It is just my opinion...

...that the Ivy Bridge era Lenovo Thinkpads are perhaps the best laptops ever.

It was Saturday and I bought another, and this one was in very good condition and I paid three of the green "paper" things and three blue ones. Seventy-Five dollars for this addition to the entourage :

The laptop looks new, almost as though it has come from the store, although I know that it has been used, imagine though, a thirteen year old laptop that is basically untouched, just a few miles on the clock, probably driven by a little old lady...

It is a great relief to me that not many people take any notice of little enthusiast blogs on the internet, how can they as the internet is far too big for little voices to matter, or for the masses to affect the price of obsolete gear, I know this yet still put stuff on my blog that will not attract readership, I never want to go and read the statistics on the blog dashboard, as they say, never google yourself.

The Lenovo Thinkpad T430s with Intel i5-3320M and 8GB of Ram, it has the webcam, one of the best laptop keyboards I have known, and backlit too, a DVD burner built into the impressive magnesium alloy case and probably would have cost around $1300 when it originally came out in 2013 ($1855 in todays dollars) and as for most things electronic, it must be a lot cheaper now because there are much better things.

It will do everything I need on a daily basis in 2026, spreadsheets, email, word processing, streaming video, image editing and everything else I throw at it, but before that happens I will need to make one little change.

It has Windows running on it at the moment, but it will not run well, I know because I have another Thinkpad T530 with similar specifications running down the clock on Windows 10 until October this year, that is when Microsoft ends their security updates, same old story, greedy corporations wanted to sell more and send the best stuff into the landfill, perhaps I have mentioned it before?

The new kid on the block will join many other Thinkpads in my collection, I intend to install Linux on it and use it for a daily machine, or a backup for a daily machine. I'll go and ask one of our AI friends on the interweb what they think of this particular model, one minute...

All of this is Gemini AI, repeating what it has read from the web :

"The Lenovo ThinkPad T430s with an Intel i5-3320M and 8GB of RAM is widely regarded as a "legendary" budget workhorse. It was designed as the slimmer, lighter version of the standard T430, offering a more portable chassis without sacrificing too much power. The i5-3320M is a 3rd-generation "Ivy Bridge" processor. While it is over a decade old, it is a standard-voltage chip (unlike the "U" series chips in newer thin laptops), meaning it still handles basic web browsing, document editing, and light multitasking surprisingly well. This model features the first generation of Lenovo’s "Precision" island-style keyboard. It is frequently cited as one of the best typing experiences ever put on a laptop, with deep travel and a satisfying tactile "click." The casing uses a carbon-fiber reinforced plastic lid and magnesium alloy bottom. It feels incredibly sturdy and "industrial" compared to modern budget laptops made of thin plastic."

I find all that to be true (this is me again) and I am sad at the poor build quality of new laptops, especially when it comes to the trackpad and the keyboard, in addition, as we are "moving forward" it appears that Microsoft are going to be pushing AI even more in to their operating system, mainly so that they can "nose around" in our business and learn what to sell us next.

Then we come to my opinion, if you have read the blog I revere Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell, and it seems that the computers I am using the most at the moment, without any issues, are the ones in the middle of that bunch, Ivy Bridge. I consider that Intel did something very special with their tock and their tick back when they made Sandy Bridge better, and don't get me wrong, Sandy Bridge was pretty darn special in itself.

That was why Sandy Bridge was the "tock" as it was a massive shift in performance from what had come before, and then within a year, Intel shrunk the die, moving from 32nm down to 22nm with the same capability, but Intel was so on fire back then that they also improved the new processor, the Ivy Bridge "tick", to be as capable but more efficient, they were tocking and ticking my boxes, my forever mindset being that computing should use less of the worlds resources, not more.

It is by no accident that my other favourite processor, the Haswell, was part of the 22nm process, in fact the last of that beneficial shrinkflation, the processor line that followed it, if I dare to mention the name on stage, was "Broadwell" and they shrunk the transistors to 14nm which became "somewhat" of an issue for Intel. However, I will not continue discussing anything after 22nm, you should go and research the car crash for yourselves, from an audience perspective it does seem like a lot of fun.

Break a leg!

Behringer JT-4000M Synthesizer

I have been feeling the need to get back into making some music again, in that respect I regret selling a couple of pieces of kit many years ago, a couple of Korg Kaossilator units, but there really is no point in this regret thing, move on and either buy them again or buy something new. I still have my Korg Karma synthesizer and my Roland Piano, but I wanted something to play with while sat on my arse. I know, I can play on my keyboards sat down, but there was an urge to replicate the portability of the Kaossilator days.

