Thinkpad Advanced Dock works with ATI Radeon 5450

I actually did this a couple of months ago but I forgot to post it. Long story short, I was able to get a Thinkpad Advanced dock for $40 and a ATI Radeon HD5450 for free so I decided to test them out with my T500.

Multi-monitoring worked; however, I didn't have the means to output to more than 2 monitors. In addition I wasn't able to see if HDMI port was able to output video/audio.

Gaming was alright. I was able to get decent frame rates while playing Starcraft II on the lowest of settings. The card idled around 65C and continued to worked fine. Increasing the graphics pass high and resolution pass 720p did cause decreases in performance. Naturally temperatures increased and caused the annoying dock fan to turn on.

As an HTPC card, the 5450 was able to play two 1080p movies simultaneously without any problems.

This is pretty much it. I didn't really test the dock and the graphics card further because it was just a fun 1 day side project before I resold the dock for profit. One point to mentioned is that you should probably a low profile graphics card that uses a fan instead of a massive heat sink. Another point to mention is that any Radeon 5000 series should work. I came to this conclusion because dornif's guide. However after doing some research, any card using above 30ish watts and/or larger than a low profile card will require some modifications.

You can check out some photos of it here.

 

great news.. thanks for coming back with a solution. I got the dock too and is planning to mod it to get an ATI 5770 working (someone has already done it, so i am just following his footstep).

 

Yeah, I only remembered to post this when I was cleaning out my hard drive and saw the photos. I guess the only other thing to mention was that my switchable graphics driver was affected. I uninstalled the 5450 drivers but, I couldn't access the Cataylst control center or the intel graphics menu after that. When I try to uninstall/reinstall the switchable graphics driver it failed. I could still switch the graphics card using the power manager but the performance was degraded.