help me pimp my E6400, what else?!?

So after 3 years of faithful duty i looked at current laptop pricing and i could not justify another 700 / 1000 euro's to gain more perfpormance

My E6400 is currently Nvidia video + p8400 + 4GB GEIL PC5300

I upgraded the HD tot the new Intel 320 Sata II SSD and i works like charm (after i had SERIOUS OZC Vertex II compatibillity issues)
Ordered an Intel T9900 on eBay
Ordered 8GB Corsair DDR2-800 After this the E6400 will be top dog again performance wise for fraction of the cost of an equally benchmarking new system

What else is there to consider to upgrade?
got the backlit keyboard, got the BT and N
Would like to switch my low light output Matté panel (1280 * 800) for a higher light output 1440 screen or so, but don't know exactly what parts to look for?

AQny other suggestions?

 

the E6400 with the nvidia graphics had serious heat issues, good luck with a T9900 in there....

 

We'll see, if that's the case i'll sell the processor again on eBay

 

yea i suppose you could. if it comes to that i recommend the P9700 as an alternative then.

i'm just wondering what your main use of the laptop is/will be?

 

Use the laptop for general home stuff, office, internet, the odd game, but it's also my mobile DAW running Cubase with loads of plugins, hence i need to be able to peak when needed, fine if it runs throthled by speedstep at 900mhz for 80% of it's time

Got a i7 980 workstation with 16GB together with t9700 E6400 for work, so it's really more a hobby lappy i like to burn some money on.

 

makes sense. shame you didnt get the E6410 though, the heat issues seem to be much less with it

 

already had this unit for +3 years, 6410 wasn't available at that time.
My unit is well maintained though, clean dust out every 2 months arctic silver on GPU / GPU temps 34c / 41 full load, so maybe i'm lucky. also when used at home i work without battery, saves heaps of heat as well

 

It's not like the E6400 you have to rip apart completely to change the CPU but I definitely don't recommend the T9900 (due to the cache and clock speeds it can run just as hot as the Extreme processors). Maybe a T9600, but it's not a huge jump from a P8400.

 

I see where you're coming from, so how did Dell deal with these issues then? except the "conservative throtling" in the older BIOSes?

 

to the best of my knowledge, there were no processors above 35W TDP available on the E6400