My Experience with the EliteBook 8540P

[NigelThornberry]

This notebook is very strange. Here's my experience.

I have the 8540P. It came with 4GB of RAM. I upgraded it to 6 but had two 4GB Hynix sticks - tried them and in no config of 4+4 worked - neither with the 4+2 or Samsung +Hynix. BIOS would POST but the OS would crash.

I then ran the 6GB for a while, decided to try the Hynix sticks again. Worked fine, for no reason at all, under Windows 10.

I've also successfully upgraded the video card to the Quadro 2000M despite it not being in the list of official supported cards:

NVIDIA NVS 5100
NVIDIA Quadro FX 880
NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800
ATI FirePro M5800 

Mine came with the NVS 5100M, a 35W card. I bought a Quadro 2000M off Amazon for $50, a steal considering the prices of GPUs right now.

After some fiddling I got the laptop to boot into Windows just fine, but it appears that nVidia's driver packages do not have the unique device ID for the particular model I bought (PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0DDA&SUBSYS_1521103C).

This is an HP problem - the BIOS assigns a unique ID between the FX 1800M and the 1000M in terms of ID quadrets. The driver doesn't have this, therefore it fails to install. This problem can be fixed by manually inserting the ID into nvblwi.INF for your selected driver version.

Another problem is the heat sink. If you fiddle with it too much it won't make contact with the CPU properly and will throttle severely, getting to 88C+ which is a problem because if it reaches 90C the laptop shuts off, and there's no way to disable thermal protection on this mobile workstation.

Thankfully I was able to rectify this problem by bending the corners where the hex screws are mounted upwards a little with a pair of pliers, and then using thicc thermal pads  between the keyboard and the heat sink. Heated keyboard, anyone?

Now the CPU only reaches about 76C under 100% load, and I can prevent throttling all together by disabling BD-PROCHOT with a program called ThrottleStop.

One thing I noted upon replacement of the video card is that Device Manager actually needed to reinstall the driver for the LCD panel!

Another very cool thing to note is that the LP156WH2-TLR2 1366x768 panel my model shipped with can actually display up to 76Hz, I have mine running at 1366x768 75Hz. According to LG's datasheet it can do 120Hz but I have yet to get it to display that high.

Currently, I have it with the following hardware and specifications:

i5 540M 3.06GHz

8GB Samsung M471B5273DH0-CH9 DDR3 (ditched Hynix)

HP BC-5501S Blu-Ray drive

TOSHIBA MQ01ABD 1TB 5400RPM SSHD

nVidia Quadro 2000M

1366x768 75Hz IPS LED LCD

As you can probably note I am an extremely advanced user, managing to even get my laptop's screen to 75Hz. Not something you hear about every day.

Links to LCD panel datasheet and graphics card driver "hack" tutorial:

LCD datasheet: http://www.panelook.com/LP156WH2-TLR2_LG%20Display_15.6_LCM_overview_16967.html

Driver enabling hack: https://forum.51nb.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=1403606&page=2

Here's a validation screenshot: