Area 51 M17x CPU upgrade options???

Good evening gentlemen, I hope Im not wearing out my welcome w all of my question. What are my options for upgrading the CPU in my M17x? It currently runs a Intel Core2 T9300 2.5G/6M. Are any of the upgrade options worth it? Windows vista score me a 5.6 for performance. The 5.6 being the RAM, everyhting else hits 5.9. Thanks for entertaining my questions.

 

I think your notebook has the PM965 express chipset, so the only two CPU upgrades could be a T9500 and an X9000.

You can overclock the X9000 to 3.6ghz stable with throttlestop, you might even get more out of it.

The T9500 isn't much of an upgrade over the T9300.

 

Thank you, I really dont think I need to upgrade yet, I just enjoy working on the PC, going to try a 260/280 card first and see if it will play nicely with a slave 9800m gt.

 

it wont run with a slave 9800 how ever you can stil try to run a single 280 i'm not sure how it comapre to 2 9800 thouhg

 

yeah Im thinking that it wont run two different types of cards. And I dont know if (1) 280 > (2) 9800m gt in SLI. Were the 9800GTX cards available in mxm 2.1?????

 

yes that<s what the AW original m17x use

and 280 where also ofered in that flavour

 

Close, the original M17x (Area 51 M17x) has two 9800m GT at 512 mb each (or 8800s) the 9800m GTX is a 1024mb card. So was the 9800m GTX 1024mb available in MXM 2.1 III?? If the answer is yes than that will be my upgrade . Yes the 280 is available but for some reason ive been told that I cant install two in the machine to run SLI.

 

to much heat will likely be created your cooling would be ont it's limit that's why they won't run in sli

also the 9800 was never offered in 1024 flavour (at least that i heard of)

if your source is notebookcheck you need to know that this site is full of bull and rarely offers relyable information for one i'm stilll searching for my cfx 4850 in that list or even for a 1gb 4850 at least

 

Some good info thank you granyte, but the 9800m gtx was a 1024 card, but its hard to find info on it. Some people keep mentioning the cooling of the Area 51 m17x. It is nothing like the horrible desighn of the Arewa 51 M15x. My M17x stays cool, and can be placed on my lap while playing games like Crysis and Fall out 2 with both cards running. So I think the cooling will be ok, I just dont know if any 1gig sli set ups will fit.

 

The only way to really know how cold it's running is to use a temperature monitor, such as HWMonitor. The air coming out of the back may feel cool but that doesn't necessarily mean the components are running cool. The cooling is not as terrible as the m15x, however you are still using essentially defective cards that will burn out very easily and the cooling in the area-51 m17x isn't brilliant.

Just because a card fits doesn't mean it'll run, it requires BIOS support too. So far as I've heard, nobody's tried a 9800GTX in the area-51 m17x, so it might not work.

A single 280M will not beat out two 9800GTs, so it's not worth 'upgrading'.

As for CPU, yeah, X9000 (2.8GHz dual core) and T9500 (2.6GHz dual core) are the only faster CPUs that would work on your chipset. I wouldn't recommend upgrading because the extra 0.3GHz wouldn't give a significant performance boost, it wouldn't justify the cost (for most people).

Also, the reason all of your components except RAM hit 5.9 in the Windows test is because you're running a 32-bit operating system, most likely. Results are limited to 5.9. If you were running a 64-bit operating system, then at the very least your graphics cards would score significantly higher as it's not capped to 5.9.

Plus, as a note, don't pay any attention to the windows score. It's a very crude and poor benchmark, only to be used for a very generic representation of performance. Programs such as 3DMark Vantage give a much more accurate score of your system.

 

well with a x9000 he could use throttlestop to overclock his cpu in the 3.x

 

WOW good info, thank you, that cost verse benefit is why I went to the 2.5 ecu anyway when I purchased the system. Im thinking about going to windows 7 but im affraid of running into driver issues.