Riding the Flow

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.

Recently I’ve partially disassembled my Lenovo Thinkpad W701 laptop to check out the seating design of MXM 3.0 Type B module it uses, and to check out the construction of the heatsink/fan thermal module. This is to determine at least mechanical feasibility of upgrading to another MXM 3.0b video card (software compatibility is still uncertain – trying will be the only option). I’ve took a lot of pictures to illustrate the whole process.

*Update - this article is kept for historical reasons only. For present situation with High DPI web surfing, please refer to a newer article* It’s not easy to find a browser with good High DPI support. A challenge that on high DPI display web content must be scaled up, otherwise it appears too small (being made for 96 DPI). While not a big problem with vector fonts and images, rescaling raster images is a challenge. Hard to rescale up just slightly – usually image is made blurry. Up to now Google Chrome has the best upscale implementation (at least in my eyes). It also has pretty good zoom support, with only caveat – now there is no way to set default zoom level not to 100%. Surely they didn’t expect people to set zoom level on every new site they visit? Setting global zoom with extensions is not quite the same – extensions have no access to this zoom setting, they try to imitate global zoom by zooming the root HTML element, which is not working perfectly in many cases. Th...

Well, after all I’ve decided to go with Etymotic Research hf2 . They have so much clearer sound, you really hear each separate instrument. I’ve already used to how deep they go in the ear – this is a plus actually, since they are quite comfortable while sitting very securely without falling out. Ultimate Ears SuperFi 5vi were good, but just too artificially bass-y while “mushy” overall. Checks for frequency response confirmed this. They were somewhat quicker to insert/remove, but isolation was a lot worse, they were more prone to falling out and also response/action button was located very low on the cord for some reason.