Upgrading my Dell Inspiron 1545

I have ordered a Dell Inspiron 1545 (with a T5800 800MHZ) quite cheaply from ebay and I wan't to pimp it out. After doing some research, I have found from a few suggestions that the T9900 (1066MHZ) is the fastest compatible CPU which I can install but apparently I need to determine what the chipset is?? Can someone please explain to me the difference between PM45/GM45 and PM965/GM965 chipsets? Also for compatibility, doesn't the BUS speeds of the CPU need to match?

 

You can use a T9900 in a 1545. There's some guys on the boards here with just that. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but you can. Probably don't even need to update the BIOS, etc.

 

PM/GM45 support 1066 FSB Core 2 Duo and some Core 2 Quad's and all Penryn. GM/PM45 will give you a BIOS halt about microcode support if you put a Merom CPU in it. 965 chispet only support 800 FSB Core 2 Duo's and Merom/Penryn CPU (Santa Rosa refresh). Penryn is prefered as it supports 45 nm and will run cooler as well as having the extra SSE instruction set. For certain 965 chispets you MAY need a BIOS flash to accept Santa Rosa refresh chips. Both only support socket P CPU's.

 

I see. thanks for the reply. What would you recommend I upgrade it to then? In regards to price and performance? Would I need to do any BIOS upgrading? I get quite confused with all this chipset/bus speed jargon. All I really want is to buy something safe without any hassles which will improve my computers performance.

 

Depends on what you are doing. Normal use a T5800 won't be **that** much slower than say a T9600. If you are encoding, or doing super CPU intensive tasks, the best value would be like a T9600, they are ~95 dollars used on Ebay. T9800 and above are way too much money for such little nominal clock speed increases.

If you want a more responsive experience with Windows, you may want to consider an SSD, as hard drives determine your boot up/shutdown/responsiveness.

 

See my signature. I have upgraded my 1545 as far as one can take it...

 

Hi gasblender37, I'm also looking forward to upgrade my 1545 (it has the Core 2 Duo T6500 Processor at 2.1GHz), and I would like to change the CPU for a faster one.
Did you had any troubles with the T9900? How better does it works?
Thanks!

 

I recently upgraded my 1545 to a T9800, which is only one notch back from the T9900 but a lot cheaper to buy second-hand. It made a huge difference over the old Pentium T4400 that the machine shipped with. If you can score the CPU for a reasonable price, it's worth the upgrade and very easy to do. I swapped the CPUs and applied new thermal paste in less than 30 minutes, most of which was spent cleaning Dell's thermal compound off the heatsink before reinstalling it.

I'm using the laptop right now to type this response. For what it's worth, the Passmark benchmark score with the T4400 was 1524. It went up to 2292 with the T9800, a 50 percent improvement. Subjectively, the laptop struggled with stuff like HD video streams on the old CPU, but plays them perfectly smooth with the T9800. And surprisingly, the battery life improved a lot. I didn't expect that, since both chips are rated at 35W TDP, but apparently the 'Montevina' updated Penryn mobile chips are more efficient than the older ones.

I also replaced the old, slow HDD with an SSD when I found a guy with a brand new OWC Mercury Electra 3G for $45. Between that and the CPU, this 1545 feels like a totally different machine for an investment of less than $100. Better than some new laptops I've tried out, actually. :thumbsup: