Thinkpads Forum

Hi Everyone!
Now that I have gotten the hang of my W530, I feel like I should do what Thinkpads are known for: upgradeability! I've decided I'm going to keep it for a while, so I'm planning long-term. The i7-3940XM looks pretty competitive even next to the Ice and Comet Lake i7s, however, I've also heard Xeon is possible. Does anyone have any experience with these CPUs? Any idea where to get them from? My budget is around 100-120 USD, which includes the selling price of the current i7-3740QM.
[EDIT] 8GB of RAM isn't much, so I'm also looking forward to upgrading that. Is it DDR3L SO DIMM? Any SSD is compatible, right?

I would max out the RAM to 32GB before changing the CPU.

Most normal SSDs will work. The folks more experienced with SSDs can chime in.

thealphaoverseer wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 01, 2020 4:02 am

I've also heard Xeon is possible

W530 is still a notebook.. They're meant to be mobile. Wouldn't being modest with CPU wattage be conductive to maintaining a reasonably long battery life?
Should also help you prevent a thermal melt-down in the system.

P.S. I'd be surprised if you found a reasonably modern 2.5" SSD that wouldn't work just fine. BTW I believe my T520 rather surprisingly has got a 9mm HDD compartment which means that modern 7mm SSD-s ideally need to be installed via specially shaped rubber "rails". Well you should check what you got, maybe you already have them.. if W530 also has a 9mm compartment. Obviously there are work-arounds if right rails are not available. Sorry don't know about DDR3L vs DDR3. I would think DDR3 should work, less sure about L. The shape is definitely an SO-DIMM..

P.P.S. Definitely do start with RAM and SSD. In truth I always planned to but never got around to upgrading my CPU-s. Somehow stock ones usually do not disappoint me. My personal experience with RAM is 8Gb is fine without virtual machines and 16Gb is fine so long as you have just one. I'd love to have 32Gb, just to show off!

Early T5XX series really benefit from max RAM and SSD's. Probably more than anything else. My T500 runs nearly as well as my T520. My two T510's I've not really fooled with except to max out the ram. Both are still running spinner drives. Those two don't get used as much as the T500 and T520.

There is a definite noticeable difference in performance just from these two upgrades. I usually do the processor last, if at all. But I usually do eventually.

the i7 3740QM is already a decent performer, the 3940XM is a bit overkill, price wise at 180-200 bucks, the best bang for buck is the 3840 QM, almost as powerful as the XM cpus but at just 135 bucks.
but before you sink your money into CPUs go for more memory and some SSDs
I have 32gigs of corsair vengence 4x8GB dimms, i installed an mSATA ssd where i keep my old win 7 partition, on the standard sata drive i have another SSD where i keep the win 10 installation, and to top it over i have a third SSD in the ultra bay which i use for storage. Once the thinkmods will launch its product i will installed a 4th drive into the 34mm express card expantion slot.

Tinkerman is spot on.

I've been doing hi-tech engineering consulting for years with a 3840qm W530, 32Gb, and an SSD (arguably too expensive: a Samsung 850 Pro 500Gb). I bought memory that allowed me to run the memory a little faster (XMP memory, which may just be purchasing the next fastest specification of memory). And I did a BIOS jailbreak (1vyrain - look it up) which allowed me to install a pretty fast wifi card (AC-7260). Faster than what the whitelist allowed, anyway.

The W530 has a G2 socket. This limits your options (no Xeons). Putting a 39X0-XM in maxes out at 55W instead of the 3840qm at 45W. So you have thermal management (which can shorten the machine lilfetime) AND battery life to think about. Here's what I'd do:

Depending on your current memory or hard drive SSD state, I'd attack the weak link. If you only have 4 or 8gb of memory, get 32Gb (4 sticks of 8Gb, all identical). If you have a 200Gb HDD, get a 500Gb SSD. I like Samsung. The 860 Evos are nice.

If you have the skills and confidence, use the 1vyrain jailbreak to eliminate the whitelists.

If you really want to spend 130 bucks for a 3840, do that. Make sure you buy heat transfer paste, and have a lot of paper towels and isopropanol to clean things.

