CPU upgrade for gaming??

Hi,

Is it worth upgrade the P7350 to something else for gaming purposes?
I am interested in gamings like crysis, starcraft 2, dragon age origin, CoD4, CoD5 and Modern Warfare 2.

The laptop I am considering is the G51 (which has a 1366*768 and GTX260M)

Thanks in advance,
Ron

 

no, not really.

 

Very few games are CPU-limited. Basically everything you listed, except possibly Starcraft 2, is more bound by graphics power than CPU.

 

Definetely Yes. If you can do it, do it. Many games take advantage of the CPU even if you don't realise. Crysis, Starcraft 2 would definetely love more CPU power. When I upgraded my CPU (from T7300 to T9300), I didn't expect to see an increase of fps in any game. However, I noticed a lot of improvements like stability, smoother gameplay, lower temps and higher fps. Games like GRID, WoW, World In Conflict, Crysis, Mass Effect (currently installed in my laptop) benefit from the higher CPU. Even my 3DMark06 went up by 300 points.
The GPU is the most important factor though.
If you need to decide where to put the money, choose GPU. But if you have the money for extra CPU power, I would recommend it. Games that have strategy, physics, massive multiplayer games etc would require more CPU.
In COD4 and COD5, I didn't see any improvement in fps or anything else apart from lower temps (~ -4oC). So I don't think MW2 would benefit from higher CPU. Dragon Age Origin though would require more CPU as the minimum PC specs demand a Core 2 at 1.6 GHz while the recommended PC specs require a Core Quad at 2.4 GHz.

 

I dont see how people say CPU wont change gaming performance, its like the most important hardware piece for your computer. A faster clock will increase all aspects of performance in a computer.

 

if you can afford it, do it. thats my rule lol

 

If you can't afford it, overclock it. thats my rule. well actually my rule is always overclock it, even if you can afford a new one. It's just more fun that way.

 

Upgrading to a p8600 is a good choice i think, or you could take a HUGE leap.

 

In some cases a CPU won't significantly change gaming performance at higher resolutions in games that are GPU dependent.

If one component is the bottleneck, you can upgrade the component that isn't the bottleneck as much as you like, it isn't going to make a huge difference.

If you are gaming at lower resolutions, then this is a totally different story.

 

Whether you get increases in gaming performance from upgrading the CPU might have been related to the resolution you were playing at. Was this a medium / low resolution?

For example, if you were playing games at 1680 X 1050 resolutions and you upgraded your CPU from a T7300 to T9300, I would be very surprised if you saw any significant performance increases. However, if you were already playing at lower resolutions then you might do.

Of course, there are some games that are very CPU intensive so this is obviously another exception.

What do you make of this Crysis Benchmark comparisom?

Particularly the results of the different CPU's at 1600x1200, High Quality.

http://uk.gamespot.com/features/6182806/p-6.html

 

Generally, its better off to upgrade the GPU rather than the CPU for performance increases, but I think that with the G51 here, you'll probably not have big troubles running new games out right now at high settings but in the future, the bottleneck will more likely be at the CPU rather than at the GPU, where it is normally at.

 

If i were u i'd upgrade the cpu. I got a T9400 but i still don't find it good enough. Somemore there are newer P9500 P9700 which u can buy and upgrade ur performance by a lot. CPU plays a big part in the speed or loading games etc.. so it's worth the upgrade.

 

Thanks for all the suggestions guys!

I was looking at buying either a Q9100 ES (Quad 2.2Ghz) for $300 or the P9700 OEM (for $375)

The reason I am still hesitating on the purchase is because my laptop will cost only $999. The CPUs mentioned above is approx 1/3 of the price of the actual laptop. I am just not sure I can justify the cost of the upgrade.

However, I do plan to keep this laptop for awhile and am afraid that without the CPU upgrade, the GTX260M will become a waste (as maybe shutter with happen due to the low CPU clock speed)

Any advice?

PS. The reason why I didnt choose to go with the P8600 is that I am not sure if it will be a significant upgrade from the P7350. I don't plan to use virtualization, and the clock speed difference isnt that much. The P8600 is not even cheap either, it seems to cost around $200+.

 

True, the higher the resolution the more GPU-dependent the game becomes. My laptop has 1280x800 resolution. But the laptop ronli_84 wants to buy has low resolution as well 1366x768 so a good CPU will be adviseable. Of course there are games that are more CPU dependent like I said before especially strategic and high physics games.

 

I am kind of confused about the screen resolution theory.

Is it that:

If the laptop has a high screen resolution, the GPU bottleneck will overtake the CPU bottleneck and hence upgrading the CPU will not bring framerate up? However, if the GPU is capable of handling the screen resolution, the CPU bottleneck will start to become noticable and upgrading the CPU will result in an improvement?

Thanks for the reply btw, what do you think about my delimma from my post above?

