In April 2024, I wrote on the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s gen 4 and how it does not suck under Linux.

That is still true. It’s been fantastic, and a very reliable laptop during all that time.

The P14s gen 4 comes with a CPU that is still solid today, the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U, and that comes with impressive integrated graphics in the form of an AMD Radeon 780M.

I’ve had a Steam Deck.

I’ve also accidentally built a Steam Machine.

I had to put SteamOS on this laptop to see how well it does. I did a quick Bazzite test the last time around, but after being impressed with how well the stock SteamOS image runs on a random machine with an AMD GPU, I had to test that, too.

Installing SteamOS on USB storage

The normal way to install SteamOS on a machine is to take the Steam Deck recovery image and to install it on your own machine that has one NVMe SSD.

I didn’t want to do exactly that, I wanted to run it off of an USB SATA SSD, which the recovery image does not support, as it hard-codes the target SSD for the SteamOS installation to /dev/nvme0n1. There’s a handy project out there that customizes the recovery script to allow you to install SteamOS to any target device, but I learned about that after the fact.

I went a slightly different route: I imaged the SteamOS installation from my DIY Steam Machine build, wrote it to the 4TB USB SSD that I had available for testing, and after that I resized the /home partition to take up the full disk. Bam, clean SteamOS on a USB SSD!

Oh, and before I did that, I did the same process but to a 128 GB Samsung FIT USB 3.0 thumb drive.

It worked.

The game library images did load a bit slowly, but it was a great demonstration of how low you can go with the hardware requirements. I wouldn’t recommend actually installing games on such a setup as that would likely kill the USB thumb drive very quickly.

Performance

I ran the SteamOS setup on this laptop over a USB-C dock that only supports running at up to 4K at 30Hz, so I did testing at 1080p 60Hz setup. You’re unlikely to want to run this setup at 4K anyway, unless you’re a fan of light, easy to run games like Katamari or Donut County.

In most games, the experience was enjoyable. 1080p resolution, maybe change the settings to medium or low in some cases, and you’ll likely have a solid gaming experience.

Forza Horizon 4? No problem, 1080p high settings and a solid, consistent experience.

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered was an equally enjoyable experience, and I did not have to turn the settings down from high/ultra.

God of War Ragnarök was pushing the setup to the limits. With 1080p, low/medium settings you can expect 30+ FPS. If you include AMD FSR settings in the mix and also enable FSR frame generation, you can have a perfectly enjoyable 50-60 FPS experience. Some UI hints were a bit “laggy” with frame generation, but I’m genuinely surprised how well that rendering trick worked. I’ll admit it, my eyesight is not the best, but given the choice of a crisp but laggy picture, and a slightly blurrier but smoother experience, I’d pick the latter. After a pint of Winter Stout, you won’t even notice the difference.¹

Wreckfest was also heaps fun. It did push the limits of the GPU at times, but running it at 1080p and medium/high settings is perfectly enjoyable.

The observed power usage throughout the heaviest games measured via SteamOS performance metrics (mangohud) were around 30-40 W, with the GPU using up the most of that budget. In most games, the CPU was less heavily loaded, and in the games that required good single thread performance, it could provide it.

The SteamOS revolution

I like SteamOS. It’s intentionally locked down in some aspects (but you can unlock it with one command), and the Flatpak-only approach to software installation will make some people mad, but I like this balance. It almost feels like a proper console-type experience, almost.

Valve does not officially support running SteamOS on random devices, but they haven’t explicitly prevented it either. I love that.

Take any computer from AMD that has been manufactured from the last 5 years, slap SteamOS on it, and there is a very high chance that you’ll have a lovely gaming experience, with the level of detail and resolution varying depending on what hardware you pick.

A top of the line APU from AMD seems to do the job well enough for most casual gamers like myself, and if the AMD Strix Halo based systems were more affordable, I would definitely recommend getting one if you want a small but efficient SteamOS machine.

Last year, we saw the proliferation of gaming-oriented Linux distros.

The Steam Machine is shipping this year.

DankPods is covering gaming on Linux.

2026 has to be the year of the Linux (gaming) desktop.

This is a follow-up to my two previous attempts on this topic:

• Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?
• ThinkPad as a server: the follow-up

Since then, I’ve had quite a few changes to my home server setup:

• I put my home server stuff on an IKEA pegboard
• I tried the Zimaboard
• I switched back to the ASRock DeskMini
• I got fiber again!

Zimaboard was great, until the CPU became just a little bit too slow for my needs.

ASRock Deskmini X300 was great, until I learned that it’s actually relatively bad at idle power usage due to lack of lower sleep states.

Combined with my recent tech cleanup, I am now proudly running all of my services on a single home server, powered by my trusty ThinkPad T430.

The promise of USB-C everything was too good to pass up, so I stopped resisting.

Doesn’t mean that I won’t run hardware into the ground.

Compared to last two attempts, I’ve made a couple of important changes to the setup.

There is a weekly tlp recalibrate BAT0 job scheduled that completely drains the battery and charges it up again, which should make sure that the laptop battery survives for a longer time. The battery charge threshold is set to 80%.

I’ve used a knock-off Honeywell PTM7950 thermal pad on the CPU. The cooling performance is comparable to using thermal paste, but hopefully it doesn’t drip out.

The whole setup is mounted to an IKEA pegboard using a Nillkin ProDesk laptop stand and a generous amount of zip ties. The combination of zip ties and the rubber feet on the stand result in the stand barely moving once mounted. The laptop stand itself is very sturdy, and you’ll have to use a lot of force to change its angle.

The CPU uses less power compared to the previous one. The one in the server is the Intel i7-3632QM, a quad-core CPU with a 35W TDP.

I still have some scripts running to limit the CPU temperatures to 85°C, just to be on the safe side and avoid overheating at all costs.

The power consumption is improved on this setup:

• mean: 27 W
• min: 23 W
• max: 70 W

Results on the DeskMini on a typical day:

• mean: 34.8 W
• min: 28 W
• max: 89 W

All measurements include the power consumption of the UPS, fiber PON and the router, which is around 10 W.

And the performance is good enough.

I’m happy with it.

It’s also handy that I now have that one laptop that I can sticker bomb without feeling guilty about removing them later on.

2025 June update

I have been running the ThinkPad T430 as a home server for a long time now. In fact, it’s one of the longest stints I’ve had with a specific home server setup. The battery recalibration was temporarily disabled because of it interfering with UPower configuration that I had in place for shutting down the laptop at a higher battery percentage (40%), but in all other aspects it’s doing fine, and after removing UPower, the battery recalibration works again.

There was a short week-long experiment with a ThinkCentre M900 Tiny, but that got put on pause because the USB-connected drives were a bit flaky. The ThinkPad T430 has proven itself to be a more stable server platform as a result.

I probably shouldn’t have written down my notes on the eGPU setup I had years ago.

I’d be lying if I wasn’t considering remaking this setup with everything I’ve learned 6 years later.

Oops.

I got access to an allegedly-faulty AMD Radeon RX 480 and an NVIDIA GTX 1650 for free thanks to my friend, so I ordered the EXP GDC Beast v8.5c, two sorts of 6/8pin power cables, and a 12V 12A DC power supply.

The idea was to take a ThinkPad T430, bolt a GPU to it, and use it as a stationary workstation until the laptop dies or gets too slow for modern tasks. The resale value of the T430 is too low for me to justify selling it, and if there’s anyone out there who can run a T430 into the ground 5+ years from now, then it’s probably going to be me.

Quick specs:

• CPU: Intel i7-3820QM
• RAM: 16GB DDR3
• Storage: 4TB Samsung 870 QVO

Side-note: I also went ahead and replaced the thermal paste with a bootleg Honeywell PTM7950 phase-changing thermal pad. It works just as well as fresh thermal paste, but hopefully it won’t drip out if the laptop is running up-right, in a vertical laptop stand.

Testing

My testing with the GTX 1650 was brief, as the open source nouveau driver crashed on the Wayland desktop¹, the proprietary drivers under Fedora did not seem to work, and under Windows the NVIDIA driver intentionally triggers the error code 43 issue. A tweak exists for the Windows issue, but that didn’t help much either.

The AMD Radeon RX 480 seems to work well out of the box on Windows 11, plug-and-play. However, it wasn’t that stable, but that could be related to the possibly faulty GPU itself or the power supply that can barely drive it under load. Or the fact that Windows itself was running off of a 128GB Samsung USB 3.0 flash drive. Probably the latter, given that the USB stick died as a result of this experiment.

On Fedora Linux 40, I discovered that eGPU-s aren’t really plug and play. Sure, the image is there, but on my ultrawide monitor I saw a whopping 11 frames per second! Turns out that by default GNOME on Wayland doesn’t like to use the eGPU as the main rendering device, even on more legitimate Thunderbolt-based eGPU setups. It’s a common enough problem that there exist multiple solutions to this issue.

