Thinkpad R51 UXGA

[Medessec]

I managed to find a really nice condition R51 recently and someone on the Discord suggested the idea of swapping a UXGA into it... can't say I wasn't tempted. I happened to have a spare HV150UX1-100 lying around so I figured why not, and one whole night-project later, here it is. Figured you guys on here wouldn't mind getting to see it.



Some more photos:

- Just mounted the display in the lid
- The cable "mod" (I poked a hole in pin 2, and used a tiny bead of solder at the connector pads to bridge 4 and 5)
- The poor little Radeon 7500 resigned to drive this display

- Closed up, looking at the lid
- Opened up, showing keyboard, palmrest and finished display
- showing back left corner from rear
- showing back right corner from rear but a tad higher
- showing front face-on, powering up with BIOS screen displayed

Took awhile because I didn't want to mess anything up, but it's all done. The cable mod was super straightforward, I referred to this old post I found with a QXGA mod where sjthinkpader posted a reference displaying the open/closed circuit pin sequences:

A30/A31
Pins 1 2 3 4
XGA S S O S
SXGA+S S O O
UXGA O O S O

T30
Pins 1 2 3 4
XGA S S O S
SXGA+S O S O

T4x/R5x
Pins 2 3 4 5
XGA S S O S
SXGA+S O S S
UXGA O O S S
QXGA S S S S (added later on from additional forum member contributions, David_r and ikari_01)

UXGA was seemingly correct, referring to an actual 15" T42 UXGA cable I happened to have. However XGA on the R51 cable didn't match, it seemed to be S O O S instead which didn't even match any of the other sequences. Regardless I decided to just try and match UXGA as I doubt that would have been any different between T4x/R5x, seeing as it could only go in the less numerous 15" varieties. I modded a spare XGA cable I got, hooked it up with the original inverter, and it works just fine.

It's a 1830-F4U, upgraded to 2GB RAM but still has the original 1.7GHz CPU in it. It also makes it a Radeon 7500 model, the oldest and weakest GPU, so I'll be interested to hear your opinions on saddling it up with a UXGA. I do plan on trying out some old retro games with it, and see how they run and look on the Hydis UXGA. If there's any adjustments or mods you guys think would help, I'm all ears. Happily intending for this topic to kick off discussion related to this configuration.

[TPFanatic]

i love the style and build of R50-51-52, in fact R50p is my favorite oddball ThinkPad of all time. very nice that you've built what's essentially a UXGA R50p except it's an R51, same difference.

i put UXGA on R60e with intel GMA, i'm not sure what's weaker that or the 7500. in any case Desktop composition is not GPU intensive, the CPU is more than capable of rendering that, up to Windows 10 1709, after which the desktop is video game that not even my X60s could handle.

[dr_st]

Nice! The R51 is a fun machine and your specimen is in super-nice condition indeed. It's basically a T42 15" only with amber Thinklight and a few other differences.

[Medessec]

i love the style and build of R50-51-52, in fact R50p is my favorite oddball ThinkPad of all time. very nice that you've built what's essentially a UXGA R50p except it's an R51, same difference.

I will admit the 15" R5x looks oddly very good even compared to 15" T4x, which is one of my favorite Thinkpads by looks. But only when it's almost mint like this- unfortunately very tough to find now.

i put UXGA on R60e with intel GMA, i'm not sure what's weaker that or the 7500. in any case Desktop composition is not GPU intensive, the CPU is more than capable of rendering that, up to Windows 10 1709, after which the desktop is video game that not even my X60s could handle.

Looked it up and it seems that GMA 950 has more resources available to it than Radeon 7500 on top of being DX9 capable, so... yeah. I suppose where the 7500 shines is purely in the retro-oriented use, since it won't be natively rendering a lot of newer content it shouldn't be as negatively impacted, especially with XP and not a newer OS installed. Hopefully this means the 7500 will last longer and happily be chugging along on content it was originally meant to run.