 

In addition to the fact that most games won't really push a cpu to the limit, you'll likely be able to overclock a P7350 to 2.4 or 2.5 Ghz.

I haven't seen anyone who has a G51 yet, but the G50 is really easy to OC and it does make a difference in some games and benchmarks.

If you're going to spend several hundred dollars on an upgrade for that notebook, you might first consider adding an SSD (I'm not sure, but the G51 probably has an extra HD slot), or getting a higher res screen.

 

For the G50, there's a overclock console right?
Does it overclock the FSB? or through the multiplier?

I will definitely give overclocking a try.

 

If a laptop has a high native resolution, for example 1680 X 1050 then the GPU will be doing more work so you could for example, replace a 1.8 Ghz Core2Duo with a 3.0 Ghz Core2Duo and not really see significant performance increases in any GPU dependent games. The Crysis benchmark I linked to earlier shows a 1.8 Ghz Core2Duo getting exactly the same frame rate as a 2.98 Ghz Core2Duo with the same settings for this exact reason.

However, at lower resolutions everything becomes more CPU bound, the CPU will be the bottleneck so that upgrade from 1.8 Ghz to 3.0 Ghz will show significant performance increases in this case.

I think many assume that a higher clocked CPU will automatically give significant performance increases in gaming without considering all of the other factors.

In your case, the CPU clock rate will be more important because the native resolution is 1366x768 according to nklive (I haven't looked up the details of your laptop).

 

What CPU is the most economical for me to buy? (Performance/Price ratio)

Any idea will be greatly appreciated.

 

t9300 is the best or me.

planing to change cpu too soon

 

T9300 had the right Performance/Price ratio for me when I bought my CPU from Ebay. You have to think that it's not only the clock frequency that is important in gaming, it's also the L2 cache size and the FSB. More L2 cache reduces bottlenecks and helps speed memory performance. It's like an internal RAM memory only much faster.
You can check
Mobile and Desktop CPU benchmarks
There you can see various benchmarks with all the mobile and desktop CPUs and can compare them and see if the perfomrnace/price is right for you. Don't take the results as definite though as the laptop configuration is also important. My CPU scores more in some tests than the one is on their table.

 

Ok lemme give you the skinny.

Unless your CPU is HUGELY inferior to your GPU and RAM, its WONT HELP YOU GAMING in a worthwhile way at all.

If you want to understand the difference between GPUs and CPUs and there relative importance in gaming you need to understand what parellel processing is.

Parellel processing is essentially a technique that uses many small processors (called stream processors lately) that do the work of one large sequencial processor. Diagram follows:


> GPU (500mhz) >result
> GPU (500mhz) >result
====LOAD==== > GPU (500mhz) >result
> GPU (500mhz) >result
> GPU (500mhz) >result


as opposed to a fast sequencial processor



====LOAD==== > CPUCPUCPU (2.0ghz) >result

Since an image that needs to be processed for a game has many simple orders to carry out, parrellel processing is ideal, while faster sequencial processing is better for converting a movie file or compressing a file.

Thats why when you upgrade your GPU your 3d mark score triples, but after you upgrade your CPU you score is more or less unchanged. (Unless your REALLY slow, old processor was bottlenecking you, and this doesn't happen nearly as often as people think or say it does).

AND NOW, the best part of my post, and explaination and amazing demo by the mythbusters illustrating the differences Ive highlighted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrJeYFxpUyQ

 

Unless you like to play RTS games, or games in a large open environment, or any games coming out in 2010...

Upgrades will never hurt you if you can afford them, and they will prolong the life of your laptop, as well as improve its performance.

 

There is a program called direct console which comes with the laptop, that overclocks your cpu through the fsb by about 10%. (This means of course that the RAM gets overclocked too.) As far as I know there isn't a good way to change the multiplier on the G50.

There is also a freeware program setFSB http://www13.plala.or.jp/setfsb/ which allows you to overclock as high as your computer is capable. It seems that in most cases the RAM is the limiting factor when you do this (I start getting RAM errors around 2.9Ghz). The correct pll is ics9lpr604aglf. You can even autostart this: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=373672

 

Dual Core an up can do Parellel processing. Cpu is capeble doing more complex calculation.

CPU may impact your gaming performance in numerous ways and its allway better.

If you have SLI or Crossfire the GPU will ask for more data to process and if you don't have a good CPU the GPU wont be feed at 100% with data. lots of other things about CPU.

The ting that myth busters did with GPU can be done also in CPU and very close at performance.

 

Yes, but the GPU specializes in certain kinds of tasks, which is the reason why we have one. Even if both the CPU and GPU use parallel processing, it does not mean that they can both do the same tasks just as well.

 

And thus, when one runs 3DMark06, and gets 1-3 fps in the desert area part, it's because the CPU is rendering the images, but failing at it, because that is what the GPU is for.

 

Yup, good example.