The FINAL Upgrade For My 10 Year Old Thinkpad T430

Today I finally go ahead and see if there's anymore performance I can squeeze out of our Thinkpad T430 by adding an external GPU with a special adapter.

Some of the following product links are affiliate links for which I may be compensated.

Make your own T430 Gamer setup (affiliate)

[lectrc]

“Now remember, if the whole laptop boots up first try and everything works perfectly, you must have missed a screw somewhere. And if you aren’t missing a screw, something’s broken.” - This resonates with me so much. Every time! Great video, I subscribed.

[bryans]

Well, you ended up with a more powerful CPU and renewed thermal paste, both of which will improve this laptop's initial mission of being an excellent business machine. I suspect everything else was just for fun.

[michaelrusso]

Did you check your BIOS settings to ensure the ExpressCard slot is actually putting out a Gen 2 PCI-E link, or is it defaulting to Gen 1? Apparently sometimes there are issues with that on these machines, depending on the quality of the cabling and setup as well. Do you have any alternatives besides the ExpressCard – for example, is there an NVMe or mPCI-E-capable slot available on the motherboard, such as the WAN slot, which might offer a better link?

[DanStormVO]

Socketed CPU in laptops need to make a comeback. I updated my T440p from a dualcore i5-4300M to the quadcore i7-4700MQ. Not only did I instantly feel the performance difference with booting, loading programs and the general snappiness of the system, it also cleared up some weird freezing issues I was having. I'd assumed it was my OS install, but since I've not had many performance related issues since the new CPU I'd bet it was just the poor i5 struggling to manage a modern 64-bit OS.

Despite not having the best thermals and the ageing battery taking even more of a hit, I've been pleasantly surprised at the i7's performance in emulation and light gaming!

[funnifurrytechgirl]

Absolutely amazing setup you've got there, and your voice is really relaxing to listen to. I put your videos on loop when programming.

[stridervanmeter]

i had a setup similar to this for a year or 2. quad core t530 with a 1080p screen, thinkpad dock and a gtx 1080ti hooked up through expresscard. youre right, disabling the built in display does make it run faster.

[DkKOfficial]

That's so cool! I had T430s and it supported me during my 4 year IT degree! Absolute turstable laptop. I even gamed on it. Ended witcher 3, GTA 5 and Fall out 3/4.

[lokmannaza]

Omg! I just repasted my t430 yesterday and you upload this 😄😄😄

[bearfm]

Gaming isn't really the first thing I think when I hear 3rd gen Intel

[zvzenjoyer-ao]

My new favorite tech channel ! Gone through so many ThinkPad videos on youtube before buying my own L390 few days back !! And I use your voice as a relaxing background noise while writing codes, so thank you !!!

[robsquared]

I think the only followup for this would be to stream on twitch on this setup while at a coffee shop.

[raginaldmars]

bought a T 410
for 80 Euros last year
excellent machine!

[retroree]

If you do another video on this laptop you should try one thing to upgrade the GPU performance: Use modded drivers, AMD GPUs benefit a lot from having modded drivers, specially older cards

[devisals]

I used to have the same laptop when I was younger. This was such a good laptop for the time!

[Lemagnes]

My first computer at 30. It means a lot to me. Thanks for this video. Like and subscription. Blessings.

[gregoryodell]

Ran this setup for about 6 months with a GTX 980 when I was at university and it was honestly daily driveable. Only cavieat was that I had to shut down the laptop to remove the GPU but for how jank I'd say it's pretty reasonable. Games worked a lot better.

[leomacal-ju]

bet this setup will be considered high end in the old days

[Facade]

Loving these videos!! Keep up the amazing videos. (sorry to hear that you’re wife doesn’t let you get anymore gpus hope it changes for the better).

[polosandoval]

Make sure you have a fire extinguisher handy when working on these projects… your girlfriend will thank you for it. My wife did lol thanks for the fun video and project

[monkmichael-munkmiikael-hy]

Thank you very much for doing this, this was just the information I needed. Now I know I should get a new fast laptop rather than upgrading Lenovo T430.