ThinkPad T470P Upgrades

[ThinkPad560X]

Anyone ever desolder and solder in a CPU on the newer laptops? I am not thinking of doing this but wondering if anyone ever did or wanted to swap out a i5 with an i7 soldered CPU. I always liked maxing out my machines and upgrading them. And that was upgrading the CPU the RAM and the HDD to an SSD. Now we lost the CPU upgrade and half of the RAM if not all soldered RAM on select laptops. Apple is the worse, everything is soldered and even the SSD. Must pick your size during purchase. But the good news if following ThinkPads. The T14/T15 Gen5 will come with 2 RAM slots upgradable. https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press ... on-at-mwc/ Not sure if Lenovo is testing to see how many people are going to upgrade their ram or to say see no one wants upgradable ram and is better and cheaper to have soldered.

My T470p has the i5 and the only way to max it is to replace the motherboard with an i7 along with getting the Nvidia GPU over my Intel. The boards are around $70-$100 for the i7 Nvidia chip. I don't think it is worth the swap of a good working board and the age of the T470p now. I have 32GB maxed on it as well. But minus the Nvidia chip, if the CPU was socketed, I could have upgraded from a i5 to an i7 easily.

[TPFanatic]

lack of thunderbolt would turn me away from t470p, which is just a Kaby Lake t460p, even the quad core models. subsequent generations have more cores and thunderbolt, with how inexpensively one can hunt down a t490 or l14, if you really want more capability in a 14" laptop the t470p is a dead end.

[ThinkPad560X]

Apparently BGA chips being sold for solder onto boards is a thing. https://www.ebay.com/itm/232443121248?i ... R7yqx5fOYw

I just thought you wouldn't find the BGA soldered chips as they are of course soldered to the board, but I guess there is a market and probably is being done. But the question is then, say upgrading a i3,i5 BGA processor to a same gen BGA i7. Would that motherboard read that CPU or not, as the motherboard bios was probably only programed to accept that i3 or i5 processor only and no bios update would exist to read the higher chip as you are not supposed to upgrade that chip.

Most likely these BGA chips being sold are for replaceable of the exact BGA chip that went bad.

[TPFanatic]

I would gamble the t470p would work with any other skylake or kaby lake, possibly even kaby lake-r.

My x330 works fine with a 3615qe, even when I temporarily had the stock bios flashed.

[axur-delmeria]

But the question is then, say upgrading a i3,i5 BGA processor to a same gen BGA i7. Would that motherboard read that CPU or not, as the motherboard bios was probably only programed to accept that i3 or i5 processor only and no bios update would exist to read the higher chip as you are not supposed to upgrade that chip.

AFAIK the BIOS doesn't work like that, and you can upgrade to a same-gen i7 without worrying about the BIOS support.

[ThinkPad560X]

It may even be that simple and they just got rid of the socket for the slim systems. But it was mostly for the cost to save, and they figured the average person/company isn't going to touch the CPU or even the RAM. But that is why I wanted to see if anyone has done this with a soldered in CPU swap. I don't plan to do this with my ThinkPad T470p or any of them but just want to see if it was doable. So that we are not locked down with an apple like system as I hate soldered RAM, CPU, Storage and even GPU but that option is only on larger laptops anyway. I have a ThinkPad and that is always why I bought a ThinkPad for its upgradability, longevity and build quality. I still have my IBM ThinkPad 600X and it keyboard is solid and the machine is still running great.