Hey so I actually got myself one of those P9700 boards. I found this listing on Discord, and since I'm moving to the UK next month I wanted a solid small laptop to bring along, so small review time from me.
I bought a very good condition X60 chassis with a X61T board and modded SXGA+ screen in from Plunkyy on here, had a L7500 and 4GB of ram. Very cool machine, it has 4:3 and a good keyboard which are really important for me, and I have a pretty good battery that gives me like an hour and a half running videos and the internet. However, the CPU is a big bottleneck. I think Youtube is a pretty good comparison point - It barely ran 480p videos, but only on the small player. Theater mode or full screen would make it lag hard.
Aight so something to keep in mind, This modded board only takes 533MHz Dance Dance Revolution 2 ram sticks. And this is where I made a mistake and bought two 2GB ram sticks because I thought the X6x had a 4GB cap for some reason (It's 8GB). Franck sells modded ram sticks so that's cool. I have a pile of DDR2 ram sticks and all of them were 667MHz so I think it's not a common speed for sticks. But in my honest opinion, 4GB ram is enough to run it as a daily, so no issue on my end here. CMOS battery and fan are not included but you'll get that in your donor unit anyway.
I got the board in about two weeks, China -> Canada. So well packaged that I burned my panini as I was trying to cut through the styrofoam sheets - I only had a small pair of Crayola scissors. The swap was pretty comfy with the manual hosted here on this website. Just one thing to keep in mind: there's a screw on the underside of the laptop that is unmarked and not mentioned in the manual at all, and I swear it's invisible if you're not looking for it. It actually holds the motherboard in place. Be sure to remove it, it's on the left side, near the palm rest / keyboard screw. Aside from the annoying plastic foil that keeps falling off when trying to place the motherboard, there's this notification switch (?) on the center front of the laptop that has a plastic slider that fell out during reassembly. Make sure it's not trying to escape.
Here's a few steps from Plunkyy himself:
- Take off every single screw on the bottom side of the laptop (except the two directly below the display, which are not labeled).
- Take out keyboard (shove back a bit, lifts up).
- Pop off palm rest.
- Disconnect wifi antennas, remove wifi card.
- Unscrew grey screws holding display connector down, and 2 screws holding SATA connector in place.
- Unscrew the last screw directly above the right screw of the display connector.
- Disconnect display cable and take off metal shielding.
- Remove the motherboard, put new one in, and work backwards.
Since I'm using a X60 chassis, I had some issues with fitting the board since it still had the second fan connected. The speaker with the X60 chassis does not allow the fan to fit on top of it, it's missing I think 3mm. This fan is usually there for the wifi card that runs very hot, but I have an Atheros card that runs pretty cool so I don't need it. I tried to remove the fan but I got a fan error. So I just removed the speaker for now. Franck sent me a listing for a "X61 fan similator" you can get on Taobao, which simulates a fan and you can just tuck this little wire in there. Really cool, but I'll have to wait until I move to the UK to order it. If you're running a X61 chassis, you shouldn't have this issue.
Result; I can run 720p videos, on Youtube in theater mode. It just makes it usable as a daily. The P9700 runs cool, cooler and faster than the max OEM option that is the T9300, as it uses 28w compared to the later's 35w. And much much much faster than the L7500 it had. It's an usable, ultra portable little 4:3 machine that fills my daily needs with a keyboard that I'm able to use with my tremors.
On top of that, communication with Franck was amazing. If I can do the swap you definitely can lol. It's a well-built machine.
Final rating:
1 out of 1 - Definitely worth it if you are a 4:3 fan and want to daily one. I do not regret my purchase a single bit. The hv121p01-100 led mod is a good option too if you want a good, bright screen that outclasses all the modern macs somehow. The T9900 is also an option but I settled for the P9700 as you get better battery life and less of the
hot. The performance gain you get does not tilt the balance in its favor in my eyes. This is a good affordable alternative to the X62 and X63 custom boards, and you're still using the OEM board, just with a swapped CPU socket. You don't get the i5 performance, but it's good enough.
Wishing you the greatest of luck and success!