Comment by leiroigh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leiroigh | Hacker News Reader

I am a happy owner of an x62. This article almost convinced me to buy an x210 next.

Minor gripes: (1) The dispayport-hdmi thing, (2) the mainboard is split (sound + rhs usb are on a separate board) and the small part has pretty flimsy attachement inside the case, (3) the CPU (i5 broadwell engineering sample) is pretty lackluster but perfect for development (no turbo, no throttling, no surprises), (4) finding an ok screen is hard, (5) nobody told me that I have to buy a separate wifi card. There is a free mini-pci slot, but 51nb could have been clearer on their online description, (5) the old x60 speakers suck.

Overall, it is an awesome machine (trackpoint, ibm keyboard, beautiful rubberized metal case). And shockingly cheap: An x62 mainboard, plus an old x60 chassis from ebay and battery from amazon, plus screen from alibaba, plus SSD, wifi-card and ram comes at ~$600 (I think?), cheap enough to buy as an experiment. I can definitely recommend to anyone who is ok with a little tinkering and the small adventure of ordering this from China (best approach: have Chinese colleague).

edit: Linux drivers work perfectly. Really, the ram was the most expensive component of this build. To expand on the no-surprises advantage of the CPU: To me it is more important to effortlessly benchmark small code changes than to quickly compile large codebases. And the weird engineering sample CPU that the 51nb guys sourced somewhere is absolutely perfect for that: Timings reliably match up with Agner Fog's instruction tables / iaca, without anything getting into the way (after the kernel cpufreq manager adjusted).

I'm not sure what screen you got off Alibaba but if you want something better, you might want to try the daylight LED mod.[1] You won't get better color gamut, but you will get insane brightness and better battery life.

I did that mod to my X62 and it made the screen actually usable.

1. https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/thinkpad/led-kit.shtml

It'll be a little while before I'm offering them again. Still clearing new projects out of the way.

Damn, 15 minutes after getting pointed to your mods the disappointment :)

Also, thanks for all your guides on the thinkpad forums.

Would you mind writing a small idiosyncratic guide about "51nb procurement for dummies"?

Like: Buy one of these models of chassis. These aftermarket batteries. These screens (possibly with aliexpress links). Use this preferred method of ordering. Remember that you also need to procure (ram, wifi, ssd).

I was lucky enough to have a chinese collegue who dealt with everything for me (I sent him the taobao link and gave him cash, next time he visited family he brought me my board). Without that I would have been lost.

(seriously, taobao? no way to enter a non-chinese address? Take my money already! There must be somebody in China who wants to make a quick $50 per item for just reshipping 51nb boards to the West, e.g. via aliexpress or ebay, instead of imposing on the time of hackers / hardware engineers who have better things to do than reshipping packages)

The problem with any specific process or link recommendations is they become obsolete instantly. Putting one of these together requires some searching and active exception handling.

There are Chinese services that do forwarding (I use FSC), as well as enthusiast engineers, like Jacky (or me), but enthusiasts get overwhelmed quickly... it becomes a full time job for little or no profit. I have to consciously dial way back to keep this only a hobby so it stays fun.

I know, and I am super grateful for all the cool things you and the other people in the scene develop, and for the effort you go to to actually ship out modkits. You do what's fun and I won't ask for more.

Don't get me wrong, putting together my x62 from your and other's guides was fun. I am just wishing that some of the Shenzen hardware hackers had an entrepreneurial cousin or friend who made a business out of this. I wish I could just send an aliexpress link to all my friends who rightfully complain about lenovo design quality nosediving.

> the mainboard is split (sound + rhs usb are on a separate board) and the small part has pretty flimsy attachement inside the case

That's however the same with the stock design and I've never had an issue with that. IIRC there are a couple pins from the lower casting holding it in place and then it's sandwiched using IIRC two or three screws between the lower casting and the palmrest. That's pretty solid.

The old x60 mainboard was a single part. I don't know about the x61.

It's not a big issue, but makes assembly pretty annoying because everything sticks out: There is no screw-hole from the lower casing in the extra attachement, and the flat connector cable has enough tension that the entire contraption bulges out and flaps around, until everything is fitted together. Or maybe I am just bad at this kind of stuff.

Just praising with faint damnation, really.

It would be so awesome if someone in the 51nb circles made an attempt to make money by properly marketing their stuff: make ordering easy in the west, possibly sell pre-assembled modded barebones (screen mod + 51nb mobo + new battery in place, chassis bought in bulk in china), put some modest markup on top and try to sell in the 10k units instead of the 100s. There really are a lot of people who think t60/x60/x220 are the pinnacle of laptop design and would love to get a machine with similar quality but modern hardware. The set of people who are motivated to spend their time modding is much smaller.

I am under no illusions that you could sell enough modkits to recoup engineering costs, if this was a truly commercial product. But you don't really need to: The development is a labour of love.

My mistake, I thought you were referring to the X201/X210.

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