78xxu: Worth CPU upgrade?

As you may have seen in my previous thread, I just tried to upgrade my 7801u from a 2.26 ghz P8400 to a 2.93 ghz T9800. It appears the CPU may be out of commission, and that means I'll be sending it back for a refund. This has given me a chance to reconsider my upgrade, though, and I wanted to seek the opinions of others.

For those of you who have upgraded your CPUs in the 78xxu series, do you feel like you got a significant performance increase in gaming? I know that the CPU is probably the bottleneck in this unit, so it seems like a new CPU would be the most dramatic upgrade. If I'm looking to drop $300ish bucks on a 3.06 ghz CPU, will that translate into a serious frame rate increase? I'm about to head off to graduate school and will likely be unable to afford to build a new box. Should I pinch pennies for a couple months and build a dedicated gaming desktop for a few hundred more, or will I be able to squeeze another 2+ years of gaming out of this thing with a CPU upgrade? I'm not the kind of person who needs to have glorious 1920x1200 8x AA graphics, but even with a 3.06 C2D under the hood do you think this lappy will be able to push 30+ FPS on the next generation of PC games at medium detail?

 

it really depends on the game we are talking about because on a few games it hasnt made that much of a difference like for example silent hill homecoming it didnt make much of a difference because i have v sync on that game and i already got full fps so not much of a change there. if we take a more cpu oriented game like left 4 dead 2 it has made a good difference when lots of zombies are on screen. if you use emulator like i use pcsx2 then youll see a massive difference. the dolphin emulator has shown and even bigger difference then pcsx2. so it really depends on the game if it uses the cpu alot or gpu. it has made the computer noticeably faster though. i think this laptop will last awhile before the graphics have to be turned down massively because right now most games are ports from console games. take alien vs predator for example it runs at 60 fps on my laptop if i turn ambient occlusion off and max everything else.(this is in dx9 because demo doesnt have dx10 support) bioshock 2 runs fine on the laptop as well with graphics maxed out.(cant really tell you what fps it runs at because the game seems to either lock itself at 60 fps or 30 fps so it jumps back and forth with no in betweens)