This wasn't the solution :

The Behringer JT-4000M seemed to be a good idea at the time, and for a few hours I did have some fun noodling around and learning how to use it, but, despite all of the amazing Behringer promotional videos on youtube, I have to stand up and disagree with how useful this thing is, and I will tell you why.

Great sounds come out of this, 32 programs/voices and they can be adjusted, filtered and played with, but the reality is that because this is a very limited synthesizer, only one voice can be played at a time, with four notes played, not polyphonic, paraphonic, a term I only learned since buying this. It was a cheap unit, a hundred bucks including taxes and shipping, and I sort of knew there was a bit of deception going on with the Behringer videos, yet my need to have something exceeded logic.

The Behringer claim in videos online, touting "all sounds from the JT-4000 or JT-4000M used in the making of this tune" are correct, however, what they avoid to show in the videos is that quite a bit of peripheral equipment is also used, I would guess a MIDI keyboard, an effects processor and a DAW at the very least. 

This thing called a DAW is a Digital Audio Workstation which is a software application used for recording, editing, and producing audio files. Think of it as a professional recording studio condensed into a single computer program and the tunes "demonstrating" the capabilities of the JT-4000M use a DAW to construct multiple tracks.

Think of the JT-4000M as a potato, and the software is used to play multiple potatoes via MIDI or even layer multiple audio tracks (not MIDI) mixdowns from a single potato and Behringer have had an audio engineer use the maximum capabilities of the DAW (not the JT-4000M) and publish the results as a promotional video on youtube to sell their product, at the end of the day that is what they need to do, sell potatoes to idiots like me.

The silver lining in all this is that I have reinstalled Ableton Live 12 Lite on my main computer and I will attempt to learn something in the next few months, however, if I do buy another piece of hardware I will be avoiding paraphonic synthesizers in the future and spend a little more cash on a polyphonic, 4 voice and a drum channel unit like the Roland MC-101. As you could see in the last blog, the JT-4000M was included in my "free" list so in my mind at least, no harm has been done and I will see how much I can flog it for to raise cash for more things I don't really need.

Onward and downward!

The list of free...

Ok, as promised and as of March 19th, 2026 here is the list of free stuff from my efforts in late 2025 and 2026, this is why I am still happy with this hobby and all of this stuff is still in my possession as of today, but I have plans to build out a couple of the cases with the two remaining TB360 BTC PRO motherboards and some of the other free components, basically selling stuff I don't really want to buy new stuff I don't really want and continue to maintain the status quo of it being a free hobby.

The list : 

