Gateway NV53a36u with AMD X920 quad core black edition

Well today my new gateway nv53a36u showed up from circuit city. I was unhappy about how it was packaged -- pretty much no packing material in the box and the gateway box wasnt really "soft" either. however the computer worked fine out of the box. I booted it up, installed windows updates, updated video drivers. ran some benchmarks and shut it down. I checked the bios and amd overdrive -- no overclocking options . not surprized.

I removed the battery, memory, hard drive, wifi card, all the screws, popped out the keyboard, removed the motherboard, removed the heatsink and popped out the N830 cpu. put in my grey market X920 CPU and put everything back together. Now i dont have any thermal paste handy so i know its going to run very hot but i had to see if the bios would even let me boot up.

Yay it boots with screenshots.

Windows 7 performance index with N830 @2.1ghz
Processor 6.2
Memory 7.2
Graphics 6.7
Gaming 6.7
Primary hard disk 5.9

X920 quad @ 2.3ghz
Processor 7.0
Memory 7.2
Graphics 6.7
Gaming 6.7
Primary hard disk 5.9



Once i have real thermal paste applied i think im going to upload a video showing how to tear down this laptop and swap out the CPU for those lucky enough to obtain an X920 cpu. I am also pretty disappointed that i cannot overclock the CPU via AMD overdrive. I was under the impression that unlocked multiplier meant i could do just that.

 

Cinebench R10 64bit

single render: 2434
Multiple render: 8817
GPU: 4028

3dmark06: 7374
3dmark06 with GPU at 666/950: 8695
http://3dmark.com/3dm06/15261384
im going for 9k

 

Hey, I have a question for you. I have the same laptop and I tried to install 7 Ultimate 64 bit, but I could never find video drivers for it. Do you have the ATI 5650 in your laptop too? How did you update the video drivers? According to Gateway, they can't send me a link for the drivers, and I can't find the actual drivers on AMD's web site either. Think dropping in the new proc sounds bad a*s, done a lot of desktop building, but never done more on a laptop than add ram, a new hard drive or swap in a new optical drive. Hope you know where I can find drivers and thanks!!

 

The drivers are really simple to find. goto amd.com, click support and drivers. chose notebook graphics, mobility radeon, mobiltiy hd 5xxx series drivers

chose your OS ,and then your all set.

I am pretty happy with the performance of my laptop, my only gripe is the keyboard -- it feels very cheap and flimsy.

 

I tried that, but when I do it, and I am only able to download the catalyst control center, which for me didn't include the drivers, guess I did something wrong.

 

Why is your processor score so low? I have the Phenom II N950 (2.1Ghz) and my WEI is 7.8 for the processor. Also, what are the temps and battery life like?

 

LOL. That's higher than my 1055T overclocked to 3.7

 

Just goes to show you, don't trust WEI as a benchmark