I just upgraded the CPU on my Vostro 1700

My T9300 came today

Changing the CPU on this laptop took several hours and involved stripping the laptop right down to its component parts, I even had to remove the screen. you can really tell that Dell doesn't want you changing the CPU on their laptops

Anyway, it's all been put back together now and it's working brilliantly, since I also fitted 4GB of OCZ memory.

 

Several hours??

I can strip it and have it back in about 90mins and thats being careful

What did you upgrade from?

Can you feel a difference in performance?

 

Well, maybe not several hours, but then I did have to go out in the middle of it to get some thermal compound.

It came with a Celeron 2GHz and 1GB of RAM, and the difference in performance in Vista is very noticeable; the Aero effects are much smoother.

Oddly enough, my 3DMark 06 scores don't appear to have changed, although I'll reserve judgement on 3d performance until I've tried some games. The C2D does seem to run a lot cooler than the Celeron, I now get an idle CPU temp of about 39c, whereas the Celeron stayed at about 58c

 

Crikey, your Celeron ran hot. Mine has been running for ~30 minutes on my lap, and is idling at ~37C. Mine is set so the fan will run at the slow speed at 42C, and high at 50C, both on AC.

On battery, low is set to 50C, and high at 60C. Even under full load on both AC and DC, the machine doesn't get hot enough to hit the higher fan-speed unless I've left the machine on the duvet...

 

Did you go in Device Manager to see if the C2D appeared? If you still find Celeron under Processors you will need to right-click on it and select Uninstall, then restart the laptop.

 

I upgraded from a 1.5 core2 to a 2.0 core 2, had it to 90C today

 

Doing what? Still... no matter what you were doing, that's damn hot!! Check the thermal compound again, I think you didn't apply it correctly.

 

It's definitely there, task manager reports two cores, and my SuperPi benchmark (1m) has gone from 37 seconds to 18 seconds.

I'll have a fiddle around with some games later, I may even have a look at overclocking the GPU.

 

for vostro 1400, changing CPU won't be more than 5 minutes.

 

Same as my Acer Aspire, I only had to remove a single panel on the bottom and the CPU was right there. If only all laptops were as simple.

 

I think it's the best buy stuff :confused2: and my bad heat sync. I have arctic silver and a proper heat sync on the way.

 

A small amount of copper grease(often used on vehicle brakes - £1 or $1 should get you a big sachet) will perform as well as the expensive boutique stuff.

I'd be very careful with it though, because it'll be conductive. I've used it for years...