touchpad, ram, HD, wi-fi card, turbocache/3G card and if you're REALLY good, the CPU.

That's it. Don't bother with anything else. it won't work...

 

i want to add this as a final point.

i had a look at ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 for small and light notebooks and replacement for 3470. this is a 64 bit card

an excerpt from Notebookcheck.net

"AMD published some benchmarks at the launch of the Mobilty Radeon HD 4000 Series with relative benchmarks of the HD 4570 versus the HD 3470. Sadly the settings of 1600x1200, 4x AA, 8x AF are too high to result in playable framerates. Therefore the following chart is only of limited use.

Still AMD also included the increase in 3DMark06 points (1.65x) and therefore one can conclude that the Mobility Radeon HD 4570 should score about 3200 points which would put her in place of the old HD 2600."

Source:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-ATI-Mobility-Radeon-HD-4570.13885.0.html

it comes very near X1800, a 256 bit card

 

Interesting thread idea....but something easier - ViDock.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=397296

Check the op's tests with the T400.

 

actually the ddr3 4570 in the vaio sr gets about 4k in 3D06, putting it in the same league as the ddr3 3650 in the t500. just go check out the sr threads in the sony forum.

 

Benchmarks are a decent way to rate things, but in the end, the true test are games. Neither card would be able to touch a higher end card in higher resolutions.