t420 CPU Upgrade

https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/t420

How stable is the i7-3720qm CPU Upgrade in the t420?  You guys have it listed under the tested portion.  I want to grab myself one, but would want to see if it's worth my time to upgrade the CPU, or just go with something more powerful.

[Zoran Stojsavljevic]

Let us try to understand what is i7-3720QM for itself? To find out, we'll
ask our good friend ark.intel.com:
http://ark.intel.com/products/64891/Intel-Core-i7-3720QM-Processor-6M-Cache-...

Important points: 4 (Quad) Core, 8 HTs, TDP 45W, DDR3/DDR3L 1333/1666MHz,
GFX base FREQ 650MHz, GFX Device ID 0x0166 .

As I see from: https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/t420
vBIOS (64KB) file pci8086,0166.rom does exist, so GFX wise Coreboot is
supported. I guess, IVB FSP does support as well i7-3720QM, with built-in
MRC algorithms for DDR3 (1.5V) and DDR3L (1.35V) 1333/1666MHz.

The only one thing here to take care of is new MCU to be entered in config:
it is after all sku specific (new sku demands new MCU).

And one more important point, economy wise, this sku costs around $350 USD.
If you do have these monies, IVB is 61% more PM efficient then its
counterpart SNB (currently present in yout T420 laptop). :-)

Good Luck!
Zoran

On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 6:08 AM,  wrote:
> https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/t420
>
> How stable is the i7-3720qm CPU Upgrade in the t420?  You guys have it
> listed under the tested portion.  I want to grab myself one, but would want
> to see if it's worth my time to upgrade the CPU, or just go with something
> more powerful.

[arian]

Hi chub,

I have a 3740qm in mine, runs fine with the minor constraint that it isn't completely full-load-stable - apparently something decides to shutdown the machine at 100°C core temp before the cpu reduces boost from 3.5 GHz - happens to me in the third run of a kernel build with make -j8.

regards, arian

On 27.08.2016 06:08, [e-mail] wrote:
> https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/t420
>
> How stable is the i7-3720qm CPU Upgrade in the t420?  You guys have it listed under the tested portion.  I want to grab myself one, but would want to see if it's worth my time to upgrade the CPU, or just go with something more powerful.