CORSAIR CARBIDE 270R CASE

COOLER MASTER HAF RC-912 CASE

HP SFF ELITE 8200 COMPUTER WITH 8GB DDR3

MICRON 8GB PC4-2133

SK HYNIX 2X4GB DDR4 PC4-2400T X2

G-SKILL AEGIS F4-2400C15D-8GIS 4GB DDR4

VENGEANCE LPX CMK8GX4M1A2400C14R 8GB DDR4

KINGSTON 2X8GB 2400

16GB DDR3 FROM ANTEC MACHINE

24GB DDR3 RAM 6x4GB

INTEL I3-8300

INTEL G4930T REMOVED FROM SOLD TB360-BTC PRO

INTEL G4930T REMOVED FROM SOLD TB360-BTC PRO

INTEL I3-2120

BIOSTAR TB360-BTC PRO WITH INTEL G4930T

BIOSTAR TB360-BTC PRO WITH INTEL G4930T

ASUS MOTHERBOARD B85M I5-4440

ASUS P8H61-M LE/CSM WITH I5-2400 CPU + COOLER X2

ASUS M5A99X WITH FX8350 AND COOLER

GATEWAY CBO311-1H-C01N 11.6" HD CELERON N4500

SANDISK 240GB SSD

SANDISK 480GB SSD

SANDISK 960GB SSD

NOCTUA NF-P12 WITH RHEOSTAT 3 PIN X2

NOCTUA NF-P14s REDUX 1500 PWM 4 PIN

NOCTUA NF-P12 REDUX 1300 PWM 4 PIN X6

ARTIC P14 MAX PWM 4 PIN X2

CHROMAX (NOCTUA) NF-A8 BLACK SWAP PWM 4 PIN

CHROMAX (NOCTUA) NF-A9x BLACK SWAP PWM 4 PIN X2

MINING RIG MOTHERBOARD AND BITMAIN POWER SUPPLY

GIGABYTE NVIDIA GTX 1660 TI OC 6GB

GIGABYTE NVIDIA GTX 1660 TI OC 6GB

MSI NVIDIA GTX 1660 TI VENTUS 6GB OC

MSI NVIDIA GTX 1660 TI VENTUS 6GB OC

MSI NVIDIA GTX 1660 TI VENTUS 6GB OC

LENOVO T450 LAPTOP WITH ADAPTER

LENOVO T450 LAPTOP WITH ADAPTER

LENOVO T450 LAPTOP WITH ADAPTER

ASUS H270 PLUS MOTHERBOARD I5-7500 AND 4GB DDR4

ASUS P5KC WITH QUAD Q6600 CPU AND 4x1GB DDR2

ADATA 120GB SSD X 2

SILVERSTONE SG04, P8H67-M EVO, I5-2500K, 16GB DDR3, SOUNDCARD, AIO

BEHRINGER JT-4000M SYNTH

You will notice at the end there something that is not a computer part, but I've been fiscally responsible for all my purchases over the last three months. I will do a short review of that next.

Three week mad one

I've already blogged about the fate of the first TB360-BTC PRO motherboards, set up as an i3-9100F 1080P gaming machine with the lovely white case and ASUS GTX 1060 that I'd had for a week, there was good profit there and my purchase spreadsheet was looking a lot less lobsided with the $300 cash coming into the hobby. This encouraged me to go on a three week selling spree with a goal to pay for everything with profits and see what was left "free" and of course, give myself encouragement to buy more.

A local business, Lighthouse Brewing, unfortunately went out of business after 27 years and I bought six laptops off them for $20 a piece, it gave us a reason to go down to Esquimalt a couple of times and enjoy beers at the other brewery, Driftwood. The laptops from Lighthouse were a couple of 15.6" Acer and four Lenovo T450.

This is one of the Acers after I cleaned it up, all six of the laptops need a lot of cleaning as they have been used in the industrial area of the brewery, the two 15.6" laptops cleaned up surprisingly well and sold quite quickly on Marketplace and between the two of them I made $100 profit which went into the spreadsheet, before that I had sold the original T450 for $100 profit, everything helping towards my goal of breaking even.

I should explain that, when Lighthouse announced their "last day and yard sale" they had a bunch of laptops and computers for $20 a piece and I had bought the first T450 and a HP Elite 8200. That was it and I was kicking myself for not buying them all once I realised what was in them. There was a second chance a week or so later and I went back and bought five more laptops, two Acer and three T450.

In the interim I sold many things, boxes of AIO, radiators, 3 pin fans, a toughbook, some old CPUs and RAM for gold recovery and what I would call a "Frankenstein" computer (which I will blog about soon if I remember) and by the middle of March my books were balanced, even the mining rig and 5 graphics cards were paid for and I had a big list of stuff that had turned out free, which I will blog about immediately after this.

It has been a mad, mad, mad three weeks.

Left Holding the bag.

The purchase of the large mining rig with the five graphics cards was a smart move, however, there were components in there that are really not useful for those that do not intend to do any mining, and the state of the crypto mining business indicates that a growing number of hobby miners are throwing in the towel and discarding their equipment, as quickly as possible.

I have already scrapped the large metal chassis that came with the unit, I could think of no circumstance where it would be useful, I removed the power supply, the industrial fans and the motherboard and took the case over to the local recyclers and threw it into the scrap metal skip, at least that part of the adventure is over.

We should discuss this motherboard :

There is an established order in the home computer building world, motherboards have been standardized over the last thirty years and fit into computer cases with a set pattern of screws and a backplane of outputs that use an IO plate within those cases. This mining motherboard has been created to ignore most of the established criteria, it is a niche monster and custom made to serve a single purpose, to run a mining operating system like HiveOS and support up to eight GPU units in the "riserless" PCIe x16 slots. The motherboard does not even have standard power requirements, hence a speciality unit is required to power it and all those power hungry graphics cards.