I didn’t like any of them², so I disabled the i915 kernel driver responsible for driving the iGPU, which did the trick. The 3440x1440p ultrawide monitor was being rendered by the eGPU and for the most part the experience was very smooth.

The iGPU in the T430 can also run the ultrawide monitor at 60 Hz via the DisplayPort port on the dock, but it can’t run things at 60 FPS at all times because it’s really, really weak.

The eGPU ran things much smoother, which made the whole setup feel more responsive and great to use. It’s not the fastest setup in the world, but the GUI running smoothly certainly makes it feel like one.

I didn’t have a ton of games installed for testing, but I did give Minecraft a try, and it ran just fine. The CPU was struggling when building new parts of the map, but the visuals were doing fine and I could see myself playing on this setup for hours.

There were some things that weren’t running smoothly even with the eGPU. For example, 1080p H.265 video playback was awfully choppy. Using radeontop revealed around 80% GPU usage, so either the decoding engine is crap on this GPU, or the very limited PCIe bandwidth and CPU-GPU data transferring is the culprit.

I also tested LibreELEC to see how it handles the eGPU and I’m happy to report that it renders Kodi on it by default, with the UI running very smoothly.

On Linux I also saw some stability issues and crashes, but those could also be down to the faulty GPU or the PSU being underpowered. I can probably rule out the latter by limiting the GPU clock speeds, and the Arch wiki has some great instructions for that. Those toggles do work, but I noticed that GNOME can be a bit choppier when the GPU switches between lower power states to higher ones.

The physical stability of this setup is questionable, especially if you use a bigger GPU. Most prefabricated cases for this eGPU adapter assume that you’re running it with an ATX/SFX PSU, so those are out of the question for me. There exist some 3D printable designs out there, but they can sometimes be very specific to a particular setup or GPU, so I’d have to design my own.

The power consumption of this setup isn’t great, unfortunately. Using a smart plug I measured the idle power of the eGPU component to be about 20W. Typical desktop usage and video playback results in around 50W and peaks around 120-130W, which is right on the limit of the shoddy PSU I’m using.

If I had the choice to pick any GPU for this setup, then I’d likely opt for a modern AMD GPU that didn’t require additional power via the 6/8 pin power connector as that option would likely be a lot more efficient while yielding similar performance.

I ended up disassembling the setup in the end, partly because I misdiagnosed a Mesa bug to be a GPU issue, and because the RX 480 really was acting weird from time to time, even with LibreELEC.

Not all experiments end up being successful.

Conclusion

I think that these types of eGPU adapters are great even in 2024, but only for a small number of very specific use cases, and with GPU-s that actually work.

If you already have an older laptop around, and a compatible spare GPU collecting dust, then this setup will make sense for desktop or media playback machines, and perhaps gaming if your demands are not very high.

I don’t suggest building this setup from scratch, it’s probably not worth the money and hassle. Used gaming PC-s that have similar specifications to this eGPU build, but with no funny PCIe bandwidth limitations, go for less than 200 EUR at this point.

The ThinkPad T430 has a few options for running it with an external display:

• VGA port, which is pretty much obsolete at this point
• mini DisplayPort connector on the laptop itself
• DVI or DisplayPort on a dock

The mini DisplayPort port has annoyed me for as long as I’ve had this machine.

Most places where I’ve had to present something only offer an HDMI cable, which means that I always have to carry a dongle around, and I keep forgetting to bring one everywhere I happen to go.

Until now.

I have a few of these SATA HDD adapters that replace the optical drive on the ThinkPad T430, and I discovered that my mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter can fit in one without a problem.

I don’t currently have a need for a second SSD in my T430, so this “mod” makes perfect sense to me.

I bet there is someone out there who is capable of routing an actual HDMI port in place of this adapter. The existence of FHD mods for this laptop suggests that this is possible. If you’re that person and created that mod, let me know.

The ThinkPad T430 is not a remarkable laptop. It’s thick, bulky and built like a tank. I got mine in 2016 when the first university scholarship money dropped, and it’s still my backup laptop of choice.

Around 2017 I did something every reasonable poor computer science student would do: I got an eGPU adapter for it to play some games. I never ended up playing many games, but I loved tinkering with and testing this setup a lot.

These are my notes on the setup that I used to have. The notes used to be on Reddit, but after yet another user-hostile change¹ I deleted my account and all the content associated with it.

The specs

The ThinkPad T430 that I used had a CPU swap at one point, running an Intel i7-3820QM. This upgrade doubled the CPU performance on the laptop compared to the dual-core CPU that was in it before. This change was critical because it opened the door to running lots of modern games at reasonable performance.

The eGPU adapter I ran with was the EXP GDC Beast v8.4, using the ExpressCard34 connector. This adapter turned the ExpressCard34 slot into a PCIe 2.0 x1 slot. It’s not really hotpluggable, but using this connector instead of something like the internal Wi-Fi adapter slot made this setup much more portable. Done gaming? Shut down, disconnect the ExpressCard cable and you’re good to go!

This adapter is also a good example of connector reuse. The other end of the ExpressCard plug is an HDMI port. Video signals require good quality cables, and so does PCI Express.

The eGPU was once powered by a simple ATX PSU with the jumper wire set on the 24-pin connector, but eventually I bought a Dell DA-2 power supply. The adapter has a power connector designed specifically for that pinout and it made the setup a lot cleaner.

At one point I got a fully metal case for the eGPU. It made the setup a lot cleaner and the risk of the GPU tipping over while turned on was also substantially reduced.

I tested a few GPU-s:

• AMD Radeon HD 6870
• nVidia GTX 950
• nVidia GTX 1080
• AMD Radeon RX 480

The HD 6870 was an old card back in 2017, and it did not run great at all with this eGPU adapter. It was buggy and the performance sucked.

Loaner GPU-s, such as the RX 480 and GTX 1080 were much better experiences, as long as you output the video signal to an external display right from the GPU.

The nVidia GTX 950 was the card I ran with for the longest time in this setup. It worked well with this setup and had decent gaming performance.

eGPU tech tips

You will want to use an eGPU adapter with an external monitor for the best performance. The PCIe bandwidth is very limited in a setup like this. Using the internal display of the laptop will mean that the final rendered image will have to be sent back from the eGPU to the CPU. 1x PCIe 2.0 lane is about 500 MB/s of bandwidth. Sending 60+ frames in the native resolution (1600x900) will eat it all up. The higher the resolution on the internal display, the fewer frames you’ll get.

I tested out these two scenarios in CSGO. The internal display yielded about 61 FPS while an external display would result in 100-180+ FPS.

The PCIe link bandwidth was not actually that noticeable in a lot of games, such as GTA V, Rocket League and Dirt 3.

In some games, such as Dirt Rally (2015), it did not matter what settings you went with, something about the game made it run poorly no matter what graphics settings you went with. In cases like that you might as well cap the framerate to something tolerable like 30 FPS and crank the graphics settings up.

VFIO on a laptop???

This setup was also around the time when I first learned about the magical world of VFIO and GPU passthrough.

The logical continuation of that discovery was to try it out on my laptop, and to my surprise it actually worked. I could pass the eGPU to a VM and play GTA V on it!

This setup ran on Antergos OS, a flavor of Arch Linux. It’s been so long since then that the flavor of Arch Linux is now discontinued.²

The laptop was ideal for this purpose as well. You have the integrated GPU, display, keyboard and mouse for the host system, and you can pass USB devices and the eGPU to the VM.

There were the usual VFIO tricks that I had to try out to avoid the dreaded error code 43 issue, but after that it was smooth sailing.

The performance was very similar to what I saw on the host system.

Smartphone cameras have come a long way since then.

ExpressCard eGPU-s in 2024?

What got me started with writing down my notes were some YouTube videos that were made on this topic recently.

A pimped-out ThinkPad T430 can still be a perfectly serviceable computer in 2024, and an eGPU will completely sidestep the problem of the weak integrated GPU.

The T430 is not powerful enough to natively run a 3440x1440 ultrawide monitor at 60 Hz. It is even struggling to do it at 30 Hz. An eGPU adapter with a modern low-power GPU, such as the AMD Radeon RX 6400, could solve this issue nicely and give the ThinkPad T430 a new lease of life.

I’d be lying if I wasn’t considering remaking this setup with everything I’ve learned 6 years later. GPU pricing sucks, though.³ They still sell these eGPU kits in various forms, however the price has doubled or even tripled over the years.

If you’re interested in building a similar setup, then do check out egpu.io. With an M.2 or Thunderbolt connector you can build a much more capable eGPU setup.

If you can get a PCI Express signal out of a computer, then you can probably rig a GPU up to it. Unless you’re Jeff Geerling, in which case you might need to recompile the kernel a few times.

I recently busted out my old ThinkPad T40, the last of the OG IBM ThinkPads.

