Thinkpads Forum

My next project is a W500 that I, apparently, killed. I thrifted it, put a battery in it, and bought a charger. It worked well, then stopped and did nothing. At any rate, I bought a T500 motherboard with a P8400 on it. My question is, is the P8400 any good or should I spring for a T9550 or T9900 CPU? It will end up with 8gig ram and 500gig SSD.
Or do you peoples have another suggestion for the CPU? I'll be using it for photo and video work.

P8400 is fine, they are low energy usage and by virtue of the low clock they are very low temp especially under the beefy T500 heatsink. i have never noticed a meaningful speed difference between different Socket P Core 2 CPUs in web browsing and office work, but since you mention video work, you actually would see marginally (but not significant) faster render times with a higher clock CPU. personally i wouldn't bother because using a Core 2 and caring about speed is contradictory.

Will it take a quad core like my E530?

it is possible only with mods. This youtube video explains it better than i can.
https://youtu.be/Fs4GjDiOie8?feature=shared

Personally i never desired it enough to do on my T500. when i wanted more performance i bought a P71 and an EGPU. you can build a powerful little desktop or server and remote into it from any laptop.

Just watched the video... ya I'm good with 2.