The second option and the one I went with, is to go with a third-party inside of China who is taking these same parts, and installing them into X201 chassis to provide a more turnkey solution. Once you have the motherboard, you can follow the instructions on the 51nb forum for the slight modifications that need to be done to the X210 chassis to fit the new components. Keep in mind, a lot of the available information is poorly translated, so I’m going to do my best to represent my personal experience with this notebook.īoth Weidian and Taobao will likely require the use of third-party package relay services to order these components for delivery outside of China.
However, it seems likely that at least some of these individuals are working in the PC industry as their day job, which gains them access to the much-guarded documents and materials to make something like this happen in their free time. Since there’s not a whole lot of information on the crew behind these notebooks (including the elusive “HOPE” who provides excellent updates and details on the forums), we don’t want to speculate too much. These ThinkPads represent the transition time for the ThinkPad brand from IBM to Lenovo and are some of the last notebooks to feature what fans consider standout “ThinkPad” details such as the fantastic 7-row keyboard with the blue enter key, 16:10 displays, and the ThinkLight. Through the work of some intrepid modders, I am now the proud owner of a 2010-vintage Lenovo ThinkPad X201 with a modern, 8 th generation quad-core mobile processor, NVMe SSD, and 32GB of DDR4 memory in it.įor several years now, the forum section of the Chinese 51nb site (a general technology news/review site), have taken it upon themselves to develop, test, and produce new motherboards to retrofit modern technologies into older ThinkPads such as the X60/X60s, X61/X61s, T60/T61, and in this case the X200/X201.įor ThinkPad fans, these model numbers will have a special place in their heart. What we are taking a look at today, however, defies all common knowledge of the PC world. Generally, notebooks don’t use standard components, making it virtually impossible to do something like swap newer hardware into an existing notebook chassis. One area that largely gets left behind in the PC hardware modification world is notebooks. In general, these sorts of project swap new, high-performance hardware into chassis from vintage desktop computers, t his build from Linus Tech Tips springs to mind as a standout option. The enthusiast PC building world also has their equivalent sleepers. This performance can come from a variety of different areas it might be a high-performance trim level of a vehicle that most people associate to be cheap or slow, from modifications, or even entire drivetrain swaps. Sleepers are high-performance cars in mundane, dull shells. In the automotive world, there is the idea of a sleeper car. The Story Begins From an Alternate Reality