I picked it up some time around my university days because I liked collecting ThinkPads at the time, and it was a nice complement to my existing ThinkPad T60 and T430.

The battery is dead, but everything else still works. Checking a few online listings, I’m surprised that I can still find batteries sold for this model. Probably old stock that’s been sitting around in a warehouse slowly discharging to death, but hey, you might get lucky!

I also learned that I had replaced the internal IDE hard drive with a 16 GB mSATA SSD via an adapter at one point. I don’t think they even sell SSD-s that small nowadays, but the size feels age-appropriate.

I had already installed a flavor of Linux on this, but had completely forgotten the password.¹ This was a good excuse to wipe it and see if I can install a modern mainstream Linux distro on it.

I went with Debian 12 (Bookworm). It’s the newest Debian release, and unlike many other distros, they still offer 32-bit installers.

It had been a while since I had last installed Debian via the terminal user interface. The experience felt surprisingly snappy.

I went with the good old XFCE desktop environment. It strikes a good balance of being lightweight, simple and usable.

Things were great until I started up Firefox. It works, but man, is it slow. All the years of browser complexity have caught up with this laptop and made the web barely usable.

It does pass the techtipsy test.

This will likely be the last time this laptop runs a modern OS. 32-bit CPU-s are losing support both in x86 and ARM ecosystems, and the year 2038 is not that far away any more.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

ThinkPad keyboards were once well known for their great layouts, feel and functionality. This included the media playback control keys.

On the ThinkPad T430, the new chiclet keyboard layout moved the media keys to the function row. Still there, but less convenient to access.

The ThinkPad L390 Yoga doesn’t have any visible function keys for controlling media playback. However, I found that the play/pause and stop buttons are still functional on the up/down arrow keys. Left/right arrow keys act as Home and End keys.

evtest output for play/pause key combination:

Event: time 1714716211.222697, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value e3
Event: time 1714716211.222697, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 143 (KEY_WAKEUP), value 1
Event: time 1714716211.222697, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1714716212.291293, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value a2
Event: time 1714716212.291293, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 164 (KEY_PLAYPAUSE), value 1
Event: time 1714716212.291293, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1714716212.366568, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value a2
Event: time 1714716212.366568, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 164 (KEY_PLAYPAUSE), value 0
Event: time 1714716212.366568, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1714716214.026847, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value e3
Event: time 1714716214.026847, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 143 (KEY_WAKEUP), value 0
Event: time 1714716214.026847, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------

evtest output for stop key combination:

Event: time 1714716254.780584, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value e3
Event: time 1714716254.780584, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 143 (KEY_WAKEUP), value 1
Event: time 1714716254.780584, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1714716255.614775, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value a4
Event: time 1714716255.614775, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 166 (KEY_STOPCD), value 1
Event: time 1714716255.614775, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1714716255.658388, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value a4
Event: time 1714716255.658388, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 166 (KEY_STOPCD), value 0
Event: time 1714716255.658388, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1714716256.961601, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value e3
Event: time 1714716256.961601, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 143 (KEY_WAKEUP), value 0
Event: time 1714716256.961601, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------

On a very recent laptop, the ThinkPad P14s gen4, the media playback keys seem to be gone. Left/right arrow keys do still work as Home and End keys, though.

If you also miss your media playback control keys on your ThinkPad, then hit that Fn key and give it a go, you might get lucky!

I’ve had the opportunity to try out another new laptop at work. I’ve used a brand new laptop recently, and it was horrible.

But this time I’m pleasantly surprised.

The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s gen 4 has great specs:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U (8 cores, 16 threads, up to 5.1 GHz)
• GPU: AMD Radeon 780M (integrated)
• RAM: 32GB DDR5, soldered
• SSD: 1 TB NVMe
• Display: 1920x1200 resolution
• Two USB-C ports
• Two USB-A ports
• HDMI out
• A full-sized Ethernet port!

I have used it for about a month at work, and so far I have not noticed anything outright broken about it. The Fedora Linux 39 installation that I copied over from the previous laptop (Dell Latitude 5411) simply works, no modifications required. The CPU is blazing fast. The GPU driver does not crash. No issues with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth so far. USB-C docks and monitors that I have just work. The webcam is also functional and has an acceptable image quality for meetings. CPU and GPU temperature data is present with lm-sensors.

The build quality is what you’d expect from a modern ThinkPad: better than consumer-grade crap, but not as solid as a ThinkPad T430. The case has a soft-feeling light gray finish to it, which will likely look horrible after a few years of use.

The battery life is not great: don’t expect to last a full 8-hour work day on battery with this thing. It’s been years since Apple has released Apple Silicon laptops with great battery life and somehow the rest of the industry still hasn’t caught up.

The fan has a really annoying high-pitched whine to it. You only hear it when pushing the CPU hard, like you’d do when compiling a legacy Java monolith, but in a quiet room it’s really annoying. I’m not even sure that the fan has to be run that hard, the AMD Ryzen CPU inside is very efficient and can regulate its power consumption based on the current temperature. You can tweak the fan curve on this laptop with a basic script.

I haven’t tried functionality that I don’t use myself, such as the fingerprint reader, so I cannot comment on that.

This laptop can also play games. I took an external SSD, installed Bazzite on it (GNOME + gamemode version), set everything up, and installed Forza Horizon 4 on it. It runs, and for an integrated GPU surprisingly well. I could push the game to run with medium-high settings on the internal 1920x1200 display at a solid 60 FPS, with very rare dips below it. That’s even better than what I got with the Steam Deck, and the CPU running near the 5 GHz mark certainly contributed to it. This makes the laptop a great candidate for a LAN party after work, unless you favor more demanding games, in which case you might want to temper your expectations a little bit.

It’s the first time that I’ve had a brand new laptop that just works on Linux. Hats off to the FOSS community for making this happen, AMD for getting their act together, and Lenovo for not completely fucking it up this time.

It’s been a while since I last wrote about my ThinkPad T430 that was tasked with being a home server. After doing some experiments with my setup a couple of times, it is once again the main server for all my self-hosting needs. However, this time I have made some adjustments.

Background

The monstrosity that you’re looking at is what I’d call “the minimum viable ThinkPad as a server”. To be fair, you could go even more minimal by ripping out everything but the motherboard and the drives, but for my use case this is how far I was willing to go.

In my previous post about this setup, I mentioned that the T430 suffered unexpected shutdowns under certain situations, which usually involved running the fan at the lowest speed, moderate to high CPU load, and a lot of storage activity. It wasn’t the CPU as the temperatures were way below the critical point, so I suspected either the motherboard or the storage running hot and tripping some sensor that I wasn’t aware of.

For a while now, I have been thinking about running the T430 as bare as possible. One idea involved taking the bare motherboard and the storage and slapping it on an acrylic sheet with some stand-offs, which should give it the best chance at cooling. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to commit to this, and that setup would have had some downsides as well. At some point an idea popped to my mind: I could probably achieve a similar result by stripping everything but the bare necessities from the laptop and improve the cooling as a result. That’s how I ended up with what you just saw.

T430, stripped

I ended up removing the following from the T430:

• palm rest
• smart card reader
• Bluetooth chip
• WiFi chip
• the whole display assembly

This was in part motivated by the fact that those parts are the ones that are not in the best shape on my main ThinkPad T430 that I use as an actual laptop. The other part was this nagging feeling that the most powerful PC that I own (the ASRock DeskMini X300) was woefully underutilized as my home server.

The keyboard had to stay because the power button is part of the keyboard assembly. There are ways to power on the laptop without the keyboard:

• put the laptop in a dock and use the power button that is present on the dock
• short a specific pin on the keyboard connector to ground

I do have some extra ThinkPad docks around that I could have used for this purpose, but it would have made the setup bulkier, which is why I did not go for that, at least not yet.

There is also an option in UEFI settings that can be used to turn the laptop on by connecting the charger (“Power on with AC attach”), but that only seems to work if you have a battery connected and after you have turned the laptop on manually once. The same caveat applies for Wake on LAN functionality. If the laptop overheats or it runs out of battery completely, then you need to manually power it on.

The cooling situation

Removing the palm rest reveals something that might be related to the unexpected shutdowns that I observed with this setup previously.

Under this area is a chip on the motherboard that seems to generate a modest amount of heat. While the machine is running, it gets warm to touch and gets hot if you throw a high load at the system, especially if you include storage in the mix. With the laptop lid closed and the palm rest being present, the cooling situation for this area can be quite bad indeed. Now that the palm rest is removed, this area of the laptop is now exposed, which should help with the cooling for this chip.

Having the keyboard connected in this state isn’t too bad. It does restrict the airflow a bit, yes, but at least it can be fastened using two screws, which means that it won’t move around and cause any other issues.

With this setup, the cooling has improved noticeably. Unfortunately it didn’t come to my mind to make a before/after comparison to better illustrate this, so I will just write about how well it operates in this configuration.

