Wife wants "the higher FPS's"

In my signature are my laptops and their specs. I bought the 9150 from the marketplace and I've loved every minute of owning it (especially now that most of the Enduro issues have been fixed).

I lived in Afghanistan for 3 years doing contract work and my wife lived and worked with me (sweet deal). We had both of these computers out there and she used the M15x to buy crap we didn't need off of Amazon and play Farmville UNTIL.... she saw me and my buddies playing Borderlands 1 on our LAN.

Her: That looks fun...
Me: *dumb look on my face as I imagine the rest of our lives playing PC games together*

Fast forward 3 years, we're back in the States, and my wife loves PC-gaming and playing Borderlands 1 & 2 (has over 500 hours logged), Half Life (et al.) and basically any first-person shooter. However, a few days ago she used my computer to play BL2 and now she's insisting on getting a laptop that can "do the higher FPS's". She gets an average of about 45FPS in BL2.

My question is, can I avoid buying a 7970m/680m for the M15x (we left contracting/DOD/Afghanistan and are "poor" college students again) in favor of upgrading the CPU to the 920XM ( something like this) and get the extra 15 or so FPS and the smoothness that she desires? Is that where my bottleneck is on the M15x?

TL;DR: Will upgrading the CPU on the M15x give a noticeable increase in gaming framerates?

Thanks!!

 

that is pretty much right. 6970m is plenty or good fps especially with 900p resolution . new better CPU should work for u

 

The 920XM - 940XM should give you the smoothness you are looking for.

 

920xm now. New GPU in a year's time! 6970M is plenty for 900p. 680/7970M are pretty much overkill for that resolution and i5 chip.

I can't imagine you will find an affordable 940xm. They go for practically twice the price of the 920xm! In no way worth that.

Next year the 680M will be a good upgrade. Will be very cheap by then and will blast 900p in even the newest titles especially with an OC. The memory is the bottleneck on that card but that won't be so apparent at 900p.