Thinkpads Forum

Hy, I want to ask the community which is the better option to upgrade an W530 equipped with the quadro K200M, heat wise and performance, i know the XM is a 55W piece and the QM is a 45 W piece, so from a heat perspective it makes sense to go the QM route, but i am not sure,
does having an XM makes sense from other points that completely overshadow the heat problem?

Yes, but not by much. The Core i7-3920XM has an 'unlocked' multiplier that goes up to 63x, although I doubt that your W530 has the ability to make use of the unlocked multiplier.

From what I have seen (as I have never owned a T530/W530 of any sort), bit 20 in MSR 0x194 is set to '1' in these ThinkPads. This means that your W530 has been effectively given a software lock that prevents the turbo multipliers from being modified by any program. Or in other words, overclocking is disabled by the BIOS. Which makes it pointless to buy the Core i7-3920XM, as you cannot overclock it (the only good reason to buy it).

Unless you are able to bypass this problem by flashing a modified BIOS, stick with the Core i7-3840QM.

Screamer wrote: ↑

Sat Jul 11, 2020 2:49 pm

Unless you are able to bypass this problem by flashing a modified BIOS, stick with the Core i7-3840QM.

Great, thanks for the advice dude
I will keep everybody up to date as to how the upgrade works. This CPU upgrade and the upcoming thinkmod for the 34 mm Extresscard NVME adapter , those 2 are the final upgrades to my W530.

I finally received the cpu , from ebay at 135 bucks, i went for the 3840 QM, for the reasons mentioned in the above comments.
I just installed it an hour ago and got some basic benchmarks done.
But before benchmark results i want to comment a bit regarding the physical part of the upgrade, just like its predecessors the W530 is built like a tank, even more so than the T60/61 ( i compare it to the T60/61s, because this is the model which I know best and onto which I worked the most as far as upgrading parts and frankenpading. In fact it is soo over-engineered that it becomes cumbersome to remove some parts, especially the heatsink and fan are a real pain to get out and than put back in, the T60/61s had the north and the west parts closed, by the case, and there were some chassis elements on the eastern flank but the south was clear and as such removing the heatsink and fan was never an issue, the W530 on the other hand , has a large magnesium structure on the south and south east of the fan, and the heat-pipes coming from the cpu and gpu have their own cutaways in this solid bridge of magnesium. the overall fit is very tight. Once you manage to remove/replace the heat sink the rest of the dismantling or rebuilding is easy as pie, but , but you need a lot of patience for the heatsink and fan.
After i completed the upgrade i ran the passmark 10 test and it gave me 6450 points for the 3840QM, the average for this CPU is 6100 something. My old cpu , 3630QM scored 5500 points, so i got an almost 1000 points improvement, which is great.

here is an image of the chassis around the fan
https://imgur.com/a/E35riGv

That's a good number for the passmark. Were you using optimized SSDs?

WizardOfBoz wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 12, 2020 10:52 pm

That's a good number for the passmark. Were you using optimized SSDs?

hey dude, i just read your comment on the other W530 upgrade thread, your system looks alot like mine, with the major difference that i didnt made a bios jailbreak, I like how the 6300 ultimate works, so i didnt feel like risking the machine just for that.
as for SSDs, I have a samsung EVO 860 mSATA 512 GB, another samsung 840 PRO 512 GB, and a samsung 860 QVO 4 TB in the ultra bay, and in the next few months i will get installed a 1TB sabrent m2 2240 formfactor in the express card slot via an adaptor made by thinkmods.
i just checked with samsung magician, apparently i didnt have the rapid mode activated, but right now im logged with the win 7 partition, i will have to check again in the win10 partition to see if rapid mode was active there, in win 7 i got 6340 points with passmark

Yeah, I used that machine for the past four or five years. Just got a W541 up and running. 4940MX, so its a little (not a lot) faster. The big thing, for me, is a higher res 1080p graphics card.

Hey TinkerMan, you got a lot of disks!

TinkerMan wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 13, 2020 2:56 pm

I have a samsung EVO 860 mSATA 512 GB

...so is it SATA II then? I'm herding a number of *20 machines which are due to be slowly upgraded to *30 so I'm wondering

TinkerMan wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 13, 2020 2:56 pm

a samsung 860 QVO 4 TB in the ultra bay

This must be SATA III then. BTW - to save lazy me some reading - how do QVO compare to EVO? Are they cheaper at this sort of capacities? What is your experience overall?

TinkerMan wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 13, 2020 2:56 pm

and in the next few months i will get installed a 1TB sabrent m2 2240 formfactor in the express card slot via an adaptor made by thinkmods.

So.. looking at their webpate this doesn't deliver any true breakthroughs in throughput compared to SATA III does it?.. Only if your machine can do PCI-E 3 do you get over SATA III speed but I understand neither mine nor your hardware can do that?..

The numbers look a little strange to me though: that page says that the limit say with PCI-E 2 is 425Mb/s, but theoretical limit of SATA-III is 6Gb/s = 750Mb/s. Wikipedia says PCI-E 2 is capped at about 500Mb/s, presumably theoretical. So how can SATA-III be faster than PCI-E 2? Does SATA controller not use a single PCI-E lane then?..

