9300 Inspiron upgrade concern

I already have a 9 cell battery and 130W power brick for this laptop. Just wondering if its ok to leave the Inspiron at 1.86ghz if I'm upgrading to a 7800GTX Go. I already know a faster processor will do better but would 1.86ghz totally destroy the performance of this card?

 

Well what kind of 1.86ghz? Is it a pentium m or a Core 2?

If it is a Pentium M than it could sort of go either way. Essentially you are working with a single core Core 2... so I assume it'd be ok as long as you game with all of your other programs closed (don't have AOL and Photoshop and Windows Media Center running while playing games )

What upgrade options are there for the processor?

 

It's a pentium M. The only upgrade I know of is the pinmod but I'm not comfortable doing it.

 

Of course it's not going to totally destroy the performance of the card!

That 1.86 is not that much slower than the 2.0 (400fsb) Dothan, so I don't see how and the heck it will destroy the performance. Would you get better results if you were to pin mod a 1.6 to 2.1, 1.7 to 2.2 or a 1.8 to 2.3? Yes, ofcourse you would.

Now, that's out of the way.

Where did you get the 9 cell battery and 130W brick from? And if you already have the 7800GTX, where did you get it from?

 

I got lucky with both. The Battery cost me 2 dollars and the power brick $30 through online classifieds. I'm looking at some used 7800 for about $100 in my area.

 

You could upgrade to the pentium M 780 (2.26) without pin modding.

 

too much money

 

Being a fellow i9300 owner, the 7800gtx would be awesome for this notebook. Have you found one yet? I would also suggest pin modding. That would be the best way to go for performance.

 

Actually, the pin mod only works for the 400MHz FSB Pentium M processors. 533MHz processors (like yours) cannot be pin modded.

Anyway, I do not think the processor will limit the 7800GTX for most games. But the upgrade may not be worthwhile depending on how much it costs.

 

That's why I listed from/to, which are all 400 (FSB) Dothan cores. Of course there is a 1.6 (533), but I think he got the point. If the whole upgrade is costing $200 or less, it’s definitely worth it. He could run any game maxed out at 1024x768, and use max settings on most games at 1280x800, depending on what his default resolutions is for his display.

I want to do the same mod for my D810, but it seems as if you guys don’t want to give up the 1.7/1.8 (pin mod) Dothan for cheap. It also seems hard to find a 6800go for cheap, and I know that thing shouldn’t hover around the $200+ mark in 2008!

 

If you find more than 1 7800GTX for $100, I want one!

Didn't notice that in your post the first time I read it.

 

Your best bet is patients and checking out your local craigslist. Ebay isn't that great because you going to end up paying 300+.

 

Actually think of it like this, if you play higher res you are not so CPU limited. Do check some of my Youtube videos, search for Magnus72 as user name or search for Test Drive Unlimited 1920x1200 and World in Conflict 1920x1200 and you´ll see what the go 7800GTX can pull of graphically and how smoothly Although my go 7800GTX is overclocked to 446/1200.

 

How smoothly did it run those games without being overclocked? I will have to underclock the GPU because of undervolting, but will be able to speed up the RAM a bit on a 7800GTX. I think this is only with my model (D810/M70).

Nice videos!

You had the Dell XPS M170, 2.13GHz.

Looking at your signature, you’re an avid gamer. What differences has your new systems brought you in terms of performance, compared to your M170?

I guess I'm trying to ask....is there more to it than just benchmark testing?