ASUS N73SV CPU Upgrade (Core i7-2920XM)

Hi All,


came to a decision to provide my laptop with a new CPU making it more up-to-date machine.

So far I've managed to get in :

• Samsing 850 Pro 250GB SSD by getting rid of the optical drive
• Corsair Vengeance 12GB RAM
• 7800mAh 9-cells battery
• running Win10 Pro

all working together flawlessly for some 2 years already...

I'd love to see Core i7-2920XM inside and working yet no idea if that's going to be swallowed easily by this laptop.

Can anyone support my concept or it's not a viable solution therefore I shall stick with Core i7-2630QM as a manufacturers choice?

Thanks for all your inputs.

 

The i7-2760QM and the i7-2860QM work, I would say that unless you get a XM for very cheap, it wont be worth it, the i7-2820 or the 2860QM would be "worth" it due to the 8MB L3 cache and 1600Mhz DDR3 memory support, if you want a cheaper alternative the 2760QM is the lowest Sandy that supports 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM on that laptop, if you RAM can run at those speeds, go for it, but dont get a super expensive CPU, because the difference will be like 12-15% better compared to your current on.

I'm still rocking my N53SM(same mobo/chipset/bios, so basically, the same, but smaller), and 16GB of RAM a 2760 and an SSD gave it new life as a work horse.

 

Thanks senso,

Got sort of an official blessing from ASUS here : 'We have not tested it officially, but technically it could work. The processor type is not locked by the BIOS and chipset supports that chip, so it can work'

What would you consider cheap CPU? I've found some used i7 XM CPUs online around £80-100.
The last thing I'd possibly add on top is getting 4GB more RAM (Corsair Vengeance) to max it out at 16GB setting me back another £50 or so.

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i3-2310M-vs-Intel-Core-i7-2920XM/m159vsm459
It's some £130 project giving theoretical 130-150% performance boost - what do you think?

My 1600x900 display works alright so far but another £80-100 would get me FullHD on eBay (I'm not convinced I can't do without it yet).

 

You N73 has an i3?

Never saw any N53/73 with anything besides i7's, if you are on an i3, go for a 30-40£ i7-2760QM, it will be a big jump in performance, and if you can, swap for a FHD display, its so much better to work with an FHD display.

I tested up to the 2760QM and it works fine, they all share the same micro-code, so they all should work, just keep in mind that you wont be able to OC XM models, so their value is a bit more meh.

 

I agree. If you can find it for cheap enough and are able, it might be worth the upgrade/hassle.

 

Alright, after some hunting I bought a Core i7-2920XM CPU for £50 and went full steam ahead!

A nice instant boost to the laptop however I think there's some serious tweaking required to realize the full overclocking potential of this CPU.
Neither BIOS or Intel XTU show the OC options so I'm a bit disappointed but my research into enabling them via AMIBCP is well underway.

Senso: you've done this with your old Toshiba as per some other forum please share your experience. Did you unlock the BIOS on your current N53SM?

 

Very nice! best of luck with the mods.

 

I did in fact unlock my N53SM BIOS menus, using AMIBCP and setting everything to user, then I upgraded the micro-code, and a couple more oROM's using UBU, currently UBU seems a bit buggy for the older BIOS revisions, and produces buggy images sometimes :/

You can try unlocking your menus and re-flashing the BIOS with AFUWIN/AFUDOS.

I think your chipset doesn't allow overclocking, I know that there is a page on the BIOS that shows the multipliers, but I didn't even allow to select to values, much less changing them.

The Thosiba BIOS is a crappy InsydeH20 and its all locked down, the only way to flash a modded file is with an hardware programmer and removing the flash chip, that one I dumped it, made a listing using a couple programs(there is a post in the Toshiba section), and then used setup_var2 to change the BIOS variables to achieve what could be done on a BIOS with the menus unlocked, but didn't need to flash anything.