Any fooling around with BIOS, or goofing around with your laptops innards involves risk, which you accept.

Last, I'd point out that the graphics chips in the W530 are ball grid array (BGA - they're soldered in). There's no feasible or at least reasonable upgrade path for the graphics chip. So balance things: don't spend $600 bucks on a machine with K1000M graphics.

There are indeed great machines. But they ain't ever gonna be a quad CPU Xeon running 88 cores and 256Gb of RAM with a RAID array of 1Tb SDDs.

I'm probably too late to chime in for the OP, but for the benefit of anybody else reading this...

I concur with the advice above; adding RAM and putting a modern SSD in are great bang for buck.

I'd pay particular attention to the speed of the SSD, as this will improve most real-world use. I benchmarked the SSDs that came in my x30 series laptops (I've got a few) and found that the maximum read speed was in the ~100MB/s region (possibly as high as 125MB/s, I forget precisely). Write speeds were slower.

I would often notice that multiple CPU cores were entering the wait state during periods of high I/O. What this means is that the CPU cores were trying to do work in parallel, but were having to wait for the drive to catch up.

I spotted this when I wrote a script to automate downloading a couple of hundred MB of Linux software, and the Linux kernel source. My quad core (8 thread) W530 would take 12 minutes to run it, but my dual core (4 thread) X230 (with a Samsung Evo 860 SSD) could do it in 6 minutes 30 seconds.

Replacing the W530's drive with another Evo 860 put the W530 back on top. I forget how long the task took after the upgrade, but it would have been at least as fast as the X230's time.

If any of you are on Linux and want to monitor your `iowait` states, the glances program is a nice way to monitor it. It can show you a summary over all cores, or show you how much time each core is spending waiting for I/O.

In terms of the amount of RAM you need, I did put 32GB in mine, but I very rarely use more than 16GB. I think I've seen it use more than 16GB twice. So check how much RAM the apps that you use tend to need, unless you're happy to just pay the extra for maxing it out.

Oh, and I also considered the CPU upgrades. In the end I stuck with the 2.7GHz 3740QM. It's surprisingly quick (quicker than my i7-3770T desktop, which really surprised me).

so, while i do realize that I'm necroposting here, so be it

i also am an owner of a w530. I replaced the cpu for a 3949xm (no issues whatsoever with cooling, etc btw). I'n my case i endede up with 3 drives on my machine: - W11, Linux Mint and OSX Sequioa (with Ivyra1in bios soft mod)l

While OSX was a bit of a chore (if only certain small ones tbh) i did not really have huge issues anywwhwew.

I might as well chime in too as I have a bit more knowledge when it comes to upgrading and modding a W530.

CPU - Most 3rd gen (Ivy Bridge) quad core CPUs have a TDP of 45W. However, the Core i7-3632QM has 4 cores and 8 threads and a TDP of 35W. Less power draw (more battery life) for similar performance. This CPU can be bought on AliExpress for pretty cheap.
Best 45W stock CPU vs. 3632QM

IPS display - Only a 1080P IPS display is possible right now and it requires some case modifications apparently, and it might not look stock from the outside.
Adaptor board for 1080P display. The seller suggests using the AUO B156HAN01.2, which can be purchased on laptopscreen.com here. You could also buy one from someplace like eBay or AliExpress—be careful though; some people sell fake displays which might not look the same or might not even work. There are several displays that work but they all have physical differences which changes how the display fits.
Here is a thread from this forum which documents theterminator93's experience fitting an IPS display. They don't use the AUO display, something else, so if you go with a display different to theirs your experience may be different. If you plan on doing this mod, read this thread first. It's a long thread but worth the read as it will be a great help in understanding this mod.