Currently, I have the laptop fan controlled by a modified version of the minimum viable fan control script. The fan only kicks in after the CPU reaches 60°C, ramps up to a moderate speed at over 85°C, and lets the default fan behaviour handle everything if the temperatures reaches over 95°C. This results in the fan being off completely for most of the day as the server is idling at around 5-10% CPU usage and temperatures being anywhere between 45-60°C. When there is a workload on the system that taxes the CPU, the fan will kick on with a small delay.

I’ve also disabled turbo boost on the Intel i7-3632QM that is currently in this T430, which limits the clock speed to 2.2 GHz max. Performance takes a small hit, but the CPU is now running much more efficiently. This is one of the tweaks that allows the laptop to be near silent. At a full 8 thread CPU load using stress -c 8, the CPU core temperatures peak at 70°C at 22°C ambient temperature, with the fan running at around 2600 RPM.

As a result of all of this, the T430 is very quiet while using about 10-12W of power while idling. Under the maximum CPU load generated by stress, the total system power usage is around 34W.

Putting the “paste” in thermal paste

Originally, the T430-as-a-server ran vertically using a basic laptop vertical stand. Back when I concluded the initial test in 2022, I disassembled the machine and noticed something very odd with the thermal paste.

Based on this image and the fact that I ran the machine quite warm most of the time (CPU temperatures around 60-80°C), I assume that the excess thermal paste started slowly dripping down. The part that concerns me the most is that the top of the chip was barely covered by the thermal paste. Either that part of the chip had great contact with the heatsink, or the thermal paste drooped down with time and left it mostly uncovered. It could explain some of the issues, but I’ll avoid making any definitive conclusions from this alone.

To avoid similar issues in the future, the laptop is now on a stand at about 60° angle. Not sure if it will work, but it’s worth a shot.

Closing thoughts

Overall, I’m happy with how this experiment turned out. Cooling is no longer an issue, and the T430 that I initially got for spare parts is actually being useful. The amount of performance this machine offers while using very little power seems to be a good balance for the workloads that I run on my home server.

This post illustrates something that is not common on modern laptops: changing the CPU.

Background

One of the modifications that you can do to a ThinkPad T430 laptop is changing the CPU to a more powerful quad core model. That’s exactly what I did back in 2017, but due to the poor availability of compatible CPU-s in my region I went for one with a 45W TDP, which is a bit much for a laptop designed for CPU-s with a 35W TDP.

You could work around this issue with software, and that’s what I also did for a long time. Since I now own two T430-s and the availability of 35W parts is better now, I decided to go for one to see how well these two options compare (result: it doesn’t overheat as often, but it managed to do it once anyway).

Unlike my T430, most modern laptops come with a soldered CPU. There do exist laptops that come with a socketed CPU, but those are not that common and are designed for very specific use cases.

Soldering the CPU right to the board has its benefits, such as the machine being thinner, and CPU-s don’t really die all that often. However, what we have lost out on is the option to upgrade older machines with more powerful components, extending the useful lifetime of the device.

Yes, you can replace soldered CPU-s, but that requires a skillset and equipment that few people have.

A couple of years ago, I worked on a ThinkPad T60. That ThinkPad had been in use by a family member before that, and I started its cleanup by disassembling the whole machine and making sure that it was pristine. However, once I put it all back together, I saw that it was password protected. I wasn’t even able to access the BIOS. After repeatedly asking for hints for the password and trying some simple cases myself, I never cracked it.

Not too long ago I got curious and looked for a way to overcome this issue. That’s when I stumbled upon this SuperUser post about resetting the supervisor password on a ThinkPad.

Once my to-do list was down to a reasonable size, I decided to finally give this a go, since it didn’t seem that difficult. Here’s an illustrated guide on how I approached this task.

Sources that are relevant to this topic:

• How to remove the Supervisor BIOS password for an IBM ThinkPad

• www.ja.axxs.net

• “How to unlock BIOS Supervisor Password from Lenovo Thinkpad Laptop (no damage to laptop)” by Arpan Dubey

Setup

What you’ll need to pull this off:

• your ThinkPad T60 laptop that has a supervisor password enabled
• a screwdriver
• anything that conducts electricity and can be used to short two pins
• a steady hand
• a magnifier, if your eyesight isn’t that great

To begin the process, you need to remove the palm rest of the ThinkPad. Follow the service manual if needed. Removing the keyboard screws is optional, but it might help you access the correct pins better.

The process

The steps for performing the supervisor password clearing:

• turn on the laptop
• when you see the ThinkPad logo, short two specific pins
• keep shorting those pins!
• press F1 to go to the BIOS
• navigate to the section in BIOS where you can set the Supervisor Password
• enter the supervisor password setting prompt and enter a blank password in the first field
• stop shorting the pins, and then enter an empty password to the second field
• save settings and restart
• after rebooting, you should be able to boot without having to enter a password

What follows is an illustrated guide of the process.

This is the step where I messed up initially. The contact between the pins was not good and I got prompted with the supervisor password prompt. Power the machine off and try again if you face the same issue.

Once the pins are shorted, you should be able to access the BIOS with a little bit of F1 key spamming.

After saving the settings and rebooting, you should be greeted with a successful boot.

Once you’ve confirmed that everything’s OK, assemble the machine again and enjoy the laptop that you just saved from becoming e-waste.

Caveats

This guide might not be terribly relevant in 2022. I still remember starting my software development career in 2016 with a ThinkPad T60 and it was painful even back then. These laptops are classics, but they are really starting to show their age. I’ve even encountered issues like the WiFi chip causing lots of trouble, with the connection being very spotty and borderline unusable.

But hey, at least it’s not completely unusable any more!

I stumbled upon this post in /r/thinkpad, which got my attention. It showcases an ExpressCard to M.2 NGFF adapter that they purchased from AliExpress. The adapter has a similar purpose to the one designed by thinkmods.store, with the added bonus that it could fit longer NVMe SSD-s if you didn’t mind them sticking out of the case. You could also order one instantly, so I did.

For those interested, the title of the listing at the time of writing of this article is “ExpressCard interface to m.2 NGFF nvme solid state disc x201 t430 hp8570 w520”. The listing I chose was this one. I’m not affiliated with the manufacturer or the seller in any way.

The idea

I try to avoid buying things that I don’t need, which is why I came up with an excuse for getting this adapter: adding a cache SSD to my ThinkPad-as-a-server.

The OS is running off of an mSATA SSD that I could theoretically use for the same purpose, but eventually killing the SSD that also hosts the OS with constant writes sounded like a really bad idea. I also didn’t want to have excessive writes on my pair of Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SATA SSD-s, because replacing those will be quite expensive down the line.

Here’s what we’re working with:

• Sabrent Rocket Nano NVMe 2242 SSD (512GB)
• the aforementioned ExpressCard to M.2 NGFF adapter
• ThinkPad T430 with an ExpressCard34 slot

Quick word on the packaging: it was packaged in a small cardboard box, which held up okay, but a more rough treatment of the box would probably have broken the tiny PCB.

Assembly

According to comments I saw before purchasing the adapter, I expected the assembly to be a bit tricky, and after assembling it I have to agree with that sentiment.

First, you’ll have to squeeze the SSD in there. Unlike M.2 slots that are common in laptops and desktops alike, this one requires you to horizontally push the SSD in without breaking anything. Don’t be afraid to use a bit of force here, but be careful in how you apply it.

After the SSD is in, screw it in properly and place the assembly on one of the metal parts.

Now comes the fun part: you’ll have to clip on the top part as well. My recommendation is to first clip in the part that sits near the contact pins, then the one at the other end of the adapter, and then push in the metal shielding at the edges.

Tests

To test this adapter out, I just plugged it into my main ThinkPad T430 running Fedora 36 and Linux kernel version 5.19.12. It worked right out of the box.

My ThinkPad T430 can now support hotpluggable NVMe SSD-s, and 4 internal SSD-s in total. Not quite tricked out as this setup, but not bad for a 10 year old laptop.

Please note that these tests are not done with any meaningful testing methodology and are just quick one-off tests that aim to showcase what to expect when using this adapter with the configuration I’m using it with.

To check how well the adapter performs, I opened gnome-disks and did a quick benchmark offered by it.

The average read speed is at 411.2 MB/s, and writes at 366.7 MB/s.

The results are in line with the limitations of a PCIe 2.0 x1 link, which has a theoretical cap of 500 MB/s.

What’s more noteworthy is the latency. Average access time is at 0.03 ms, which compares well to a Samsung 870 EVO 1TB SATA SSD that’s connected to the same machine, which reports an average access time of 0.07 ms.

When copying files to the SSD, the temperature sensor reported a maximum of 60°C. Additional read operations in the form of an ZFS scrub hit 63°C, which was the maximum I observed during my quick testing.

