phillofoc

If anyone is thinking of using one of the previously discussed modified BGA CPUs, I would be concerned with clearance issues. In order to make the BGA Ivy Bridge chips work, you'll need an interposer (adapter) to convert from BGA1224 to rPGA988B (socket G2). I would guess that it would effectively double your CPU height as well. For a pic, check here: https://www.mill-max.com/new_products/detail/6 I also thought that the advantages of BGA were that it was soldered to the board which reduced the height of the setup as well as provided an additional 1224 points of contact for heat dissipation. IIRC, BGA chips flow heat much better to the motherboard than socketed solutions, which can help lower CPU temperatures. The pins in rPGA setups are like a stack needles trying to transfer heat from the CPU to the socket and then to the motherboard, vs soldered pads. I would consider using the BGA+adapter chip in a desktop setup, but I would be surprised if it fit in a laptop.

@hatoblue, have you tried booting with one RAM stick installed? Try alternating RAM configurations too, so boot with one slot empty, then switch slots, then switch RAM. A BIOS reset by unplugging the BIOS battery could be helpful too. Usually when I open a computer like that I clean the RAM contacts with a Q-tip and isopropyl alcohol. If none of those work, you're probably right in that you have a bad CPU. I tried upgrading the CPU in my old Acer 1810TZ by sending it off to a company to get the BGA CPU replaced and ended up with the same result that you had. Good luck!

AMD A10-5750M takes 1866 RAM AMD APUs for Laptops I'd imagine that their APUs would love the extra speed

You can try reseating the wifi antennas, or try the WWAN antennas and see if there's a difference. I've also seen where swapping the primary and aux antennas can help wifi reception. Also see if there's newer drivers if you haven't done so yet. I'm running an Intel 7260HMW 802.11AC wifi card. I haven't had any issues that were described in the forums, but my network is 5Ghz only and haven't checked it on a 2.4Ghz one yet. I'm getting small power savings over my 6205 as well (a few hundred mW)...maybe because I'm not using the BT side so it's only pulling power from the primary 3.3V side(see here page 35)? Nando's a fan of the new BCM chip that's in the MBA instead of the 7260. I did some reading a while back and saw that the BCM uses PCI 2.0, while the 7260 still uses 1.0 so maybe you'll get some power savings and features from that alone. I wanted to keep the Intel chip because I use a WiDi device that doesn't support Miracast and because I've had good luck in the past with Intel chips. Good luck! I've found that a $30 upgrade is well worth avoiding the hassle of trying to make an older card behave properly.

SEC4149 here! @marvinix, it might be worth contacting HP and explaining your situation. Use Skype to call the HP toll free number in the US, it should be free. I thought I've read elsewhere that they let people under warranty do field repairs on their own if there wasn't a service center within a reasonable distance. If you do decide to give it a go, this laptop is super easy to work on. The only gotchas are that you need TORX screwdrivers in addition to regular phillips screwdrivers, and you should replace the thermal pad when you remove the base enclosure, but you can probably get away with reusing the stuff there if you're careful (YMMV). See page 78 of the service manual for what I'm talking about.

You may not actually need a 5V adapter if your laptop provides clean 3.3V power over ExpressCard. See here: http://forum.techinferno.com/diy-e-gpu-projects/4532-%5Bguide%5D-low-profile-12-lenovo-x220-gtx650%40x1-2opt-pe4l-2-1b.html @Remko78 needed 5V to make his eGPU work because his 3.3V power was insufficient. I was able to get my eGPU working with and without 5V on the floppy molex connection (from my Xbox360 PSU), but settled on supplying 5V to take the load off of the 3.3V line in the EC slot. Without the 5V line attached, the PE4L would reset itself on a restart as well as system shutdown so I didn't have to switch off the eGPU on a restart (could be a benefit if you restart often). YMMV with your particular laptop. See the above link for the symptoms of having an inadequate 3.3V power line if you're getting funky errors while using your eGPU. Good luck!

Just for fun, try disabling the HD3650 in Setup 1.3, then running the compaction afterwards. Maybe the BIOS isn't disabling the dGPU properly. When soldering the PCIe power pin, make sure you connect all the ground lines. At least on the 6-pin connector, the middle ground runs "plug detect" logic for the card. Also, have you tried a new PSU? Most of the issues I've seen in the past few years result from a bad power supply.

