Upgrading i740qm to i7920xm ??

Anyone tell me if this is worth it? Do the extremes overclock better? I found the online prices for the cpu are much better than the $1000 dell was asking for the upgrade.

IS this swap hard to do? what else would I need to change/modify?

tia

 

Depends on what you are going to be doing with it, but I've had mine overclocked running at more than twice the speed of the 820M. The XM CPUs can turbo up on ALL FOUR cores at the same time. They are also TDP/TDC unlocked which gives more power to turbo boost higher. They can be OCed through SetFSB as well as throttlestop.

It all comes down to if you need or want the power. The CPU also helps the GPUs as they scale with higher clocks. This holds true for some gaming, and not just 3DMark06. Which shows the scaling as well.

The actual physical swap isn't to tough. Just look at some of the guides. The_Moo wrote a good guide complete with a video. It's for the R1, but swapping the R2 CPU is the exact same process.

 

I don't do much but gaming and that's where I'm looking for the main bump in speed. I gagged when I saw the $1000 option for CPU I just thought it was crazy it was so much. What's the differences between the 740qm and 920/940xm ? I can't seem to google enough on specs and benchmarks to compare. On paper the speed is similar (2.93 vs 3.13/3.33) so I don't even know on paper if it's worth it..

My desktop runs a core2duo @ 3.4 ghz (e6750) and since it's 5 years old I was kind of disappointed to see it still beat my aw in benchmarks and fps in games. Since then I've read more than a few articles on how clock speed is still the most important in apps/games that still use 1/2 cores. So really I'm looking down the path to gain higher clock speeds.

 

Funny that if Dell had only listed all the benefits of the xm CPU on their site I Would have selected it. They list nothing at al.

 

A 3.4GHz C2D will still be slower than a 3.3GHz i7, mostly due to a slight IPC increase, and the IMC improving the memory subsystem overall.

 

I swap mine. It came with the i7 740QM and bought from shirley on ebay for US$ 380.00 (maybe the price has gone down by now) the i7 920XM. I have it on my system for almost 2 months. I've applied MX-3 thermal paste. At idle cpu temps stay at 39-40 degrees Celsius and full load no more then 70-75.

I see good improvement in the games (own the M15x with i7 720QM) + you can do many applications without bothering about any kind of delay. On the m15x I have wait for 1 application to end before I can start another one.

It really feels the difference!!!

Regards