920xm purchase

Preparing to buy the 920xm to replace my 720qm for my G73JH

In the UK I can get the 920xm for £225.00 and sell the 720qm for £150.00

The only difference is that the 920xm is QS and the 720qm OEM retail.

1. Will the difference in performance be good for gaming?
2. Will it effect my twin turbo button?
3. Is it just a straight swap or do I need to update the bios/drivers?

Can anyone who has this or the 920/940 comment on overall performance.

Thanks

 

There are a lot of posts in the g73 benchmark thread about the 920. Since forum search is not really anyone's friend, here's a google search for you: site:forum.notebookreview.com "Asus G73 Benchmark Thread" 920xm - Google Search

There's no special BIOS or drivers for it.

 

920/40xm is a beast.... forget twin turbo when you have one, no need for it at all, better take a look at Throttlestop. With this nice tool you should be able to get a nice 3.2 GHz or more OC across all cores.

An OEM 920xm is outrageously expensive, a QS (or ES, whatever they call them) from ebay will be the best solution. There are some really reliable sellers who are selling them at a pretty good price.

Make sure you have all the necessary tools and ESD protection... it's a pain to exchange the CPU in a G73 imo.

 

I have no experience with this, BUT I think it is logical to conclude that there should no perceptable increase in gaming performace for most games. My logic is based upon the Anandtech.com review of the G73SW. When comparing the G73SW to the G73JW, they found that FPS for the two laptops where almost identical. This is because they share the same GPU and that is the bottleneck. So even though the SW has 50% more CPU power than a JW, it doesn't help in games because things are still limited on the GPU end. The ONLY exception to this was Star Craft 2 which is very CPU intensive. Other CPU intensive games like Civ5, Supreme Commander, ETC will probably see an increase also, but not games like COD, BFBC2, Crysis etc.

I believe the SW v JW comparison is relavent to you because you are looking at a similar (but slightly smaller) increase if you upgrade to a 920.

So, is the 75lb cost of upgrading worth it? I don't know, if you play CPU intensive games then yes, if you encode a lot of music or movies, then yes. If you play only First Person Shooters, and you are looking for a big or even noticiable performance increase, then you will probably be disappointed.

Here is the article I am referencing...

ASUS G73SW + SNB: Third Time?s the Charm? - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

I hope this helps in your decision making.

 

That's not necessarily true, take a look at this thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m15x/562070-before-after-benchmarks-920-940xm-2.html

...and the 920xm wasn't even overclocked yet. It definitely depends on the game... the impact it has is much bigger with a CPU intense game of course, but it's not negligible imo.

Anyway, it's a fantastic CPU, especially because of Throttlestop, if you're encoding videos or doing similar tasks it's really an amazing processor. But it's not something everyone needs.

 

In terms of gaming, there should be zero difference. The 720QM is more than enough for pretty much every game, the real difference comes down to CPU extensive tasks like video editing.

 

Nice info if I dont see any gain in gaming then its not worth the hassle of ripping apart my JH and upgrading along with the fact that I will own a QS and not my OEM cpu.

Its a tricky choice although FPS are not really my thing im into RPG Witcher 2, Skyrim and dragon age upto when they released number 2 which was awful and I was going to prepare for these releases.

Does the difference in 45watt against 55watt make a difference apart from more power drain. Do I need to adjust the CPU voltage?

Also the temps are they gonna burn me because I Idle at 44oC at the moment and max out at 71oC.

 

Only games that are CPU intensive (WoW, SC II, and a few more I can't name off the top of my head) will benefit from the upgrade. IMO, if you only game, it's a waste of money and time.

 

I have to say, itis breath of fresh Air, when people link a source.

Thank you all for putting in your sources to back your view on the topic.

Please give your self a patt on the back...

 

Hmm, so are RPGs like Oblivion GPU or CPU dependent. I'd like to know, so that i can upgrade my i7 on my G53 in preparation for that game.

 

Svl7,

I am not sure what you were referencing in your post. The closest thing to a benchmark was this...

He was comparing a i5 to a i7-920, even though that is a significant leap in CPU power (his i5 has half the threads of our i7s), he still only had minimal gains in FPS (SC2 being the exception).