When I threw both read and write operations to the SSD, the total I/O bandwidth for both operations was capped at around 390 MB/s according to zpool iostat 1 -v. If your workloads do a lot of read-write operations in parallel, then take this into account.

As for my use case, it seems to be holding up okay. I’ll have to report back after this adapter and SSD combo has been in use for a longer time.

I’ve always been a fan of tinkering with cooling setups on my computers. I’ve even went as far as writing crappy solutions to make up for deficiencies on the hardware level. After years of dumb experiments I’ve seen how little you can get away with in cooling and how to run your machines as quietly as possible without giving up too much performance.

I also appreciate simplicity, which is why I’m currently running the simplest damn solution you can imagine to control how my ThinkPad T430 and ASRock DeskMini X300 run: a shell script.

It also comes with some added benefits:

• self-documenting
• highly customizable
• low resource usage

These scripts are not “battle-hardened” and using them incorrectly may or may not result in hardware failure. Use at your own risk. The only guarantee I can give is that it works on my machine™.

If you’re someone who doesn’t like tinkering with their computers and wants their machines to “just work”, then this article likely isn’t for you.

ThinkPad T430

With the ThinkPad T430, the script does two things:

• control the fan speed
• preemptively throttle the CPU and GPU

This type of behaviour is optimized for mostly quiet operation. The fan is running at its lowest speed when under a small load, and the CPU/GPU throttling has an added benefit of reducing the overall power usage, too. The difference between non-turbo and turbo speeds on the Intel i7-3820QM can be as much as 13-15 watts.

To enable fan control on ThinkPads, you need to have a file at /usr/lib/modprobe.d/thinkpad_acpi.conf with the following contents:

options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1

Reboot, and you can now have full control over the fan speed in your ThinkPad!

The script itself looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

while true; do

  temp=$(cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone1/temp)

  if ((temp > 90000)); then
    echo level 7 >/proc/acpi/ibm/fan
  elif ((temp > 75000)); then
    echo level 5 >/proc/acpi/ibm/fan
  elif ((temp > 60000)); then
    echo level 3 >/proc/acpi/ibm/fan
  elif ((temp > 30000)); then
    echo level 1 >/proc/acpi/ibm/fan
  else
    echo level 0 >/proc/acpi/ibm/fan
  fi

  if ((temp > 97000)); then
    echo 350 >/sys/class/drm/card*/gt_max_freq_mhz
    echo 350 >/sys/class/drm/card*/gt_boost_freq_mhz
  elif ((temp > 90000)); then
    echo 650 >/sys/class/drm/card*/gt_max_freq_mhz
    echo 650 >/sys/class/drm/card*/gt_boost_freq_mhz
  else
    echo 1250 >/sys/class/drm/card*/gt_max_freq_mhz
    echo 1250 >/sys/class/drm/card*/gt_boost_freq_mhz
  fi

  if ((temp > 70000)); then
    echo 1 >/sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo
  else
    echo 0 >/sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo
  fi

  sleep 0.5
done

What we’re doing is reading the temperature of the CPU package and then setting the fan speed and throttling based on that. Note that the temperatures are represented without any decimal places. A reading of 78000 means that the chip is running at 78 °C.

On my ThinkPad T430, the fan speed levels can be roughly described as such:

• level 1: lowest speed, barely audible
• level 3: audible, but tolerable
• level 5 and above: it’s probably loud enough to bother you

The second section controls the integrated GPU. What I’ve found in my testing is that a weak integrated GPU can still chug up to 20 watts, which is a considerable amount, especially on a laptop. The card* wildcard is there because the integrated GPU may change between card0 and card1, and I’m too lazy to make the script any smarter.

The values written there correspond to the maximum GPU clock speed. 1250 happens to be the max clock speed (in MHz) and at that speed the GPU is using a lot of power. 650 is the speed at which the integrated GPU is running most efficiently. 350 is the lowest speed, and you will notice it due to the performance being extra crappy.

With the CPU, I chose to just turn the turbo boost on or off. With turbo boost off, the CPU will top out at 2.7 GHz and around 22 watts of power usage. With turbo boost, the CPU can run anywhere between 3.4-3.7 GHz, depending on the number of cores under load. You’ll likely notice much higher CPU temperatures and power usage climbing to around 35 watts. Fast at short and bursty workloads, and yet efficient and relatively cool at sustained loads.

And at the very end, you have a simple sleep statement. I’ve set it to half a second, but feel free to set it as you see fit. Higher intervals might not be that good of an idea because the script may not be able to respond quickly enough to changing thermals, just keep that in mind.

ASRock DeskMini X300

Although I’ve opted for a more experimental setup with my home server and the ASRock DeskMini X300 is no longer running as one, I think it’s still worthwhile to share how I configured the fan control logic on this machine.

With the ASRock DeskMini X300, my goal was simple: let it run as quietly as reasonably possible without losing too much performance.

This machine was running 24/7 as a server and has a powerful 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 5700G CPU in it. One thing this script is heavily relying on is the fact that Ryzen CPU-s have well-engineered boosting logic in them, meaning that they’re already designed to run at the highest speed possible and only limit their speed if they hit power or thermal limits.

One thing you may need to do first is installing lm-sensors and running sudo sensors-detect. By default the CPU fan speed controls were not properly exposed, but after running sensors-detect and saying yes at every prompt, they were picked up.

The script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

# /sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3

echo 1 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2_enable

while true; do

  temp=$(cat /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon4/temp1_input)

  if ((temp > 94000)); then
    echo 170 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2
  elif ((temp > 90000)); then
    echo 140 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2
  elif ((temp > 70000)); then
    echo 120 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2
  elif ((temp > 40000)); then
    echo 30 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2
  else
    echo 0 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2
  fi

  sleep 5
done

The hwmon values and which fan you’re controlling is likely different on your own PC. Take a look at the paths found in the script and poke around while also physically looking at your PC. Try enabling PWM control by writing to pwm*_enable handles and then setting the fan speed. As a result of your poking, you should see the CPU fan change its speed. If it doesn’t, try another value.

The values you can write are in the range 0-255, where the higher value corresponds to a higher speed.

I’ve limited the TDP of my CPU to 35 watts using a setting found in UEFI settings. This results in the CPU running cool and quiet even under a full load.

systemd service

To run your fan control script as a systemd service, drop the script to your preferred location (I placed it in /root/.local/bin/fancontrol), then create a file /etc/systemd/system/fancontrol.service with the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=Quick fan control software

[Service]
ExecStart=/root/.local/bin/fancontrol

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

And once that is done, enable and start your fan control service with sudo systemctl enable --now fancontrol.service.

If you encounter issues or something isn’t working right, check the status of the service with systemctl status fancontrol.service or full logs with journalctl -u fancontrol.service.

Conclusion

If you want something that works out of the box and does the smart stuff for you, then give this Arch Linux wiki page a look. If you’re not into that and want to easily tune the behaviour of your machine, then feel free to use these scripts as a baseline for your own experimentation.

You’ve disabled the boneheaded Lenovo WiFi adapter whitelist using a tool like 1vyrain, installed a better adapter like the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260, and found that Bluetooth is not working as intended on your ThinkPad T430 running Linux?

Here’s a guide on what you can try to resolve some issues you may encounter.

The integrated Bluetooth adapter

The ThinkPad T430 comes with Bluetooth out of the box. Mine is this one:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0a5c:21e6 Broadcom Corp. BCM20702 Bluetooth 4.0 [ThinkPad]

I run Fedora Linux and frankly the experience with the stock adapter is horrible. Getting stuck while pairing a device or the GNOME Bluetooth settings GUI hanging isn’t a rare sight. Sometimes I’ve had to run a script to reset all USB devices to get things sorted out, or restart the machine altogether. This is not fun when a work call started 3 minutes ago and your Bluetooth headset is just not working.

After installing the new Intel WiFi adapter, I thought that I’d just disable the integrated Bluetooth controller via the UEFI settings. That should do the trick, right?

Nope. Apparently this disabled ALL bluetooth devices, including the one provided by the Intel adapter.

Well, no problem, I’ll just physically remove the Broadcom device and that should force the ThinkPad to use the Intel adapter, right?

Nope. Now the machine just shows no Bluetooth devices.

udev to the rescue

If you install the Intel adapter and don’t touch any of the settings, you’ll have two Bluetooth adapters. On my laptop, the OS used the Broadcom adapter by default, which was evident by all GUI interactions interfacing with the Broadcom one and throwing out errors in dmesg -w as a result.

Since disabling the Broadcom bluetooth adapter via other means did not work, I had to look for some solutions. One that I stumbled upon relied on udev rules.

Essentially, what you want to do is drop a file in /etc/udev/rules.d/, name it something like 81-bluetooth-hci.rules and make the contents something like this:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0a5c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="21e6", ATTR{authorized}="0"

Make sure to replace the idVendor and idProduct with the correct values for your Bluetooth adapter. Output of lsusb will likely contain those values.

