Lenovo Thinkpad T430

Hardware information
iGPU: Intel HD Graphics 4000 (in CPU): seventh generation, Ivy Bridge (released in 2012-2013). You can get GPU information in Firefox in.

Openbenchmarking.org

Firmware setup
Press Enter during boot to enter BIOS, RAM testing. F12 to choose boot media.

lscpu
Product page for stock i5 CPU.

Ivy Bridge page on Wikipedia.

Compare stock CPU with top available 3840QM, userbenchmark.com, notebookcheck.net, technical.city, cpubenchmark.net, cpu-world.com, cpuboss.com. During Gentoo compilation your T430 may became very hot and even turn off, especially on higher CPU - so you will need to replace HSF too, to have 2 pipes:

RAM


ThinkPad T430 supports up to 16 GB of SO-DIMM DDR3/DDR3L memory. Max frequency for some machines is 2133 MHz, but personally I got black screen without loading with 2133 MHz memory, so check in shop before buy. DDR3L is better because it is 1.35V instead of 1.5V so it uses 10 percent less battery with the same performance as DDR3. To check how much of memory the laptop has:

This shows one 4GB module is installed and a second is unpopulated but available.

To find out the frequency of installed RAM modulesː

When a second RAM module is installed, they will operate on the same frequency (the lowest one from both), but size can differ (for example 4 GB plus 8 GB).

See video about how to replace RAM.

Hard Drive
Better replace for SSD for higher speed, (SATA III: 6Gb/s) or mSATA (SATA II: 3Gb/s). Good models: Samsung EVO 870, MX500, BX500, according to Windows benchmark - Samsung is the best.

Also you can replace DVD ullrabay to SSD caddy - SATA III, and have two storages.

So totally you can have 3 drives inside this laptop (plus USB).

Trim
If you have SSD — sometimes you need to trim it for faster writing. Do not mount with discard option - it will be slower and can be harmful. Better trim on poweroff, on Fridays:make it executable:

.

By default prints are hidden, to show them:

Battery
Get current battery level (useful when using i3 or Sway window managers without GUI battery indicator) ː

For all details about the batteryː

Wi-Fi
The Linux firmware package is needed since the Centrino Advanced-N 6205 AGN wifi adapter requires a specific firmware file.

Firmware file that is needed is the. It can be obtained by installing the Linux firmware package: or.

After every kernel update (after ) execute

For more info see iwlwifi.

To make connection emerge wpa_supplicant:Edit config file, this is an example (see more at man 5 wpa_supplicant.conf and /usr/share/doc/wpa_supplicant-2.10-r1/wpa_supplicant.conf.bz2):

Connect to Wi-Fi with this command:

You can replace mini-PCI (half) WLAN module to something that do not need proprietary blobs, for example AR5BHB116.

Ethernet
To try to use Ethernet on laptop boot (run by init system):

Bluetooth
Thus a Linux firmware file is needed. See Broadcom Bluetooth for additional info.

Sound
If you plan to use Firefox for meetings - you need PulseAudio, because Firefox has the issue that when built with Alsa - your microphone will not work.

Microcode
Intel released microcode updates that fixes fault on processors. Install the officially published microcode package. For more info see Intel microcode.

Kernel
Gentoo specific Menuconfig. More info at Kernel.

Ready to use .config for Linux 5.

Compiler settings
More info is available at:
 * GCC optimization
 * MAKEOPTS
 * EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS

Packages settings
For more info: CPU_FLAGS_X86

USE flags
You can get or review my /etc/portage configs.

With Intel Modesetting DDX as video driver and libinput as input driver add the USE flags  and.

Firefox video performance
Video performance is better on (use --hwdec=vaapi), but from 2021 you can   and enable WebRender in Firefox (if not enabled by default, see about:support) to use GPU for video and get higher FPS. Also in firefox in  enable   (tested on Firefox 86).

To check that it works: emerge and run  : it must show loading for Video when Firefox plays YouTube, not like this 0%:

Note that Intel HD 4000 (Ivybridge) supports only h264 hardware decoding, as you can see in vainfo:So you can install popular browser extension h264ify. On YouTube make right click on video and choose Stats for nerds, see Codecs line. Also check media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled.

