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Showing posts from April, 2011

Is Thinkpad W701 MXM? Kind of. Upgradeable? Nope :(

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When I've chosen Thinkpad W701 as a laptop, one of the potential pluses I've considered is the usage of MXM 3.0 Type B slot for video card. Because MXM is a standard like PCIe, it would have potentially enabled upgrading to more powerful third-party graphics card. The Quadro 2800M is still quite respectable, but recent-gen like AMD 6970M already does better. Of course I did realise this was a  potential , not guarantee , but it still worth to try. In my previous blog post I've described details of mechanical tinkering, you can read it here - Thinkpad W701–anatomy of MXM video module Since I've established that mechanically and electrically almost any MXM card would be accepted, all that remained is to try the actual card(s) - I was prepared to try several different ones starting from most powerful in case it would not work.