Classic 7-row keyboard - This is possible, but with a couple keys being rendered non-functional—Fn+F12 (hibernate) and Fn+F3 (power manager shortcut)—and no CapsLk light. Every other key or light works as is expected on an xx20 laptop to my knowledge. This involves flashing the embedded controller (EC); you will need to do this on Linux and your W530 needs to be on EC version 1.13 (which conveniently comes with BIOS version 2.58, see the 'Modded BIOS' section below). You can find a link to instructions for this in the ThinkWiki page linked below.
Guide from ThinkWiki

Touchscreen - You cannot install a touchscreen display, not even aftermarket. However, you can purchase a USB-A touchscreen digitiser and a miniPCI-E to USB-A card. All ThinkPad W530s come with a miniPCI Express slot which is typically used for two things; a WWAN card or a miniSATA 2.0 SSD (slower than SATA 3.0, which is used in the main hard drive bay). Theoretically, you could put the board of the digitiser and most of the cable behind the display, route the USB cable through the right hinge, and down into the—very conveniently placed—miniPCI-E to USB-A card. You can move the antenna for the optional WWAN card (black cable with red tip) back through the hinge and underneath the LED/mic board to the left of the lid for more space. Note that, to my knowledge, no one has tried this before. This is a little project of mine which I will get started on soon. Also, you'll need a modded BIOS to install the miniPCI-E to USB-A card; this is because the stock BIOS implements a whitelist on that slot and the Wi-Fi card slot, only allowing select things to be installed in those slots. We'll get into the modded bios on the next section.
USB touchscreen digitiser. There's a lot of these on AliExpress.
miniPCI-E to USB card. There's a lot of these on eBay.

Modded BIOS - For a while, BIOS modding was only possible with hardware flashers—no softmod route—because the BIOS was rewrite protected with software (BIOS mods usually work by flashing a modded BIOS over a normal BIOS of the same version). However, we're lucky enough to be in a time where 1vyrain exists. This gives you; 1. overclocking support for certain CPUs, 2. whitelist removal to use any card in either of the miniPCI-E slots (the wifi card is in a small miniPCI-E slot), 3. an advanced menu in the BIOS which gives you a few options such as fan control and the ability to disable the Intel Management Engine (ME FW). For this you have to be on a BIOS version compatible with 1vyrain; for the W530, this is version 2.58 (which conveniently comes with EC version 1.13, which is compatible with the 7-row keyboard mod). If your BIOS is on a version higher than that, don't worry! You can downgrade; download the BIOS from the link below and run 'flash.bat' (in the folder that says it has flash.bat, ignore the other folder). This should bypass any BIOS downgrade restrictions... uh, I'm pretty sure it will, at least; I haven't tried this on a W530 but it works on a W520.
1vyrain GitGub page; download and instructions
BIOS 2.58

Blu-ray Recordable Erasable (BD-RE) drive - A disc drive that slots into the Serial Ultrabay Enhanced drive which allows you to read from and write to CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays. Alternatively, you can get a SATA hard drive bay that slots into the Ultrabay. These are plentiful on eBay.
ThinkWiki's article on the Serial Ultrabay Enhanced Blu-ray Drive II

Palmrest/keyboard bezel - I managed to fit a W510 palmrest with a fingerprint reader and a coloromitor on my W520. I did this because it was cheaper than buying a W520 palmrest with the same features—by several hundred dollars. All you need to do is trim some standoffs and clips to be more like the W520 palmrest. I did this with a razor blade; make sure to wear some thick gloves that will actually protect your hands; I used gloves I use when go karting. Not sure about doing this on a W530, but I've read you can't fit a W520 palmrest on a W530 due to differences in the magnesium rollcage on the inside or something, so the chances seem slim lowkey.

Motherboard replacement - Fried motherboard? Got the Quadro K1000M GPU but want the superior Quadro K2000M GPU? A motherboard replacement is surprisingly easy, despite having to disassemble the entire bottom half of the machine to get to the motherboard. If you want the better GPU, just make sure the listing specifies that it comes with a GPU that says 'N14P-Q3-A2' on the die, or message the seller. You can find these boards on AliExpress for not too much.

alalalalysa wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 20, 2025 7:03 am

I might as well chime in too as I have a bit more knowledge when it comes to upgrading and modding a W530.
....

Not OP, but also a W530 owner. Just came here to thank you for this. There are other mods out there like USB-C one, but you covered the most important ones.