TinkerMan wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 13, 2020 2:56 pm

apparently i didnt have the rapid mode activated

Hmmm? Could you please elaborate a little? What kind of rapid mode is that?..

atagunov wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 14, 2020 6:50 am

...so is it SATA II then? I'm herding a number of *20 machines which are due to be slowly upgraded to *30 so I'm wondering


This must be SATA III then. BTW - to save lazy me some reading - how do QVO compare to EVO? Are they cheaper at this sort of capacities? What is your experience overall?

So.. looking at their webpate this doesn't deliver any true breakthroughs in throughput compared to SATA III does it?.. Only if your machine can do PCI-E 3 do you get over SATA III speed but I understand neither mine nor your hardware can do that?..

The numbers look a little strange to me though: that page says that the limit say with PCI-E 2 is 425Mb/s, but theoretical limit of SATA-III is 6Gb/s = 750Mb/s. Wikipedia says PCI-E 2 is capped at about 500Mb/s, presumably theoretical. So how can SATA-III be faster than PCI-E 2? Does SATA controller not use a single PCI-E lane then?..

Hmmm? Could you please elaborate a little? What kind of rapid mode is that?..

yes, the mSata is limited to sata 2 speeds, thats why i keep the win 7 on that one, and i use the sata 3 normal connector for the win 10 ssd

QVO is way cheaper than EVO , and if you buy on sales its even better, but performance is not that great, I wouldnt use QVO for boot drive, just for massive storage, that being said, i do have another 2TB QVO in a X230 where I use it as a boot drive, simply because i dont have space for 3 drives on that machine like i do on my W530, so I use the main W10 drive also as storage

you need to ask the creator of the thinkmods about those details, I will use that drive as a fast way to transfer large files from one laptop to another, using USB sticks is very, very slow,

rapid mode, the samsung software has a rapid mode, look it up on their site, i dont know how it works, but it works really well, the system is very fast to boot and to wake from sleep.

W530 is now complete
the thinkmods express card to NVME adapter arrived a few weeks ago
so this is the final configuration

3840 QM CPU
32 GB RAM
K2000 M GPU
1 samsung SATA 3, 512 GB, 840 PRO MLC SSD, WIn 10 installed
1 samsung mSATA, 512 GB, 860 EVO TLC SSD, Win 7 installed
1 samsung SATA 3, 4 TB, 860 QVO QLC SSD, storage
1 SABRENT 2242 M2.0, 1 TB, TLC SSD, STEAM and GOG games installation and storage
1 microSD SANDISK extreme pro 400 GB installed onto the express card adapter alongside the sabrent SSD, havent decided yet what to store on it.
9 cell battery pack

I am in W530 nirvana

I got a 3940XM, idles at about 57-62C, under full load it runs continuously at 3.7 GHz without throttling, getting up to 100C. The W530 is equipped with a dGPU and therefore comes with a dual heatpipe heatsink to provide additional cooling capacity. When the dGPU is not heavily loaded, this cooling capacity really helps to cool down the CPU. If both CPU and GPU were under max load, the CPU performance would likely be reduced.

Using ThrottleStop, it's possible ot overclock the XM CPUs (open ThrottleStop, click Turn On, click TRL, increase the turbo ratio limits). Just for fun I tried it at up to 4.4 GHz. I don't use OC it in daily life, though.

Hi Tinkerman,

myself, i went the same route as heilong with the 3940xm and it has caused me 0 issues so far (with very decent temperatures, etc) for a couple of years now I also run a 3 disk system on it (using the sata/dock/pcie to run W10/Linux/OSX). But i saw that you mentioned "1 microSD SANDISK extreme pro 400 GB" running on the express card/nvme adapter? May i ask what adapter you use and where you bought it? Does it boot from it as well?

my03 wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 10, 2023 4:20 pm

Hi Tinkerman,

myself, i went the same route as heilong with the 3940xm and it has caused me 0 issues so far (with very decent temperatures, etc) for a couple of years now I also run a 3 disk system on it (using the sata/dock/pcie to run W10/Linux/OSX). But i saw that you mentioned "1 microSD SANDISK extreme pro 400 GB" running on the express card/nvme adapter? May i ask what adapter you use and where you bought it? Does it boot from it as well?

Hello my03, I know this post is old but you found that adapter? For 34 mm I have only found for SSD-only (mSATA or M.2 2242), and no with additional space for SD card.

Hi,

still here. Well, yes and no. Myself (and a few hundred others) actually ordered a bootable adapter from here: https://thinkmods.store/ (hint, do not order!!!....) but 4 years later, most of us haven't seen any trace of this device yet (and most probably never will). The word "scam" is probably suitable here...

Anyhow, i got one of those express-card adapters of AliExpress and it was really a hit or miss. It never really worked on the W530 unless you popped it out/in again while inside Windows. Funny enough, it worked (still does) perfectly fine on my older T410 without having to unplug/replug which is a bit interesting. But it does not boot from it (and here i think the difference is that micro-sd card with the boot-loader that will allow the ThinkMod adapter to boot).