T420 upgrade to I7-2720QM ES Q154 Successful! :)

Hi everyone.

I just recieved my I7 2720QM that I bought off ebay. I got the CPU last night, and I have t admit, it took me 35 minutes to install in and have it up and running.... Such was my expectation.

First impressions are very positive indeed, low idle temperatures, 8mb cache vs the 6mb of the production version. All hunky dory. I used the new Arctic MX-4 thermal compound, as the heat transfer. All seems to work very well... In cinjunction wth my HyperX 1866Mhz ram, and the other goodies, I could not expect more........ A truly recomended upgrade for those that need more power......

Cheers,

Harry

 

Does it allow for overclocking?

 

Would be interesting to see the stress temps of the ES i7-2720QM, my production sample really struggled in the T420 chassis that I had to revert back to the Dual Core i5 in mine.

 

Hi,

No Overclocking. Not realli interested, I believe the added cores and 8Mb cache ( yes the Es saples have 8Mb intead of 6Mb ) is more than a speed boost. As far as the temperatures, I have to say that running 12 threads of super Pi for 30 mins, I never saw temps over 91Cº, which is 9 degress below Tjunction........ I think the main trick, is not to disable processor throtling functions, so when the machine is under light load, it clocks down to 800Mhz, which keeps it at a nice 43-44 degres Cº The speed boost is really incredible.

what kind of struggles do you mean? What thermal compound did you use?

Regards,

Harry

 

I used Arctic Cooling MX-3 compound in mine and tested using Prime95, but I think we both observed that temperatures can exceed over 90c during stress (mine usually around 95c for the hour with constant throttling) which personally I don't find comfortable in the long run considering the T-Junction is only 100c (though since yours is the ES there may be some variations). Another drawback is that it hammers the battery time pretty badly, I lose around 2 hours on average compared to the Core i5 during my usage.

In the end weighing in that I couldn't use the Quad Core to its full potential due to constant throttling and high temps under load, as well as taking a hit on the battery time I decided to revert to my original CPU in the end. Though you could have a bit more luck in yours considering the ES versions are different from the retail versions.

 

Any update on this? Was the ES 2720qm a long term success?

 

Hey guys,

I have lenovo t420 with i5 2520M I was thinking about upgrading it to i7 QM CPU. I am thinking about 2630QM or 2670QM? It will work? It will overheat or throttling will occur? I will be using collaboratory liquid thermal paste, also I am thinking about lapping surface of cpu cooler.

 

I updated my T420 with a 2720QM. The quad core gets pretty hot when running intensive programs for a long time. I've seen temperature readings reach 99C. I don't know if the CPU is throttling at this point. So yes, the upgrade will work, but heat and battery life will be an issue.

 

im impressed that you guys doing this kind of thing on a laptop.

 

Hmm... So I thought that, It will cause problems...