Lenovo W520 Owner's Thread

Anybody interested in buying a w520 that's pretty much decked out minus ram and ssd..other than that has everything else u can buy with machine? Pm me

 

How do I replace DVD drive with SSD on my W520 thinkpad. Note RAID is not enabled!

 

OPTICAL BAY ADAPTER..I got one for sale if u want to buy it. Works perfect. I'm selling laptop so that's why I have one. Cost me 58 bucks shipped to me. I'll sell you mine for 40 shipped to you..pm me if interested

 

Can you make the SSD to boot as primary disk?

 

I haven't tried it but I would be very surprised if the 2000M had any issues running the game. Most modern games are very scalable and the W520's graphics performance should be enough to run this at least at medium/low detail at a decent resolution.

No hard data for you though. Sorry.

 

FINAL PROOF - RunCore Pro V T50 6GB mSATAIII 120GB RCP-V_T50028-MC RUNS IN SATA2 / 3Gb/s ON W520
Dear W520 owners, I have just replaced my existing WWAN card with RunCore mSATA and the final proof is that it is running with SATA2 speed.
Attached are the result of comparison RunCore mSATA vs. Vertex3 Pro.
I am downloading now PCMark 7 and PCMarkVantage and will post those test too.
[UPDATE]
Here are the test results running with W7 x64 installed on Vertex 3 Pro 240 GB:
PCMark 7 4421, NVIDIA Quadro 2000M video card benchmark result - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2820QM CPU @ 2.30GHz,LENOVO 428223G score: 4421 PCMarks
PCMark Vantage 17968, NVIDIA Quadro 2000M video card benchmark result - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2820QM CPU @ 2.30GHz,LENOVO 428223G score: 17968 PCMarks
Here are the results running W7 x64 installed on RunCore mSATA:
PCMark 7 4110, NVIDIA Quadro 2000M video card benchmark result - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2820QM CPU @ 2.30GHz,LENOVO 428223G score: 4110 PCMarks
PCMark Vantage 16736, NVIDIA Quadro 2000M video card benchmark result - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2820QM CPU @ 2.30GHz,LENOVO 428223G score: 16736 PCMarks
[/UPDATE]
Positive:

• Already formatted with NTFS
• Recognized by W520 OOTB, drivers for RunCore installed automatic.

Negative

• Only SATA2 in MiniPCI-e slot - but this has nothing to do with RunCore mSATA itself, it is simply the fact that current Sandy Bridge & QM67 chipset architecture support only 2 SATA3 ports, other 4 ports are SATA2.

My conclusion is - not suitable for W520 owners while only SATA2 speed, on the other side too expensive for 120GB to be running as 2.5'' SSD in Slot 0/1, the money would be better invested in larger, 480GB SSD with SATA3 or maybe in the future successor model to W520 (W530?) would have more SATA3 ports.

 

@wolfindersteppe

Thanks for taking the time to do this - I've been waiting to see what the actual max speeds of this card would be, definitely not worth the extra cost for me if the performance is the same as SATA 2 devices. Much appreciated.

 

have you had any trouble with the vertex 3? Freezes, bsod's, etc?

 

No, I have applied this Solution: C300 Disk Freeze-ups in Windows 7 solved... - Crucial Community registry fix.

 

yeah i did too but i kept getting bsod's. 2.09 was the last firmware i tried and that didn't fix it so i sent it back. that was the fastest drive i tested in my machine and the as-ssd score i got was pretty much the same as yours. I have the 2920 so that may have something to do with it.