Alienware m17x R3 CPU upgrade confusion

I've had my m17x for a few years now, and recently made some upgrades. I replaces my older graphics card with an Nvidia 580m, because from what I had found it is the best card that the bios can support (could be wrong, but thats what I found). Now I'm considering upgrading the CPU from the stock 2630QM. The only issue is that I'd like to upgrade to the 3820QM, but I've seen multiple places saying conflicting things as to whether it will work or not. I tried contacting Dell, but they were pretty much useless on the tech specs since my warranty has run out.

TL;DR: Will a 3820QM CPU work in an Alienware m17x R3, and if not, whats the best that it can be upgraded to?

 

No, the 3820QM will not work in an R3, it is an Ivy Bridge Processor, the R3 is a Sandy Bridge Chipset, try finding a 2820QM to upgrade.

The best you can upgrade to would be a 29xx XM CPU

 

Cant jump generations 2 to 3rd generation since the socket design is different. So sticking within generation 2960XM is the best it could support, the 2720QM might be best value though (it can be overclocked). Depends if you really need the CPU power (rendering etc) otherwise get a SSD for speed increase too.

 

Won't work. Best you can get is a 2960XM i7.

 

Well thats unfortunate. Would there really be that much of a performance increase from the 2630 to the 2960/2920? I've been tossing around the idea of either building a desktop to replace my m17x or just upgrading it, but if its not really much of an increase then itd probably be better just to build a pc.

 

Don't think so, unless its for rendering or CPU intensive tasks, the CPU won't be your bottleneck (it isn't for my 3630QM and 680M combo during gaming). The 680m or 780m or even 7970m might be your best bang for buck in terms of gaming increase requiring slight tweaks but it has been reported on this forum to work.

 

I upgraded my 2630 to the 2960xm and to be honest in every day use you don't really notice a difference.

 

For normal use, there is hardly a difference. If you do extreme benchmarks or rendering or any other CPU intensive tasks, you'd see a pretty reasonable difference in performance.

 

my 2630qm and my 6990m can still chug through Bf4 on a mixture of medium and high settings and maintain 50-60fps if I remember correctly. Slap a new gpu like the 7970m in the r3 and you will be able to game for quite some time. 2630qm is still quite a strong CPU for how old it is.

 

IT's not worth it, besides... right now... the CPU doesn't seem to be bottlenecking the GPU's performance so I would just leave it as it is.