![]() The final upgrade was two 512GB Samsung Evo 860 SSDs that replaced the old 120GB Patriot ones to get me 1TB of local storage. I removed the W520 keyboard and zip-tied another USB powered 92mm fan to the CPU cooler so that the (louder) built-in fan doesn’t have to spin up as frequently (not in picture below). The fan connector is not the right one but can be jammed onto the graphics card fan header and wedged under the cooler. The standard ZOTAC fans are loud and I replaced them with a single 80mm Noctua fan mounted with zip-ties. While it didn’t require old drivers to work, it had all sorts of other display-artifact problems that I didn’t feel like troubleshooting. The old driver has proven to be a problem only when trying to play very recent games, and is not a blocker (but do get in touch if you happen to have gotten a setup like this working with the latest Nvidia drivers). I never got recent drivers to work, but version 375.70 from 2016 is stable for me-implausibly since it predates and is not supposed to support the 1050-series GPU. Recent Nvidia driver versions have introduced an incompatibility with eGPU setups and I spent some time troubleshooting “Error 43” before getting output on the external screen. UPDATE: This script from a user on the eGPU.io forums fixed the “Error 43” incompatibility for me. Note that a 220W Dell power brick is also required to power the PCIe dock and graphics card. I settled on a Nvidia GTX 1050ti graphics card since it’s reasonably fast and power efficient. An “eGPU” ExpressCard to PCIe adapter is required to plug in a real graphics card and I got the $50 EXP GDC. This avoids the overhead and extra latency of the USB protocol. Internal mini-PCIe slot used for WiFi adapter (the Lenovo BIOS whitelists approved devices however, so a hacked BIOS is required to plug in anything fun)ĮxpressCard technology was on the way out in 2011 but had reached its zenith and in the W520 offers a direct interface to the system PCI Express bus.Luckily the W520 has a bunch of expansion options that can potentially host a more modern graphics adapter: The W520 has a reasonably fast Nvidia discreet GPU and can render 4K just fine using remote desktop, but neither the VGA port nor the DisplayPort on the laptop can push out that many pixels to a plugged-in monitor. My main requirement was a system that can power a 4K monitor running at 60hz. For my home PC, I wanted to see if I could make the W520 work. In 2017 I moved into condo and got to have a home office after 7 years of moving between assorted shared San Francisco houses and apartments. Whenever I did, though, I found myself thinking “oh year, this is a really neat and fast machine, I should use it for something”. I also added a cheap 120GB mSATA SSD for scratch storage (the mSATA slot is SATAII, so somewhat slower).Īfter leaving AppHarbor I used the W520 only sporadically for testing Windows Server pre-releases and running test VMs. At some later point I upgraded to 32GB RAM (4x8GB)-memory was much cheaper back then. The result was a 1GB/s read-write disk array which was good for 2011. I spec’ed it with a quad-core/8-thread i7-2820QM 2.3/3.4GHz 8MB 元 processor, 8GB RAM, and two 320GB spinning disks configured for RAID 0 (You had to order with a RAID setup to get that option, and 320GB disks was the cheapest way to do that).Īfter taking delivery I switched out the disk drives for two 120GB Patriot Wildfire SSDs, also in RAID 0. In fact, you can see it in this 2012 AppHarbor housewarming invitation connected to two 23″ portrait-mode monitors. ![]() I got the W520 as my main work laptop in late 2011. This post describes upgrades I’ve made to keep the machine relevant in 2018. I find it to still be very fast and a joy to use. My home computer is a tricked-out 2011 ThinkPad W520.
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