I managed to bag a Lenovo Thinkpad T440 for quite cheap as a replacement to my old laptop and I’ve been wondering about upgrading it.

Problem is the T440 is quite hostile when it comes to upgrading, unlike the T440p. Replacing, for example, the CPU is basically impossible as it’s soldered directly to the board. And so I’ve been thinking about something stupid a.k.a. replacing the motherboard entirely with a T440s board, which has a better CPU soldered onto it.

In theory the two boards should have the same dimensions and should be interchangeable, but does anyone know if that’s actually the case? I couldn’t find much about this kind of swap online, so I thought asking here would be a good idea.

  • fine_sandy_bottom
    9·
    5 months ago

    you might have more luck asking on mastodon or something.

    I’m a huge thinkpad fan but this question is just so specific, you might need a broader audience.

  • monsterpiece42@reddthat.com
    4·
    5 months ago

    So I don’t have a direct answer about vanilla/s/p board compatibility but my question for you is, why not just get a T440 board? They can be had on eBay for $80-100 USD and will drop in. You can get up to an i7-4600U, which is more than fine for daily computing with an SSD and at least 16GB of DDR3-1600.

    • brachypelmasmithi@lemm.eeOP
      3·
      4 months ago

      oh damn, i didn’t realize you can get boards like that! i thought they all had the i3, so i didn’t bother to look. thanks a lot!

      • monsterpiece42@reddthat.com
        2·
        4 months ago

        Sure thing! So Lenovo has the PSREF library which is awesome about old hardware specs, so you can always look up what you could have got in your machine back when they were new.

        Here’s a link to the .PDF for your T440.

        One of the reasons I like Thinkpads so much is the support of the community with mods, parts and so on. Feel free to hmu if you need Thinkpad help lol.

        • brachypelmasmithi@lemm.eeOP
          2·
          4 months ago

          One of the reasons I like Thinkpads so much is the support of the community with mods, parts and so on. Feel free to hmu if you need Thinkpad help lol.

          That’s specifically why I got mine. It’s a shame I couldn’t find good deals on a T440P in my area but even the regular T440 should be enough for my needs. Thanks for the link btw! Interesting that the T440 has a military certification lmao

          • monsterpiece42@reddthat.com
            2·
            4 months ago

            Yeah I wouldn’t worry about having a non-p. I’d bet the extra battery life would be worth the slight hit to performance.

            And yeah, Thinkpads are tanks, and I appreciates that about them.