You can check video performance on this video, maybe vp9 and av1 will play smoothly for you even without hardware decoding (0% Video in intel_gpu_top).

See more

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration

Gentoo Wiki about Intel.

battery charge thresholds
Use:. Example config and instructions can be found at: github.com/teleshoes/tpacpi-bat.

fan control
Use:.

Fingerprint reader
Use:. Instructons can be found at:

ThinkLight
Fn-Space to enable/disable the ThinkLight, useful to see the keyboard in low light conditions.

Multiple displays
To add more displays, there are several methods: one additional external display, or attach two external displays but internal panel will be disabled, or to do a triple monitor setup with a T430 (iGPU model) you'll need the 4337 or 4338 dock for its dual DisplayPort, external screens need to have the same setting (resolution & refresh rate) and interface type (DisplayPort, hence needing the dock). If the monitors lack a DisplayPort you can use an Active cable or adapter (passive cables & adapters won't work).

DisplayPort specification here is 1.1a, so daisy chaining (MST) is unavailable here.

Also you can use (Wayland support in development) or  (Wayland support in development) to unite multiple computers.

Fastboot (reduce flickering on boot)
Uncomment and add:and regenerate grub, as usual after kernel update:See more about fastboot.

eGPU
With Thinkpad T430 it is possible to use external GPU, connected to ExpressCard adapter. The performance will be PCI-e x2: not very good, but on the internet you can find many positive posts about it. See more at:

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/hwmf91/t430_finally_maxed_out_egpu/

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/hbzkdz/t430_egpu_how_about_coreboot_and_linux/

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/727mhn/thinkpad_t430_and_expresscard34_egpu_what_ive/

https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2022/01/09/why-i-went-back-to-using-a-thinkpad-from-2012/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=390FuyadPIw?t=222

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TR2qOdrdtE - GPU is Nvidia GTX 1060 3GB, overview of games performance on Windows.

Fix screen tearing
When watching some videos, some frames may be out of sync with the screen rate. Screen tearing can be fixed in multiple ways. For Xorg: Thinkpad T430 has Intel GPU, create this file:

And emerge (because still not implemented in the default xf86-video-modesetting).

Reboot the system for the new configuration to take effect.

Another option against screen tearing: use Sway window manager, because underlying Wayland protocol has no screen tearing by design.

Pros of Wayland (Sway):

 * 1) A little bit better scrolling in Firefox, better video playing (no drop frames, even if Youtube shows 0), more FPS
 * 2) No need for xf86-video-intel driver

Cons of Wayland

 * 1) Difficult screencasting for Google Meet in Firefox, you will need to mess around with unstable PipeWire, xdg-desktop-portal-wlr, personally I got no success in January 2022 after a few hours of trying, see this defect
 * 2) Xorg will be installed if you compile Firefox with PGO, looks like Firefox uses Xorg virtual screen for testing
 * 3) Impossible to use ffmpeg for screen grabbing, but other options exists
 * 4) The most minor - you will need to change your screenshot software from scrot (or maim) to grim

You can check tearing on this video.

i3 bindsym for screenshot to file with a good name and to clipboard
File name will be like :

Full screen, waiting 5 seconds before, with led and "notification":

To be able to toggle the led as a regular user - chmod to 666 will works only before the reboot, persistent solution: create file /etc/tmpfiles.d/  with content:

video is the group of your user.

See more about tmpfiles at man 5 tmpfiles.d

Alter brightness
Brightness value live in a file, to react current valueː To alter brightnessː

Alternatively, install or  to control brightness with the  or  tools respectively.

Keyboard layouts
This is usual, for example here we add Russian language, change by Caps:

Screen recording with ffmpeg and vaapi
To h264, because GitHub supports this format (mp4), not webm (vp9), and Ivy Bridge supports hardware encoding to h264:

ffmpeg records middle display, where width of the left is 1200 and height is 1920 (1920 - 768 = 1152):

Another example for meetings recording: system sound + USB mic, into mono (using the right external display, so you need to adapt this script for you):

Related link: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264

Control fan noise (RPM)
See Thinkfan.

Example config:

Suspend without fan rotation
File name can be anything.

Make it executable:See more at Elogind.