Merom / Core 2 Duo runs on the XPS M1710! (Almost)

I just finished an interesting investigation of the Dell M1710 and the Core 2 Duo. I put the new CPU into the M1710 to see if it will work, and it does! The benchmarks are a bit off in spots, but overall there is an improvement.

Temperature on the CPU reads 67C when idle which isn't correct, but hopefully this means a Merom upgrade for M1710 owners in the near future.

Post your thoughts / comments here.

- Jon.

 

Does the speedstep work on the processor. Other people have reported these processors worling in laptops, but the speedstep didn't work, so battery life was low.

 

Yeah all of the Core Duo notebooks can be upgraded fairly easily. They've released the BIOS update so its just a mattter of flashing the BIOS, taking the heatsink assembly off and swapping out the CPU. I wish it were that simple with my GPU...

 

Thats good to hear. It's about time Merom was able to work on some laptops.

 

Did dell ever mention to you guys anything about voiding the warranty for doin such a swap. I know they support it and released a new bios, but I've heard several pple say that switching cpus will void ur warranty.

If dell indeed allows such things w/o anythin happening to the warranty it might sway em to get a dell instead of the others i was considering.

 

Swapping your CPU will void your warranty as Dell doesn't deem it a user upgradable part. Dell would rather you buy a new notebook with a Merom in it than allow you to easily upgrade your current notebook.

 

Well then I'll just wait till my warranty expires before upgrading since I feel no real preassure to get a 64 bit CPU at the momment

 

There's no official word from Dell yet as per the article on the XPS M1710 and Merom . . 67*C is extremely hot. It should be signifigantly less . . less than 50*C I'd estimate.
If you already have a Yonah CPU in your notebook, I doubt it is worth it to upgrade. The improvements seemed to be marginal at best - high resolution gaming, which is a primary task of the M1710, hardly changed at all.

 

67C is really hot! Get some artic silver thermal paste or something, if you have not already... What merom CPU did you put in?

 

From the link he's given, it looks like he's installed the T7400.

 

I did not test battery life / speed step because of concerns over the heat of the CPU. Battery benchmarks take a while to run and it loads the CPU at 100% (Battery Eater pro does anyway), so I didn't want to risk destroying the M1710 and T7400 I'm experimenting with. I hope to revisit power/battery soon once there's a proper BIOS release from Dell.

Upgrading CPU voids warranty, but the M1710 I have doesn't have any tamper-proof sticker over the CPU socket/retention lock. However, the threads of the screws may give you away if silver shows instead of the factory black.

In the article I stated Arctic Silver 5 and a Core 2 Duo T7400. Someone else at NotebookForums reports a similar problem (67c Idle) but it went away when he swapped with another Core 2 Duo. Could be some instability with the BIOS or problems with Engineering Samples.

- Jon.

 

Have you noticed any real speed difference. From that I mean, so programs load up faster, is Windows more responsive. We know that Merom will perform better than Yonah in processor intensive apps, but an insight into normal usage would be helpful.

 

Nope. I haven't noticed a real difference in performance. Games and my general activities all feel the same. I suppose if you're doing real intensive operations (like zipping big files) you will save time, but saving 5 minutes in a 25 minute operation doesn't change anything -- it still feels like a long time.

Since the first Merom article I posted, I've maintained the position that the new Core 2 Duos isn't about speed, but about the improved feature set like a larger cache, power consumption (supposedly), and 64-bit support.

I think it's a bit early to be buying these new processors. I'd at least wait for Vista.

 

You say wait for Vista, but ironically enough, Intel plans yet another revolution to the laptop market, with the new Centrino platform and a whole new Merom based processor in 2007. Its getting to the point of annoyance, deciding on when to buy processors these days. Yes, i know the rule of if you need it now, buy it now is the one to stick with, but Intel plans on this Merom processor lasting 6/7 months, which for a mobile processor is very short.

 

By the time Vista comes out, buying a Merom processor will be a lot cheaper... I think I'll wait for that. Id imagin the Quad core processors probably wont be compatible with the current generation of laptops

 

I agree 100%. I was pretty shocked at how quickly the Core Duo / Yonah was replaced. I supposed I'm more accustomed to AMD CPUs where the product cycles are a bit longer.

Intel really is milking the mobile CPU market for all it's worth it appears. I suppose it works out well for late adopters since older tech is cheaper sooner.

Vista + Core 2 Duo is still debated. I've been reading bits about how poorly it runs Vista, but I'll reserve my opinions once Vista is finally released.