There's a new BIOS, it might help @bjorm with his fan issue but that's about it. Drivers, Software and Firmware for HP EliteBook 2570p Notebook PC - HP Support Center - Fixes an issue where the System Diagnostics reports the same battery information for both the travel battery and the primary battery. - Fixes an intermittent issue where the system incorrectly displays a fan error while the system is powering on. - Fixes an issue where the Intel Graphics control panel does not display the correct verion of the VBIOS. - Fixes an issue where certain brands of USB drives cannot be used to create a USB key to perform a system a crisis recovery.

If anyone's thinking about ordering a QM for their 2570p, you might want to do it soon... "Furthermore, on [August 22, 2014] Intel will retire Core i7-3940XM Extreme Edition, and boxed and tray versions of Core i7-3840QM and i7-3740QM CPUs" Source: Intel discontinues Bay Trail and mobile Core i7 CPUs I imagine that the supply will be good for a while, but prices might start to go up after then.

Hey all, I've been running a RAMdisk to reduce the wear on my SSD and power consumption of my HDD. My inspiration originally came from this website, but some of the instructions were overly complicated and didn't play well with the only free ramdisk software I could find. I haven't noticed much of a power savings with my SSD+HDD setup, but I would suspect that people with only a HDD would see more (but small) power savings when compared to a SSD only system while browsing due to the shifting of cache and plugins to RAM. If someone tries this on a Win8 computer, please let me know if it's different! PROS Decreased wear on SSD Reduced noise/power consumption from HDD Increased browser performance CONS Need to load entire ramdisk on system startup, shutdown, and hibernate. Compression helps with this. Can use 1 Gb or more of RAM Can lose history/settings/tabs/any changes between RAMdisk saves to drive. RAMdisk issues = browser profile issues Extra setup effort Now to the guide 1. Download/install RAMdisk software. I use SoftPerfect RAM Disk because it's free, allows periodic backups on top of backing up on program shutdown, and doesn't have size restrictions. 2. Open the program 3. Make a new image. Image-->Create Image... I use 1024mb for the size, Hard Drive image type, and use NTFS. Save wherever you want. 4. Mount the image. You can choose to load it during boot or login. If you’re having issues with getting hung up on the shutdown screen, choose the other one. Load your image and it should autofill the size. I used the following flags: Mount as Removable – Keeps Windows from Indexing the drive. I use this. Hard Disk Emulation – Sometimes Windows requires this to make it behave. Also makes it show up in Disk Manager. I leave this disabled. Save Contents to Image – Enables the feature. Click on Advanced to configure the frequency of saving to image. I use 120 minutes. Drive letter – I use W, it’s far enough away from the normal drive letters that I regularly use. 5. Configure browser to use RAMDisk Firefox a. Close Firefox b. Go to “C: \users\*login name*\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla” folder c. Copy everything to RAMdisk d. press the windows key, type in “firefox -p" without the quotes e. Click Create Profile, then Next, then Choose Folder. Go to your RAMdisk, open the “Profile” folder, then double-click on your profile. It should look something like “p59adyr3.Default User.” Click Finish f. Open Firefox normally g. type “about:cache” in the address bar h. Your cache disk and offline cache should now be on your RAMdisk IE a. Open Internet Options b. On the “General” tab, click “Settings” under Browsing History c. On the “Temporary Internet Files” section, click “Move Folder” and make a new folder on your RAMdisk. For Chrome, you’re on your own. I’ve seen it on other pages I’ve referenced for this type of setup. Notes The best way to make changes on your RAMdisk after setting it up is after a fresh restart. The software is very finicky. I find that changing settings will regularly freeze the application, most likely due to the application waiting for open handles to the disk to close. With the image stored on my HDD, it stopped spinning down to save power. With a mixed SSD+HDD setup, saving the image on the HDD may eliminate power savings. On a HDD only system, the reduced read/writes would probably save power I hide the RAMdisk from myself in “My Computer” and Explorer. This requires a registry hack. I would not try this on a system with less than 8GB of RAM. I installed 16GB so I could run this RAMdisk, disable hibernation, and turn off the page file to help preserve the SSD. With a big enough RAMdisk and loading the image at boot, you could realistically use a RAMdisk for Windows Temp files as well. I have read that Windows Update will store stuff in the Windows Temp files that needs to get installed after a restart. I haven’t done this yet, but will. Consider using NTFS file compression on your image file. The actual RAMdrive is a driver, so your “System” process may use more CPU time. Rarely uses over 1% for me.

You can try, but you would be disappointed. Expect something like 70-80% of performance in a desktop rig, probably closer to 70% or a little less due to your CPU performance when compared to a newer IVB or Haswell quad-core. If you're in the US or Canada, Newegg has a sweet MSI GTX660 2GB OC for 160 after rebate today only. Might be worth a look depending on your budget, but that's cheaper than most 650 Ti (non Boost) on Amazon right now. Newegg.com - Shell Shocker Deal. Exclusive Jaw Dropping Savings on PC Components and Electronics.

Was it a 12V or 19V adapter? As I understand, a PE4L 2.1b takes only 12V. Do you have a backup video card around? I found a GT610 for 10 bucks on Newegg and use it as my backup. Also, try a sleep, power on gpu, plug in EC, wake up laptop. If you get errors then you might need a DSDT override.

Thanks, but I'm looking for a free solution. Softperfect just updated their offering that addresses many of the bugs that I've been experiencing. Once I get everything sorted out I'll report back and post a guide on how to put everything together. Right now I'm not seeing much battery savings as Firefox is running a constant 2% on my CPU, but maybe we can see some savings while actively browsing. HDD users might see more savings than me as it can potentially allow the drive to spin down while browsing, depending on the rest of your setup.

Chrome does support GPGPU web rendering https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1220892?hl=en Maybe Chrome thinks it's smarter than you and enabled this by default? Try this from guru3d's forums: If you go to Settings-->Show Advanced Settings and untick the box labeled "Use hardware acceleration when available" you no longer have GPU acceleration within the browser.

I have a 7260 coming in on a slow boat from Newegg. Should be here in a week, so I'll report back when I get some time. I'm not sure if I'll be getting any power reductions, maybe Intel is counting on the increased bandwidth to lower the time with the chip in an active state to save power? I found two fact sheets that show exactly the same power usage estimates: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/14650_div/14650_div.PDF http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/14801_na/14801_na.pdf Either they copied and pasted the numbers or they're banking on the bandwidth to pick up the slack. I can't find anything from Intel on the power usage, or anything on the Broadcom chip. Also, the review for the Lenovo laptop said that the "radios" were on, did this include the WWAN + GPS module that they had installed as well? GPS receivers can use a decent amount of power when active. The Samsung 840 (in the Lenovo) is one of the lowest power consuming SSDs out there, so I doubt the increase comes from that. I do like the dual battery setup and screen on the Lenovo, but no TB/ExpressCard + BGA CPU = fail for me (and most of us here I'm sure). I've been trying to use a ramdisk as a browser cache to reduce power consumption and increase performance. What else am I going to do with 16GB of RAM? I also disabled my pagefile to try and reduce read/writes to my SSD. My current setup is using SoftPerfect RAM Disk, but it keeps thrashing my HDD with a 1MB/s write and occasionally loading up one of my cores to 100%. Does anyone know of any good RAMdisk software that will let me save an image file in a specified time interval and on system shutdown? I'll try Dataram's free version to see if I can find anything useful. The performance improvement I do have right now is very much worth it though!

What plugins are you using? I've seen Flash and Java use a noticeable amount of CPU even when I don't have any websites that should use those plugins. Check out Process Explorer, it's like resource monitor on steroids. You can queue up a GPU column and see what's tasking the GPU. I don't think that you can tell it to watch one GPU over another, but maybe you can shut down processes one by one to see what's spinning up your eGPU.

What error code are you getting? I was getting various (and spurious) errors when I was using a bad power supply. I was even able to run a weaker GPU (GT610) successfully, but once I stressed the PSU I would get issues. If everything is working well, you have a dGPU only setup so it's a little more complicated. You can try using the info from here: http://forum.techinferno.com/diy-e-gpu-projects/3539-guide-dsdt-override-simultaneous-igpu-dgpu-egpu.html to try and find a solution to your issue. If you're trying to use the AMD card as an eGPU, then you will most likely be disappointed in your performance due to the PciE 1.0 link / lack of Optimus and should consider a new laptop. If you're using it as a GPGPU and don't care about the 1.0 link, then you might not notice a performance impact but should consider dual booting into Windows 7 to enable a DSDT registry hack.

Might be worthwhile for you to modify your registry to adjust CPU parking, in turning it off when plugged into AC and maximizing core parking when on battery. Windows 7 by default won't park logical cores, so they're not being parked when idle (at least they weren't for me). I used similar instructions to the "AHCI Link Power Management - HIPM/DIPM" reg hack to enable "Processor Performance Core Parking Min Cores" (0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583) and "Processor Performance Core Parking Core Override" (a55612aa-f624-42c6-a443-7397d064c04f). Set the former to 10% so that the min number of parked cores is 1 for a quad core with HT, and enable the latter so that Windows will park logical cores. When idle, I squeaked another .1 to .3W of power savings doing so. You can also modify "Processor Performance Core Parking Parked Performance State" (447235c7-6a8d-4cc0-8e24-9eaf70b96e2b) to force CPUs to enter a lower power state. The only side effect of doing all of this was that there is a slight pause when waking up cores or during web browsing. Microsoft has detailed its CPU power management here http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/0/2/3027D574-C433-412A-A8B6-5E0A75D5B237/ProcPowerMgmtWin7.docx Naturally, editing your registry can mess up your computer so be careful. To bring this back to being related to eGPU stuff, you could use the same settings to maximize your CPU performance. Here's some discussion on performance effects of disabling core parking: Possible perfect solution for Battlefield 4 spikes with high fps | EVGA Forums

I chose that particular extension cable because it had 8 wires and the male end plugs into the female end. Its original purpose as a CPU extension cable is a coincidence, the cable met my need for the number of wires I needed, wire length, wire gauge, and the ability for the ends to plug into each other and lock. I cut the wires so that the male end had about 2" and the female end had the remainder, and soldered the ends to where I wanted them to go. I cut off the XBOX end and soldered the male side to it, and soldered the female side to the appropriate connectors on the eGPU side. I made the 5V switchable by running the 5V red wire from the floppy molex to the same side of the switch as the blue XBOX PSU wire (5V to the blue wire signals for the 12V to activate). I made my observations with the 5V disconnected by trying to troubleshoot my 203W PSU that I fried. I reconnected 5V in my final setup for a number of reasons, but to mainly reduce the load on the 3.3V from the motherboard (3.3V gets converted to 5V on the PE4L, and I was having some issues with my other PCIE devices during testing with the GPU on 3.3V power) and to run/charge USB devices. In the end, you can just pull the 5V connector from the molex floppy power connector to your PE4L. If you're running an ATX power supply like pretty much everyone is doing, you probably only have one. If I do that on mine, I risk damaging the only connector I have and it's a pain in the butt to replace. Did I answer your question?

I don't know how much in the weeds you want to get on what materials to use, but have you considered using a thinner piece of copper and thermal epoxy on the heatsink? I would use a thinner piece of copper so that it still conducts the heat while storing less, and the epoxy to have a consistent connection. Ideally you want to limit the amount of materials and number of interfaces between the CPU and cooling source (air), but the shims that you've been using seem to be overcoming the aluminum limitation. Depending on how hardcore you wanted to go, I would consider doing the same thing on the heat pipe and heatsink connection as well. In doing all of this, you could probably buy yourself a few degrees C and save a heck of a lot of thermal paste between the shim and heatsink everytime you do a mod. I've used the epoxy on a 25W ceramic resistor in an automotive application. I applied it back in 2005 and it's still holding, and is still effective at moving heat.

