m75q gen 2 CPU upgrade info

[besseddrest]

Thought I'd leave some info here because I've been at this for two months and I think this could be helpful to those trying to upgrade

m75q gen 2 at a higher level - by the looks of the psref spec one would think that you could upgrade from Ryzen 5 Pro 4650GE to 5 Pro 5000 series easily
https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkCentre/ThinkCentre_M75q_Gen_2/ThinkCentre_M75q_Gen_2_Spec.pdf

Several attempts to upgrade on my own led me to believe that I was just unlucky, and kept buying 5650GE CPUs that were mislabeled (in the auction title) and locked to a vendor other than Lenovo (i was 0-for-2)

The only thing I understood after PSB/Vendor locking is that the 5000 series chips used Zen 3 architecture.

But I discovered a few important details later in my search that would have helped if I knew/understood much earlier

• m75q Gen 2 actually had two 'runs' (i'll refer to as rev1 and rev2)
• rev1 starts with Machine type 11JJ - this is what I owned, 5 pro 4650GE
  • my motherboard is AMIV ver 1.1
• rev2 starts with Machine type 11JN
• Zen 3 requires the Cezanne BIOS
• each rev has their own specific BIOS, with rev2 the only one that you can flash Cezanne BIOS update to.

I attempted to flash Cezanne onto the rev1 board. It seems the BIOS can detect and will error with "product id unmatch"

There is a user who was able to flash Cezanne BIOS to their rev1 board successfully, however this requires forcing it with a BIOS programmer. I'd say do this at your own risk - details are in this reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Lenovo/comments/1jpjx14/m75q_gen_2_cpu_upgrade/

In short, if you want a model that you have the ability to go from 4000 series (Zen 2/Renoir) and below, to 5000 series (Zen 3/Cezanne) and up - you should be targeting the following Machine Types:

11jn-11jq-11jr-11js

Ultimately I found an ebay seller with a 5650GE CPU who threw in the motherboard it belonged to, AMIV ver 1.2 (11JN)

I'm exhausted!

[besseddrest]

Howdy,

Just wanted to add a new finding here - btw thank you

I now own both ver 1.2 and ver 1.3 motherboards for the m75q gen 2

I don't know if this is always the case but:

• ver 1.2 is associated with 11JN machine type
• ver 1.3 is associated with 11JQ machine type

It's possible that 11JR and 11JS have their own versioned mobo's OR that its either one of the boards above but already has a Windows key/license provided, but I can't say for sure.

Anyway, @a-little-wifi I saw that you included some additional info to the main branch and i'm just unsure as the issue reporter if you want me to close out these issue's myself or that's something you plan on doing, thanks again!