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My T540p FrankenPad
(lemmy.nz)
Some of you might remember the T540p I got for free from work a couple of years back - after its mainboard died I rebuilt my older personal T540p with the the remaining good components and a donor W541 I bought on eBay.
I'm quite pleased with the result. Its revised specs are: i7 4930MX, Quadro K2100M, 32GB DDR3L RAM, AUO B156HAN01.2, an HP Blu-Ray drive and an Intel AX210 WIFI card.
And a few stickers obviously.
The temps are not too bad, about 40-50 Celsius idle and 80-ish under load. I used Thermal Grizzly Duronaut paste that I had left over from a PC build I did for a mate.
I'm kinda disappointed by the K2100M to be honest, it's not that much better than my original T540p's GT730M IMO.
Optimus or have you forced Nvidia only? The higher end the card (and higher res the screen) the worse the Optimus penalty will be. But yeah by modern standards neither are super powerful beasts.
I'm just using Optimus through the Geforce drivers I installed with NVcleanstall
Are the Geforce drivers much better? I still have my W540 somewhere around here and I want to find a good use for it.
Last game I tried running on it was AOE 4 an it was pretty dire.
You get more recent security patches and game enhancements, but I'm not sure if it really makes that much of a difference.
I did something similar with the GT730M where I installed desktop Kepler drivers, that gave me two years of security patches extra but didn't really do a lot for performance