Martin's NEW ThinkPad T430

you could say that!!!

Late night web browsing is now soooo much easier!

2x 4GB Crucial Ballistix Sport sticks coming for it, be interesting to see the performance difference moving over to dual channel memory and tighter memory timings! should be here over the next few days!

A nice little treat arrived today for it, an Intel i5-3380m - 2.9GHz (3.6GHz Turbo).

i had looked at the possibility of upgrading to a Quad core i7 but the general opinion is they run too hot, throttle back when under load and potentially shorten the life span of the laptop due the excess heat when running. So I went on the search for the FASTEST i5 available, which was the 3380m, kept my eyes on eBay for a while until one came up at a reasonable price and I snapped it up.

I rarely do any serious multi tasking on this machine so didn't have any need for 4 cores and while the new CPU may only be 300MHz faster, for the small price of £25 its worth it to me for that odd time when I require that bit more!

As usual we done an installation video and plan to have it online this weekend with the benchmarks to match.

next up is to install the new RAM

The machine finally got its CPU upgrade as seen here:


And finally got its RAM upgrade as seen here:




I replaced the single 4GB stick of ram with 2x Crucial Ballistix SPORT 4GB Sticks. These sticks will run in dual channel mode rather than the current sticks single channel giving more memory bandwidth. They also run at much faster timings 9-9-9-24 rather than 11-11-11-28 to improve latency.

PCMark 10 showed a 4.5% increase in performance where 3DMark Vantage showed a massive 12.2% increase, i assume down to the better memory timings and extra bandwidth from running in dual channel since the GPU shares system RAM.

Thats the machine pretty much finished for now and im just enjoying it, i looked at doing a Wireless AC upgrade but the BIOS has a whitelist of what cars it will accept and none of them are Wireless AC, and there is no modified BIOS available for the T430 to over ride it - ive just kitted my new home out with Wireless AC access points so it would be nice to be able to benefit from it on this machine

nice upgrade!
too bad you can't use wireless ac, that kinda sucks from lenovo's side...
I did some research and even found something, but I don't know if you wanna risk it.

www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_unau...MiniPCI_network_card

the little workhorse has been running flawlessly however has developed an issue I cannot find anything online about, when its been turned off for say a day or more, I open it up, switch it on and just as the windows boot screen first appears the machine turns off, turn it back on and it boots and runs as normal. It does this regardless if the charger is plugged in or running on battery. STRANGE!

hm, sounds like it's updating some kinda config file...
what's it running, win10?

yeah windows 10 pro, has done it for a few weeks now, EVERY time i turn it on without fail, if the battery goes flat and it shuts down and i wait 20 minutes and turn it back on again then it boots no problem, but if i leave it a few hours and it "cools down" then the problem re appears. very strange.