Comment by anon6362
7 days ago
T480 (non-s)
- Love the dual batteries (one swappable) unavailable on Apple-design infested T490
- Retrofitted with magnesium top case and bezel mod
- 5 extended 72 Whr batteries with a third-party external charger from some dude in the UK
- Upgraded to fastest processor and discrete GPU (slow on its own but I use a Razer Core X eGPU with an Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti, and can run basically any game on Steam.)
- 32 GiB of RAM
- WiFi 6e Intel AX210 (looking at WiFi 7 using the AMD-compatible Broadcom FastConnect 7800 / QCNCM865 that I run on my AMD 7900 Asrock DeskMini X600 electronic lab Windows-only things box that I'm typing on right now).
- Bought OE replacement most likely to fail: keyboards, pointing stick (and tips), trackpad assembly, and fans (I think I bought 6). Any loose USB, etc. connectors I can resolder myself.
- I might have a slight mainboard problem because I'm constantly running ThrottleStop to get higher, sustained Tdp with SpeedFan sending fans manually to full blast or otherwise the max freq randomly drops to painfully-slow 900 MHz max non-deterministically.
What is the magnesium top case and bezel mod? Will any Intel AX210 card work, or do I have to somehow patch the T480's firmware to update the wifi whitelist?
Intel AX210 card worked for me out of the box in Linux.
Most likely need to repaste your CPU and replace any thermal pads for good measure (they tend to get damaged easily when removing heatsink, and do degrade over time too)