hello mobius and thank you kindly for the lengthy and exhaustive reply!
Today I have talked with a local technician that will attempt to reflow my 3700M and furthermore I have just ordered an FX 2700M with FRU 42W8202 and vBIOS 62.94.45.00.07 (plus 30 day warranty) that was sold to me as new for 50$ plus shipping and import taxes, I am sure it's a refurb or used but I don't really feel like spending a lot of money for used cards since as you said they aren't guaranteed to last and understandably no seller will offer a decent warranty. Unfortunately there’s not much choice here in Europe as import taxes are prohibitive and Lenovo is asking insane prices for these cards…the UK parts store has the 3700M at 1800 £ which is 3000 $. This is an absurd price for a card that is obsolete and six years old, if they want to force people to buy new machines so be it, but sure as heck it’s not going to be Lenovo or anything Quadro ever again. Sorry for the rant but in my opinion this is not how you treat customers of premium products, even after years.
In any case I will report back with the results of the “new” 2700M and if it works I’m going to put on hold the reflow of my busted 3700M. Might end up taking them to get serviced both eventually. Was going to try the oven trick, but I reckon for 20$ I let someone with proper equipment and experience have a shot at it.
It's also a good chance to apply new thermal paste on CPU and GPU since 6 years on every day will have had its toll.
I am keeping my eyes on ebay for some good deal on another 3700M, want to keep my W700 going as long as I can since it stills serves me well for 3D work...well not so much rendering and the 8GB or RAM is killing me but the integrated tablet is still the best idea anyone had in years. Hopefully some day someone will make another.
I will also report a message that I received from experienced poster Haarp over at the Thinkpads forum:
Known working FX2700M
- Lenovo W700 | BIOS 62.94.45.00.07 (FRU 42W8202) (default)
(other FRU for same card is 42W8024)
Known working FX3700M:
- Lenovo W700 | BIOS 62.92.5C.00.05 (FRU 42W8204) (default)
- Lenovo W700 | BIOS 62.92.5C.00.07
(other FRU for same card is 42W8025)
- HP 8730w | BIOS 62.92.51.00.05 (Displayport may break)
- HP 8730w | BIOS 62.92.6E.00.10 (Displayport may break) SPARE P/N 488125-001, ASSY P/N 460734-001, REPLACE 493984-001, CHIP G92-985-A2
Known not working FX 3700M
- Dell M600 | BIOS (all)
- HP 8730w | BIOS 62.92.3C.00.08
- Clevo M860TU | BIOS (all) MXM 3.0
- Sager NP8662 | BIOS (all) MXM 3.0
Video Card Removal and Installation for Thinkpad W700, W700ds, W701, W701ds
Again thank you very much for the reply and kind regards, will post soon with results.
edit_just for reference sake, I've had two Toshiba FRU hard drives die, one a month after I bought the machine which was in RAID 0 and made me lose everything.Had to throw away two batteries as they simply would not charge and I gave up because battery warranty is only for 6 months or one year, so I've been using it only plugged into a wall. I've had to change the keyboard because the laptop shipped with a dreadful mushy one with no metal backplate that felt beyond horrible and cheap and it took a while to track an older FRU with a decent feel to it. Also the color calibrator and Wi-Fi radio have been dead for years. Still love this thing but it takes a lot of patience and :heart: ! I want to resurrect it so badly but with these dodgy bits it's going to feel like a time bomb.
Thinkpad W700 / Quad Core Extreme QX9300 / QUADRO FX 3700M / 8 GB DDR3 / Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD / Hitachi 160GB HDD / Intel Turbo Memory 2 GB / Windows 7 64-bit