Rebuilding Toshiba Qosmio X500-11M aka Turning Trash Into Gold

NviGateSystems · December 15, 2021

Budget $200.00

Country: Canada

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: General workload, watch videos, Zoom meetings and more

Background: While visiting my previous employer, my old boss said they were about to recycle a bunch of stuff, and he said I was free to take whatever I wanted. So I took about 7 laptops. Of these, I finally got to looking at the X500.

It has a bad Nvidia graphics card, which I expected. I looked up the CPU (i7 740Q) and sadly, it has no iGPU, and all the CPU's in this series didn't. They were made for units with dedicated GPU. Now, although the GPU is bad, it still works. Just the occasional flickering and "Suddenly Be Pink" Syndrome.

I had an idea. though. I have a Pluggable DisplayLink Dock, so I installed the drivers, shut the system down and removed the GPU. Powered it back on and lights camera...no action. Ah, but I recalled that many BIOS when they hit an error the universal "F1" continues boot. So I hit F1, and it boot into Windows, yay!

I'm typing this post from the system after doing a cooling mod, as this thing really pumps out heat. I built a custom wood case for it, an open air style case, which in the next bit I will add photos of. It's still very much in the design and see if it works phase, but it does run! I can even play some videos, although I think Windows is doing everything in software because there is no actual GPU. Playing HEVC videos gets the CPU to 70% use.

I have a riser card on it's way so I can try and convert the two PCIe Mini slots into functional PCIe 1x slots.

I also have a ExpressCard USB3 interface card as currently my display is over USB2.

I am curious though. I saw the Titan Ridge Thunderbolt card, and wondered if it really needs a board with TB3 support or will it actually run on a 1x slot? There is a local seller who has a Quadro FX 600, so I could do a passthrough from the DP port to the Titan card. I'm tempted to try it. I also want to see if this board supports PCIe bifurcation, so that I can run extra cards as well. So much to have fun with. After all, it was free....