GPU is going to be the most important factor in all games, some games are affected by CPU more than others. My guess is RPGs will be like FPS, so if you are running a i7 you should be fine for anything.

 

Bumping this topic for anyone that has upgraded from the 720QM to the 920XM to give me their point of view if they can please, I have some savings sitting there asking to be spent and want to repaste with IC7 after two attempts with AS5 have not given me the results I want so its another reason to whip out the 720.

Is the CPU replacement the same with the I7 as other normal CPU replacements?.

Also could anyone who has got IC7 in the UK advise where they bought it from. Thank you.

 

When you consider that a 2.0 Ghz Core2Duo can get the same gaming performance at higher resolutions as a 3.0 Ghz Core2Duo in GPU dependent games (the vast majority) I don't think there is much more to be said.

I think we would all like to think that a CPU upgrade will give us a nice boost in gaming but the fact will always remain that it will not. Apart from CPU intensive games such as GTA IV, SC2 or a few RTS around 90%+ of the games we play are GPU limited and that is a fact.

I wonder how many people have wasted money with CPU upgrades and then convinced themselves that they have gained performance in more than a few titles.

 

I do have to note that you have one of the most powerful mobility processor's on the planet on the way mind

 

What I think is interesting is the min. fps... take a look at it, in some games it gives a really nice boost there. This means much less dipping of the framerate which improves the gaming experience more than having a higher max. framerate imo.

But you're right, i5 to i7 is not the same as 720/40qm to 920/40xm... I guess when you OC the 920xm you'll see similar results.
A friend of mine will soon replace his 740qm in his G73 with the 920xm. Hopefully we can do some nice runs and comparisons to see whether it makes a difference.

 

Yeah would be really interested to see that running with the 5870m and its going to take a while for my IC7 to arrive it seems as rubbish britain doesn't sell it!

 

I did notice the minimum FPS, but I doubt we'd see that kind of increase going to a 920. Your friends benchmarks would be great to see though. To me, I would rather save my money for when I can upgrade to something that will really do my money justice. A marginal FPS increase isn't worth it IMO. I'm not against it, I've even thought of doing it myself, but what swayed me was Anandtech article I quoted above. What is the point of upgrading your CPU if your GPU is still the same? You are still bottlenecked. Sure it's cool, it will impress the chicks (errr the other forum members ), but the end result seems the same to me. I'd rather keep my money for the day I can sell my G73 and apply all the cash to something truly better, not just a little better. For me the hardest part about being a tech aficionado, is knowing when to spend to your money, and what to spend it on. I still laugh at my brother in law who bought a new Core 2 Duo Mac Book Pro 17" for $2600, 4 weeks before the new i7 models came out. It was common knowledge the new ones where coming, if you did even a little research. Money and performance were lost. I'm not saying you should wait, we all have to decide for ourselves what is best.

This is just my opinion and I don't want to offend anyone, my wife thinks all this tech stuff is a total waste of money

 

That is sooooo brutal I have never gone in for the whole Apple scene or as I like to call them Apple Skynet as I reckon they will destroy the world with robots one day

Sounds like you need a new wife I would happily get rid of my mrs for a Sandy 2920XM.

 

@ValkerieFire yeah the same thing happened to me with the G50V though, the Vt came out like 2 months later and slapped the V. I've also owned macs, but I've bought those on launch day.

If you are gonna keep the G73 for a long time and don't care about warranty, the 920/940 could be a good idea. You may be able to send it back to your ASUS reseller (as long as it's not a bigbox one) and keep the warranty intact, but probably pay a bit more for them to do the upgrade. As time goes on that CPU is just going to get more and more expensive, and in all it's not really worth it in my opinion, unless you're doing something besides gaming and web browsing.

 

Yeah, I know, you really have some good points here... in the end it's all about the e-peen, haha. No, really... some applications and games will greatly benefit from a xm cpu,(especially thanks to throttlestop) while it won't make a difference at all for other applications.

I hope we can do some before/after benches, but it's pretty time consuming and almost impossible to be accurate when doing a fps measurement in a game as the game can't be played exactly the same way twice. Well, we'll see.

The best part is going to be the disassembling, lol, that's pure horror compared to an Alienware system