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Finding CPU to upgrade an e530c

Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 6:07 am
by ragnarockerbunny
Hello there! New to the forums, and a Lenovo Thinkpad Edge e530c recently came into my possession. Battery could be in better state and had a hard-drive so ancient that when I tried to recover data for the original owner it crashed windows explorer on my desktop, but it was otherwise in great condition.

I swapped out the HDD for an inexpensive 120GB SSD and it boots better than new, added a 4GB stick from a dead donor laptop for a total of 8GB and put in Windows 10, although I spent a day and a half with Linux Mint to see if it was a viable candidate and for the intended use-case (my daily driver when I travel, sometimes up to a week) and it wasn't a good fit, guess I'll keep rocking Win10, at least until EOL.

From my research it seems this is one of the ThinkPad models with a socketed CPU, mine has a third gen dual core i5 (i5-3320m to be exact). I found this post ( viewtopic.php?f=60&t=136342 ) which suggests an i7-3632QM, and in the next six months or so I'll likely have the cash, but I'm struggling to source the part via google-fu. Where does one typically look for this kind of thing? I can't really find a place that sells Laptop CPUs separate, or at the very least, my searches have been fruitless. Is it a question of going onto Facebook Marketplace and finding a laptop with the CPU being sold for parts? How do you guys source your upgrade parts?

Re: Finding CPU to upgrade an e530c

Posted: Wed Aug 14, 2024 7:32 pm
by ZaZ
ragnarockerbunny wrote:
Wed Aug 14, 2024 6:07 am
Where does one typically look for this kind of thing?
It's been a while since I've upgraded a CPU, but I typically buy used SSDs and memory upgrades on eBay as they offer the best value. Some sellers will ship overseas, which can be expensive, though CPUs tend to be light. Good luck my friend and welcome.