The Motherboard is a BTC65-V1.01 8x PCIe-16 and has 8 Fan Headers, 4GB RAM and a 64GB mSATA SSD with HiveOS installed. Left to right you can see the CMOS battery, then the mSATA solid state drive, chipset and the RAM socket and the CPU is under the heatsink, fan assembly in the middle. A normal ATX motherboard would be about 12 inches long, to fit in a desktop or tower case, this motherboard is 21.65 inches in length and of course, would only fit in a custom case (like the one I scrapped) and even though this is a "modern" motherboard, built in the last four years or so, the underlying technology for the CPU is well over a decade old.

I will not be too technical, because I just assemble computers, but the CPU is probably 2nd Generation Intel from back in the Sandy Bridge days, now I am not knocking that technology, I have a lot of respect for Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell processors, but the form factor of this mining board and the underlying technology mean that in "modern times" it has limited useful application. 

In that respect, for this piece of the mining chassis, I am left holding the bag on this motherboard, I have no use for it, it is highly unlikely I can sell it on marketplace and the only viable items are the mSATA solid state drive and the 4GB of RAM, which I may use in one of my industrial computers to create a home lab or a media server. 

I may attach the motherboard to my garage wall as a piece of artwork, it will serve to remind me that when the music stops there are always less chairs to sit on.

Biostar TB360-BTC PRO times four.

A little backward step here from the last post, that white computer that I just detailed as being sold included a 8th/9th generation Biostar TB360-BTC PRO motherboard and in January I had obtained four of them at bargain prices that should be highlighted here in my digital diary.

As I have already written, I was very aware of the price of DDR4 RAM going up a lot, so I had been on eBay surfing and came across these ex-mining motherboards that came with a CPU and a cooler and 4GB of DDR4 and the price, shipped, was $40. You can see 11 PCIe 1X headers next to the yellow PCIe 16X header which indicates that these motherboards are mining units, however, they work like any other 8th/9th generation motherboards and can be used for office or gaming machines. They did not come with the Intel cooler fan shown above, but some terrible third party unit as shown here :

Anyway, after I received the first motherboard and was happy with it, I thought I would see what the seller had left, he originally had 10 and over the week or so had sold more (not surprisingly) and had three left, so they were bought.

A week or so later they arrived, all working, all with that terrible fan, all with a 9th generation terrible mining rig CPU, the Intel G4930T and all, except one, had 4GB of DDR4, one actually had an 8GB stick of DDR4 and that was icing on the cake and in the few weeks between then and now I have upgraded the CPUs and the fans and two of them have been sold in built computers on marketplace.

The main comment I will make about my actions in regard to "mining" equipment over the last month or so is that the market will be absolutely flooded with the stuff over the next year and prices like the above and examples like the mining rig I bought with five, good graphics cards, will continue on a downward trend. There has been a shift regarding crypto coin mining, Bitcoin started it with a shift on how the "currency" can be mined, which basically meant that mining technology became unprofitable, that for every dollar of Bitcoin mined, they paid two in equipment and electricity. In essence, the miners were left holding the bag and wish to recoup some of their cash spent on equipment which, in their case, is obsolete.

The four motherboards were the start of a three week mad time for me on the computer bench, more details to come.

Things coming in, things going out.

It has been a truly mad couple of weeks on the computer bench since my last blog post, I suppose I should go through some photos and explain what has been happening.  The first thing should be an account of that white Fractal Design Pop Air case I bought in January and what happened to it along with a few other components, how they ended up in it and how it was freed from captivity.

The twenty dollar case had arrived with supposed issues relating to the start switch and the case audio jacks not working, they turned out to be not a problem, some contact cleaner and actually plugging the audio header into the motherboard fixed them. The case was bought with five internal fans, all like new, two of them black Actic 140mm PWM 4 pin fans that sell for around $20 each, so for my original case cost of $20 I ended up with a couple of quality fans that would go in my "free" trove.

I had not built a white computer before, sure back in 1993 I would have built beige computers as that was the only colour they were back then, but this one was to be the first true white machine, so at the start of February I took one of my bargain Biostar TB360-BTC PRO motherboards, installed an Intel i3-9100F and stock cooler, the ASUS GTX 1060 and 16GB of DDR4. Storage was a 256GB SSD boot drive with Windows 11 and a 1TB HDD for data. 

I don't think I mentioned the Biostar motherboards, perhaps in the next blog.

That was it and I listed on marketplace for $350 and it sold five days later for $300 cash for a nice little profit of $75, however, that profit was on paper, or spreadsheet and in fact, I was approaching a point when everything I had was technically free, because of other trades, I decided to be a little more serious about tracking money and another spreadsheet was created.