In my case, the output of lsusb is

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0a5c:21e6 Broadcom Corp. BCM20702 Bluetooth 4.0 [ThinkPad]

The idVendor and idProduct info is in this string: ID 0a5c:21e6.

After making this change and restarting, you should see thatbluetoothctl list outputs only one Bluetooth device.

[host@T430 ~]$ bluetoothctl list
Controller AC:FD:CE:30:EB:BA T430 [default]

Because Bluetooth is still a hot mess in 2022, I still have to occasionally beat it with a hammer. However, the experience with the Intel adapter is much better and a simple “turn the adapter off and on again in the GUI” solved 99% of the issues I’ve encountered since then.

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

If for whatever reason this solution does not apply to you, and you feel like you want to hit your machine with a big hammer without having to restart it, then here’s a script that resets all the USB devices on your machine. I’ve observed that most Bluetooth adapters run over USB, which is why this script works with those as well.

It has helped me countless times when desperate for a quick Bluetooth fix on various desktops and laptops that I’ve used.

Run it at your own risk.

#!/bin/bash

for i in /sys/bus/pci/drivers/[uoex]hci_hcd/*:*; do
  [ -e "$i" ] || continue
  echo "${i##*/}" > "${i%/*}/unbind"
  echo "${i##*/}" > "${i%/*}/bind"
done

I’m a man of many ideas. It’s a shame that most of them are quite stupid.

This is one of them, but at least it makes for a fun experiment.

Intro

After adding an UPS to accompany my server, my setup was as complete as it could reasonably be. The server is low power, but packs quite a punch with fast storage and plenty of compute power around. The UPS provides a battery backup for both my server and the router.

There was still one annoyance lingering at the back of my head: this setup took 40 watts of power in idle. That’s a lot for something that runs 24/7. Yes, /r/homelab regularly showcases more power hungry setups, but my standards are quite high when it comes to power use. I want to go as low as reasonably possible.

I recently bought a spare ThinkPad T430 so that I can have a backup machine in case something happens to my laptop that doesn’t suck. I’ve also had ideas about a server setup involving this laptop.

That’s when I decided to try running my services off of the ThinkPad T430.

The setup

Here’s a quick rundown of the relevant specifications:

• CPU: Intel i5-3320M, 2 cores 4 threads @ 3.3GHz max
• RAM: 16GB DDR3
• OS disk: 256GB Micron mSATA SSD
• Main storage: 2x 4TB Samsung 870 QVO SSD

One of the main reasons that this setup is viable in the first place is the fact that the ThinkPad T430 supports up to 3 SSD-s if you replace the optical drive with a HDD caddy. Your OS can run off of an mSATA SSD and your mirrored storage can utilize the two 2.5" SATA slots.

You probably don’t want to use a setup like this if you want to store a lot of big files, such as your legally obtained media collection. If your data can fit on a pair of SATA SSD-s, then this setup will be just fine.

Why use a laptop as a home server?

If you don’t have a home server yet and want to start off as cheap as possible while also being mindful of the power usage, then an used laptop with a competent CPU is a fantastic starting point. In an age where 6 CPU cores is considered mid-range, two CPU cores might not sound like much, but for most home server workloads it’s absolutely fine.

Laptop CPU-s are designed to use as little power as possible. After all, they need to run off of a small battery most of the time and have to run cool as well to make do with the limited cooling setup that they have. This makes them ideal for a machine that runs 24/7.

I measured the power usage of my ThinkPad T430 in this configuration and found that it used around 15-20 watts when running with a low load. This is comparable to the ASRock DeskMini X300.

What sets laptops apart from the usual desktop-based home server builds is that they often have a working battery, which can act as a poor man’s UPS. If you momentarily lose power, then the server will happily keep on working until the battery runs out, which might take 1-2 hours (or more if your battery is in a good state). This is comparable to the runtime I saw with the DeskMini server build and the APC Smart-UPS 750.

Most laptops also come with an Ethernet port, and if the laptop is made some time after 2005, then it’s likely running at gigabit speeds. Unless you have a valid use case for 10 gigabits or more, then this will be plenty of network bandwidth for most home server use cases.

One aspect that’s often overlooked with a laptop-based home server setup is the inclusion of an integrated keyboard and mouse. If you accidentally mess up your configuration and your server does not start up properly, then you can just open the lid and start fixing it on the spot. On any other setup, you’d have to find a monitor to hook the server up to and find a spare keyboard to use as well, which can be a hassle.

Performance

A home server that serves the needs of a couple of users at most and runs some scheduled tasks from time to time can run perfectly fine off of a dual core Intel Core series CPU from 2012. You probably don’t want to run intensive computational workloads off of it, such as transcoding video files on a service like Jellyfin. However, you can utilize the integrated GPU to off-load specific workloads to it, and media encode-decode for select video codecs is one of those. Intel QuickSync is an absolute godsend for situations where you need to transcode media on a CPU that isn’t that powerful.

My home server runs a lot of services: Docker containers, this blog, data archival jobs, backup jobs etc. When running them on the T430, the average CPU usage was around 20%. Not ideal, but still leaves plenty of headroom for services.

The overall usability and performance that this machine offers was completely acceptable. It’s not as lightning fast as something that runs a modern CPU, like the AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G in the DeskMini, but it gets the job done.

Caveats: thermals

A home server built around a used laptop brings a lot of benefits. However, it also has some potential downsides that you should be aware of.

Most laptops have fans, and they can be damn loud. The ThinkPad T430 is notoriously loud if you have the cooling fan manufactured by Toshiba. In a home setting this can potentially a deal-breaker, unless you can wedge the laptop into a corner of the room where it’s not audible.

There exist solutions to the fan control problem. You can install a tool like thinkfan or just write your preferred fan level to /proc/acpi/ibm/fan to avoid the cooling fan running too loud (instructions here).

Running the fan at the lowest speed works fine most of the time since your CPU can throttle itself when it’s running too hot. However, with my setup I had an odd issue where the machine would power off suddenly when it was doing a lot of I/O workload, such as scrubbing the ZFS pool on the two 4TB SSD-s. This happened even when the CPU was not even close to throttling, running around 75 C. I do not know what the actual reason for the sudden shutdown is, but I suspect that it may be related to the motherboard overheating or the system treating the hot SSD-s as hard drives that are over the critical temperature limit of around 60 C.

I was able to work around most of the cooling-related issues by mounting the laptop vertically and limiting the maximum CPU clock speed to around 2.4 GHz using the knobs made available with intel_pstate.

The CPU temperatures during normal operation were mostly around 60C, with a high load reaching max 75C with the tweaks applied and the CPU fan running at the slowest possible speed.

Caveats: maintenance

If you have a machine that runs 24/7, maintenance will become an issue. No matter how often you clean your home, dust will accumulate. On desktop PC-s, cleaning out your CPU heatsink is just a matter of taking off the PC case side panel, removing the heatsink fan, cleaning off the dust and putting it all back together. You probably want to replace the thermal paste from time to time as well.

On most laptops, cleaning out the CPU heatsink is much trickier. You will likely have to disassemble most of the machine to even access it, which takes up much more time compared to a desktop PC, which also means more downtime.

Depending on the model, a simple change, such as upgrading your storage or replacing a faulty drive, can also be more complicated. I’ve seen laptops where you actually have to disassemble the whole machine to access the hard drive. The ThinkPad T430 has an easily accessible setup when it comes to storage, but the main storage bay does have an annoying pull-tab setup that probably won’t survive multiple subsequent changes.

Conclusion

Aside from the setbacks that may or may not be due to the specifics of my setup, I find that a laptop can make for a good home server. If you have more specific requirements, then a custom-built server is likely the way to go, but if you’re just starting out, then definitely do consider this option.

After running this setup for a week or two, I decided to go back to my previous setup based on the ASRock DeskMini. The reliability woes weren’t something I was too happy with, and I didn’t really have another use case for the DeskMini either, so it made sense for me.

This post is inspired by this article from the Low-tech Magazine. I highly recommend giving that a read as well!

Over my lifetime, I’ve used a bunch of different computers, mainly due to new ideas and requirements popping into my mind every time I’m content with my current setup. One of my last changes might be a bit of a headscratcher for some.

Background

At my current place of employment, I’ve had the opportunity to try out recently released laptops from Lenovo and Dell, with the goal of evaluating them for software development workloads and pick a default option for new hires. My work laptop at the time was the Lenovo ThinkPad T480 with some decent specs and an NVIDIA GeForce MX 150 GPU that was weak and throttled itself whenever it hit 70 degrees Celsius in Windows 10, making it absolutely useless.

