ASUS M5N... how far can it be upgraded?

Hi,

I have a 4 year old M5N (M5200N) that I still want to keep. It's small, light weight, VERY quiet (I installed some mods) and has a nice 8 hour battery life.

Only problem is that it's old and slow...

My question is: how far can the CPU be upgraded? Is there any chance I could put any dual-core Intel chip inside? Right now it has a 4 year old Intel Mobile 1.5 Ghz processor.

All the documentation I can find is at least 2 years old... so it doesn't talk about compatability for newer CPUs...

Any indea on what the best CPU is that can be added?

 

Man the ASUS website sucks...

Ok dual-core might be a might much...

I think right now I have a 1.5Ghz Pentium M 1MB cache 400 FSB.

Could I use a 2.0GHz Pentium M 2MB cache 533 FSB? I don't think the chipset can handle much more than that...

 

The chipset can probably only support 400 MHz FSB processors. That limits your choice upto a 1.7 GHz Pentium M, that was originally sold as an option on the notebook. If your processor isn't causing problems, such as slowness, then it may be a good idea to look at other upgrades. Installing a faster hard disk or more RAM will certainly help with its responsiveness.

 

I agree that it's (far?) more likely that a RAM upgrade will help the performance more than a CPU upgrade. Also RAM hasn't changed that much, I'm pretty sure you can upgrade to at least 1GB without problems.

ALso consider as suggested by Zero a HDD with higher rotation speed.

 

My harddrive runs at 5400 RPM and my RAM has allready been upgraded to 768 MB (only one slot for upgrading purposes ). There's not much more I can do. It looks like any upgrade will have very little benefit. But at the same time newer apps are causing the computer to run very slow. And multi-tasking is becoming a nightmare...

Dammit... looks like I'll just need to buy a new laptop...

Battery life on modern laptops is absolutely awful... Is there any models I havn't noticed that could rival my 8 hour battery life? I think LG had a few models with 10 hour but that was 2 years ago...

 

You could replace 512MB with 1GB, if your motherboard supports it...

For the HDD, if it's 5400RPM I don't think it's a bottleneck.

If you want long battery life, don't look at ASUS... their battery life has been dropping steadily for a year now and it shows no signs of improving.

 

Too bad... Asus makes very nice laptops...

And to be honest I think my CPU is the bottleneck right now since I never run low on available RAM. I'm not running Vista here Oh well, new notebook it is.

Thanks for the input guys, much appreciated