For the leaderboard this time. I hooked the HDMI cable to the video card and ran all of the benchmarks on an external screen while disabling my laptop's internal screen. 3DMark06 - 21269 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3632QM,Hewlett-Packard 17DF 3DMark - Cloud Gate - 13554 / Fire Strike - 3549 / Ice Storm - 88497 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3632QM,Hewlett-Packard 17DF 3DMark 11 - 5083 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3632QM,Hewlett-Packard 17DF 3DMark Vantage - 18535 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3632QM,Hewlett-Packard 17DF Heaven - 1135 With the exception of Ice Storm, my performance loss is around 10 to 15% when running on the internal screen. My Heaven score seems low, maybe I have some settings that are different than what everyone else has been using? Overall, I'm happy with the performance. These numbers are without overclocking, and apparently with OC many of these TiB cards can get to within 10% of a GTX660. Maybe a future project...

Good catch on the number of wires, it's 3x12V and 3xGnd. I edited my original post to prevent any confusion in the future. For the 8 pin power cable, I cut the wires in the middle, separating the male and female 8 pin connectors to make the system a little more portable. I hooked up the male side to the power supply and the female side is on the egpu side, this way I could separate the psu from the egpu. If I didn't do this, then I would have to solder the power supply directly to all the connections, which doesn't work with my future plans to make an enclosure.

This is what I see in the device manager: Three separate memory blocks, so probably the normal Nvidia allocation? For the PSU, hardly anything different as compared to a 203W. The PSU is much lighter and uses a 2-prong vs 3-prong plug. The 3-prong fits too, but the ground connector is gone. I had a 203W for my eGPU but it was either bad or I fried it when I accidentally hooked up a 12V-->5V reducer backwards. I had 40V coming out of the 5V side hooked up to the PE4L...good thing it was smart enough to turn itself off! After I fried it, I could run a GT610 through full benchmarks but the 650TiB would freeze after a few seconds (power starvation maybe?). The 175W is missing the two small (extra 12V and gnd) wires that the 203W had, so there's only 8 total wires (3x12V switched, 3xGnd, 1x5V always on, 1xsense for switching on 12V). My long-term goal is to get a project box for my eGPU, so I used one of these: StarTech EPS8EXT 8" EPS 8 Pin Power Extension Cable - Newegg.com as a connector between the PSU and eGPU. I ran 12V and 5V using a floppy Molex connector to the PE4L, and also soldered a gpu power plug. I put a switch between the 5V and power-on sense wire, and on the sense wire side, ran the 5V to the PE4L. This way I have switched 12V and 5V. Some discoveries from tinkering with this setup: The middle ground on the GPU power connector is used as some sort of sense line to see if the connector is hooked up. Having this not connected to ground threw an error 43, just like if the connector was not hooked up. Resoldering this to one of the ground lines fixed the error 43. @Tech Inferno Fan mentioned something a few months ago about how a PE4L was supposed to automatically reset with the #PERST after a restart. I had this behavior when I had the 5V line on the Molex disconnected and the J4 on the PE4L removed. You can simulate this on an ATX power supply setup by starting up your laptop with the expresscard connected and egpu power off, so the PE4L took the 3.3V from the expresscard. Has anyone else noticed something along these lines? This could elimiate the soft-restart issues that most of us have been having. I didn't have any issues with setting up the 650Ti Boost with my 2570P. Essentially plug and play. I have Setup 1.x for another reason, but I don't think that I needed it for this. I still have yet to run benchmarks on an external monitor, but right now I'm running Skyrim (no mods) on the internal monitor at 720P on a mix of high and ultra settings.

Thanks everyone for your help. I finally got my eGPU set up with a GTX650Ti Boost. I'm using a 175W XBOX 360 PSU. All these scores are using the internal LCD, but if anyone wants me to run the benchmarks on an external please let me know. 3DMark06 - 19350 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3632QM,Hewlett-Packard 17DF 3DMark - Cloud Gate - 11179 / Fire Strike - 3356 / Ice Storm - 23911 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3632QM,Hewlett-Packard 17DF 3DMark 11 - 4821 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3632QM,Hewlett-Packard 17DF 3DMark Vantage - 16613 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3632QM,Hewlett-Packard 17DF Heaven - 1003

Give me a few days and I'll check it out. I tried doing that with my usb-only mini pcie and it didn't show up, but I'm guessing that the bios treats this differently? I also tried taping pin 20 on a mini pcie wifi card and I still had the issue.