I tried out a fair number of makes and models: Lenovo ThinkPad P14/T14 (gen 1 and 2) in both Intel 11th gen and AMD Ryzen 4000/5000 series configurations, plus some Dell Latitudes with Intel 11th gen CPU-s as well. And the result? A lot of disappointment.

The non-exhaustive list of issues I ran into with these machines on Fedora Linux 34:

• The touchpad would sometimes randomly not work on one of the ThinkPads.
• On AMD models, performance was less than stellar for my workloads and not a significant jump over a laptop from 2018.
• The Intel CPU-s had throttling issues that made them unusable for basic things like calls over Google Meet as they would throttle to 400 MHz.
• On one of the Dell machines, it was very easy to overheat the SSD, which lead to the CPU throttling to 400 MHz. Yes, the SSD caused the CPU to throttle.
• Wi-Fi/Bluetooth would not work on one of the laptops, even when I was using an up-to-date Linux distro. Likely related to the type of adapter used (not Intel).

Once that experiment was done, we settled on the least crappy version of the ThinkPads that had an AMD Ryzen CPU, at least those didn’t sound like jet engines under load and didn’t have insane throttling issues.

It’s not all that bad, though. I was now committed to using my current ThinkPad T480 for as long as possible. It, too, had a rough start, but at least all the issues it came with have been ironed out over time.

Hopping between machines

At this point in time, I had three machines:

• desktop PC (for work and personal stuff)
• work laptop (for work stuff only)
• personal laptop (for personal stuff, of course)

I could not rely on the work laptop for personal use as it has limited storage options. Call me a freak, but I feel very uneasy running on a single SSD, even if my data is backed up to my NAS and on external backup drives. With my desktop PC use case affecting other workloads as well, I had to come up with a solution.

Syncing data between machines was not the issue here. Syncthing is an absolute open-source gem and had no issues with things like node_modules folders. The main issue was the fact that I didn’t want to carry two laptops around or buy an extra USB-C dock for use at home.

I took the risk and jumped back to the ThinkPad T430 for both my personal and work use cases.

ThinkPad T430: the history

My ThinkPad T430 has a rich history. I got it in 2016 to replace my aging ThinkPad T60. Getting this laptop felt similar to that time a desktop PC that ran Windows 98 got replaced with a dual-core “beast” in 2006.

In 2006, my webpage load times went from 30 seconds to a second. Getting Android app build times from 60 seconds to around 10 seconds on the T430 felt the same.

This ThinkPad T430 has survived all the following:

• A bicycle crash while it was in a backpack. The latch mechanism broke and there are a couple of cracks in the palm rest, but the rest is working fine.
• A coffee spill, which luckily only discoloured the casing of two USB 3.0 ports.
• Liquid metal experiments, had some pretty close calls there with my dumb ass almost shorting the system out.
• Use as a budget low-power server machine for a bit.

5 years later, it’s back in my possession again after a short stint at a family members’ hands.

There’s more to this than simply a rich history, though.

The modifications

Over the years, I’ve been inspired by whatever modifications people over at /r/thinkpad have come up with. If you want a short summary, you can check out the definitive T430 modding guide to get some inspiration.

To make this machine viable in 2021, you need the CPU, RAM and SSD upgrades at the very minimum.

Here’s the list of upgrades I’ve done:

• CPU upgrade to a quad-core Intel i7-3820QM (45W TDP).
• RAM upgrade to 16 GB DDR3 memory.
• Storage: 250GB mSATA for OS, 2x 1TB SATA SSD-s for data, made possible with a HDD caddy that replaces the optical drive.
• New third party 9-cell battery. I’ve had mixed experiences with these, but the one I have now seems to be good enough.
• Replaced the heatsink and fan assembly with one that has a Delta fan (FRU 04W3270). It’s quieter and doesn’t have the high-pitched whine that the Toshiba fan exhibits.
• At one point, I ran an external GPU off of the ExpressCard34 slot.
• Installed 1vyrain to get rid of annoying limitations, such as the Wi-Fi whitelist.
• Upgraded the Wi-Fi card to Intel Wireless-AC 7260.

There are some things I’d like to eventually tinker with:

• Replace the display with a compatible 1600x900 panel that has better image quality. The current screen is awful.
• Do something fun with the ExpressCard34 slot. There’s the thinkmods.store ExpressCard34 SSD adapter, but I haven’t seen that released yet.

With these modifications, it feels like an usable laptop again.

But why?

The reasons why I went back to the T430 are quite simple.

• Build quality: it has survived a nasty fall, and it will probably survive the next ones as well.
• CPU performance is roughly on par with the T480 under sustained load.
• No dedicated GPU that takes up valuable space and power.
• Battery life with the 9-cell battery is on par or even better in real world use scenarios, compared to the T480.
• Ridiculous storage configurations: dual-boot, triple-boot, RAID1 setups, 16+TB of solid-state storage, it’s all possible on this old laptop!
• Decent selection of ports, including VGA and gigabit ethernet.
• Docking stations can be dirt cheap and be bought for less than 10 EUR (used).
• I have plenty of Lenovo barrel plug chargers, but only one USB-C Lenovo charger. I really didn’t want to buy more chargers when I have plenty of perfectly working ones.

There are some downsides, though:

• No HDMI, I’d need a mini-Displayport to HDMI dongle for that to work.
• No USB-C, which might be an issue if your environment at work is optimized for that.
• It runs hot, but doesn’t have the same level of on-chip thermal protections that the T480 has, resulting in this awful piece of software I wrote back in 2018.

That’s nothing compared to the unreliability I’ve experienced with the T480. I’ve witnessed the keyboard dying once and the motherboard being replaced twice, once due to charging related issues, and the other time due to random system crashes and screen glitching.

Verdict

I’ve been using this setup for over a month now, and it has been surprisingly adequate. Yes, opening Java projects in IntelliJ will make things slow, and to record my desktop with OBS and acceptable performance, I had to drop my screen resolution to 720p. I can’t expect everything to work super well on this machine, but for a computer that’s released almost 10 years ago, it’s still holding up well.

I’d like to thank Intel here for making this possible. The CPU innovation stagnation between 2012-2017 has resulted in 4 cores still being an acceptable low-end CPU in early 2022. Without this, my laptop would likely be obsolete by now.

2022-01-12 update

This post got a lot of feedback and comments on HackerNews with people sharing their experiences, feel free to check it out and join the discussion!

2022-09-01 update

This post was translated into German and featured on golem.de, check it out!

Background

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X230. It’s a small and good laptop that I’ve used as my main laptop and a server as well.

A couple of years ago I messed around with flashing alternative BIOS implementations on the X230, such as the skulls project, which made installing prebuilt coreboot images very simple. Of course, before doing any testing, I made backups of the stock BIOS implementation (ooh, foreshadowing!).

Skulls was nice, it booted fast, but changing the boot order likely required modifications and rebuilding the coreboot image (I wanted to set the mSATA SSD as the first bootable device). It was also not UEFI-compatible, which could have probably been solved with something like TianoCore, but I didn’t feel like messing with that too much. Eventually I flashed the original UEFI implementation back and went on with my life.

Then I stumbled upon the 1vyrain project project, which allows you to “jailbreak” your BIOS. This modification also enables a lot more bells and whistles in the BIOS under the Advanced menu option, plus it also gets rid of the WiFi adaptor whitelist that Lenovo has put in place, allowing you to now use any adaptor that’s compatible with the form factor.

The mod was very easy to install and had no issues, until I got myself a DDR3 SODIMM RAM kit. One of the sticks was not working properly, showing up with graphical glitches and failing a memtest run. To troubleshoot it, I decided to change the speed at which the memory runs from DDR3-1600 to DDR3-1333. It booted, and still had the issues.

Then I changed it to DDR3-1066.

Black screen. Uh-oh.

Initial troubleshooting

Thinking that this is just a simple issue that I could get fixed by clearing the BIOS settings and starting fresh, I looked up some basic instructions on doing so.

Things I tried:

• remove the battery (even if it is completely dead, like mine), and hold the power button for 60 seconds, then attach the battery and turn it on again.
• remove both the battery and disconnect the internal CMOS battery that sits under the palmrest and hold the power button for 60 seconds again.
• disconnect all the batteries and leave the laptop sitting on a shelf, then try again.
• try “the secret ThinkPad power button combo”:

… unplug the AC adapter and take out the battery. Then, you push the power button 10 times in a row at one second intervals. Next, you push and hold the power button for 30 seconds. Then you put the battery back in and push the power button… and she lives. The computer came back, good as ever.

After all of that, the laptop was still as good as dead. You could see the light turn on, the fan starts spinning, but nothing shows up on the screen. At that point I knew that the BIOS reflash was probably my only choice.

Flashing the BIOS

To fix the issue, I had to flash the BIOS externally. Luckily I still had the original BIOS backup images available.

With the help of a good friend, we set everything up and did some tests to ensure that the connection is good and that read/write operations on the chips return consistent results.

Once we had specified the correct chip type by looking at what was written on the chip package itself, we flashed both the top and bottom chips with the original images that were once made as a backup. After reading the chips back and comparing checksums using md5sum, it all looked good.

We disconnected the SOIC clip, attached the power cable and tried turning the laptop on. Power button light comes up for 1 second and then turns off. Not a good sign.

We flashed both chips again and made sure that everything is in order. No dice, the symptoms are the same.

A closer look

It didn’t take too long for me to start thinking about what I could use all these extra laptop parts for. After all, the screen was good, it had 16GB DDR3 RAM, two SSD-s, a screen assembly in good condition etc. I was stopped in my tracks when my friend noticed something.

It turns out that during this flashing process, we (probably me) had managed to get rid of a resistor that sat next to the top flash chip. Whoops. Turns out that it was an important one, because over at Reddit, someone else also ran into this issue and had similar symptoms .

To resolve this, my friend had the idea of putting a 10K resistor in there to see if it fixes things. The issue was that the only one available right from the get-go was a very big one, so he had to be clever with it. He ended up positioning it upright with a piece of wire handling the other side.

This, however, didn’t improve the situation much.

Schematics to the rescue

To understand the role of the missing resistor better, we started looking for schematics online. I managed to find an OK looking one from a random forum and started browsing through it. The keyword of the day was “SPI” and when searching for it, we found some promising results. My friend found the resistor and found that we could just short it, since the resistor used to be between two wires. And that he did.

We attempted to power on the machine again and this time the error sequence was different as the laptop went into some sort of a party mode with lights flashing. The usual troubleshooting steps didn’t work that well here, either, so it’s possible that the stock BIOS image did not like something here.

What we did have was the option of flashing the known-good skulls image on. I handled that part quite OK, since all the commands were in my bash history anyway. The excitement, however, got the best of me and I managed to repeat the original mistake and I bumped the soldered piece of wire off of the board, putting us back to the original issue.

After another session of carefully connecting the two wires, we repeated the steps and after the flash, we finally saw the Skulls splash screen.

It works!

After booting into a Fedora 34 liveusb environment with iomem=relaxed, I grabbed the latest release of skulls ( released on 4/20 🔥) and used the internal flashing method to update.

Reboot, and we saw party mode again. Having used skulls in the past, I knew that this was likely down to skulls (or coreboot) being very picky about RAM. The solution here is to reseat the RAM modules and turn it on again. Why does that work? Not sure, but it did.

To make this solution more resistant to my unintentional attempts of breaking things, I added a glob of hot glue next to the top chip to make sure that I don’t knock anything off of the board again.

Testing

Once the laptop was assembled again, I did some testing to see if everything still works as intended.

Fedora 34 liveusb boot resulted in a black screen once, but on the second try, it worked again.

Windows 10 installed fine on the machine and while some functions don’t work as well (TrackPoint and touchpad being the prime examples here), it was still usable. Unfortunately I did not manage to write down the original Windows 10 key that is embedded to the stock BIOS image, so I could not activate it. But hey, at least it works.

Lessons learned

Even though this adventure started with a self-inflicted wound, I still consider it a success, as I learned a couple of things.

• It’s very easy to get confused when reviewing how the wires should be set up on the SOIC test clip and the device that’s actually performing the flashing.
• If a piece of software exposes a bunch of knobs and levers and warns you about catastrophic failures that might occur as a result, then trust it and don’t mess with things that you have no clue about. With this example case, though, I didn’t expect a memory speed change to result in such a catastrophic failure in the first place…
• Developers that know hardware are worth their weight in gold.
• Access to schematics is very valuable when fixing hardware.

And on the final note, I would like to give a shout-out to Arti Zirk, the guy who helped fix the mess I created. If you need someone who is well-versed in anything related to software development, Linux and embedded systems, then he is your guy.

flashrom references

This section has some commands that might be useful to you. Unless you’re using the exact same flasher, you will probably need to specify a different programmer with the -p flag.

The names and extensions for the input-output files are arbitrary. A file is a file.

Reading/writing the top chip.

Note that I had to specify the chip type, otherwise flashrom would complain.

The top chip is 4MB and the bottom chip is 8MB. This should also be reflected in any output that you get.

--verify option is also useful for checking if the results are OK. I also recommend reading the image from the chip after a write and comparing its checksum using md5sum, just to be extra safe.

# Read the existing image on the chip
flashrom -p ft2232_spi:type=2232H,port=B,divisor=4 -r top.bin -c MX25L3206E/MX25L3208E 

# Write the specified image to the chip
flashrom -p ft2232_spi:type=2232H,port=B,divisor=4 -w top_backup.bin -c MX25L3206E/MX25L3208E 

Reading/writing the bottom chip

# Read
flashrom -p ft2232_spi:type=2232H,port=B,divisor=4 -r bottom.bin -c MX25L6406E/MX25L6408E

# Write
flashrom -p ft2232_spi:type=2232H,port=B,divisor=4 -w bottom_backup.bin -c MX25L6406E/MX25L6408E

LinusTechTips has some pretty great videos about building insane PC and server setups, such as:

• unboxing and deploying petabytes of storage

• 7 gamers, 1 CPU

• building sleeper PC-s

• testing sketchy CPU-s

• opening up a 100TB SSD

I have the ideas, but not the budget of LinusTechTips, so writing them down and hoping that one day I can test this out is the best I can do for now.

The project itself

The main idea is to have a laptop that has ridiculous amounts of storage and the performance to back it up. The idea started gaining traction in my head after I realized that my Lenovo ThinkPad T430 can house up to 3 SSD-s, which makes it a perfect candidate for a system with a ZFS mirror configuration. It also helps that it is powered by a quad-core CPU and 16GB of RAM.

Additional points:

• low power, should stay below 60-90W even under the worst case scenarios
• portable, just plug in the power and an ethernet cable and you are good to go
• built-in UPS in the form of the laptop battery
• well built, can survive a fall or two (already has done so, but that’s a story for another time)
• includes a screen and a keyboard for those times where you really screwed something up and need to fix it fast
• supports 1x mSATA SSD (great for / partition) and 2x SATA HDD/SSD (one in the usual drive bay, the other in the HDD caddy that is replacing the optical drive)

Storage

With SSD prices having dropped quite low and capacities increasing with time, it might not be completely unreasonable to get SSD-s with capacities reaching multiple terabytes. At the time of writing, Samsung, for example, is shipping SATA SSD-s with capacities up to 8TB, which is the same size as the main hard drives in my server right now.

However, these SSD-s are also ridiculously expensive, with the 4 TB model costing ~400 euros and the 8 TB costing almost 800 euros.

Hard drives are generally cheaper per TB, but in this case we don’t actually have much better options. 2.5" 9mm hard drives seem to go up to 2TB at most. You will also have to take into account the fact that hard drives do not like impacts, such as falls, and they are much slower than SSD-s in most workloads.

Cooling

Since I have fitted this T430 with an Intel i7 3820QM CPU with a 45 watt TDP, cooling is an issue. Liquid metal, beefier heatsinks, fresh thermal paste, I have tried it all, but the only solution that has actually worked is disabling the turbo boost feature. There is also this other solution I created that automatically throttles the CPU at a chosen temperature limit using Intel p-state driver, but that solution requires a rewrite.

With poor cooling comes great noise, so ideally this server should run in a place that does not bother anyone with its high-pitched fan noise.

Performance

With a quad core CPU, this system can do quite a lot. Running Nextcloud, PostgreSQL, Jellyfin or any other service should be a breeze, especially since the main storage is SSD based. The amount of RAM is also perfectly suitable for doing quite a lot. Run a couple of VM-s, transcode your media, it can do it all (with reasonable expectations, though).

Portability

One of the best features of this setup is that you can just grab it and go, should the need arise. Its low power requirement makes it a much more suitable candidate for powering it in situations where the electrical grid is down and all you have is a generator or some form of renewable energy. In addition to that, everything you need to work with the machine is already there, just open up the laptop and start working using the built-in keyboard and screen.

The good build quality of the laptop also means that you do not need to worry much about putting it in your backpack and throwing it around. Sure, the plastic might break in some places, and if the impact is strong enough then it can still break, but it is less likely to break when compared to alternative thin and light types of laptops.

Practicality

It’s not all fun and games, though. This setup does have quite a few downsides:

• no way to upgrade CPU and RAM any further. What you have is what you will have to live with.
• it’s expensive simply due to the fact that the SSD-s get very pricy if you require high capacities, hard drives are still more economical for storing huge amounts of data
• the cooling issue will remain unsolveable, unless you invest time and resources into designing a custom solution

Conclusion

Do I still want to build this?

Yes.

Can I build this?

Not unless a delivery truck full of 8TB SSD-s happens to crash in front of me.

Or someone sponsors me. Take a hint, WD/Seagate.