CPU Upgrade From P8600 to P9600?

I have a ThinkPad R400 which I love to death but I feel like the P8600 CPU isn't cutting it anymore. I found a P9600 (25W TDP) for about $30 and I don't know if it is worth it. I'm a college student so I can't afford to buy a new laptop atm. I'm stuck with the R400 for now. The P9600 has 6MB of l2 cache which makes it 3MB/core while the P8600 only has 3MB of l2 cache and 1.5MB/core. Not only that but the P9600 clocks in at 2.66Ghz vs the P8600 at 2.4Ghz. Is the extra cache and frequency worth the money? They both have the same TDP (25W) so battery life will be the same.

 

NO, overall you won't see a difference. Only if you do large apps or need alot of cache like photo and cad program will you see the boost. But also what do you mean not cutting it anymore? Are you sure you don't have too many taskbar items running and hogging up memory? I would first upgrade your memory that would definitely improve your performance first memory are a small upgrade and provide the most returns right away. So how much RAM do you have currently?

Here what Lenvo says:

I would first see how much RAM you currently have and since it is DDR3 that is at least less costly then DDR2 older memory to upgrade to get a boost performance.

Also

If this is true you can get a something like this to max it out...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Intel-...US_Internal_Network_Cards&hash=item1e712fe7a9

But those are options you can look at and see what works in your budget.

 

You wouldn't see a difference for normal tasks. Heavy rendering, you'll see a small difference..

R400/T400/T500 support up to 8 GB DDR3 RAM.

 

Don't worry about TDP, it is nonsense. Get the Core 2 Duo with the highest clockspeed you can, preferably but not necessarily an E0 or R0 stepping, apply some good thermal paste, undervolt, and use thinkpad fan control, and it will run cooler than it did from the factory. The real cheap route is to buy a dual core celeron and perform a bsel fsb mod to get about 3Ghz, depending on which one you get.

Also upgrade to 8GB of RAM. That is a must.

 

The 3MB vs. 6MB cache makes practically zero difference - benchmarks are within 5% which is more or less the margin of error. I never did understand why Intel sold the mobile Core 2 Duo's w/ 6MB of cache - marketing, perhaps.

If the P8600 isn't good enough for what you want to do, then the P9600 won't be either.

 

I have 4GB of ram and I have practically disabled around 90% of the services running and have no startup programs at boot. RAM usage never goes beyond 3GB so I don't think upgrading the ram to 8GB will make any difference. I'm using an SSD (Samsung 830 128GB) and it helps but since it's SATA2, it caps at ~250MB Read/Write.

 

You never stated what you used your laptop for, a P8600 should be fine for normal tasks, surfing the net, Youtube, Office applications. You certainly won't be running Photoshop CS6 at high resolutions very effectively...so why would it feel slow?

 

The OP stated he is a college student with no extra funds. I dont think he will risk modding his laptop just to get an extra 20% at most out of the processor. Not worth the risk. Some people cant just change their computer every 1-2 years, they keep them for a long time.

 

My questions would be:

a) What OS are you running?

b) How old is the install that you're currently using?

Hardware-wise, that system should not feel sluggish.

 

Actually, Photoshop CS6 is the main software I use but the images that I work with are somewhere in the range of 2k-3k which is not that high. Dreamweaver CS6 is another software that I use very much.

If I had the money, I would go for a T440s but the new keyboard and touchpad will probably make me go for the T430s. I might keep my R400 longer than I thought now.

I'm running Win7 and I usually format my laptop every 2-3 months because it starts to feel slow.

On a another note, I just undervolted my CPU and the load temps dropped more than 20c . I don't know if I've undervolted too much because I don't want the CPU to throttle if it doesn't have enough voltage.

 

Is there a way I can keep the voltage settings without having RMclock startup at boot? I don't like having anything at startup. I just want to be able to somehow integrate these settings into the windows itself without using a third party software running in the background all the time.

 

Kind of. A vid pin mod in the cpu socket.

 

The extra cache does do something in the order of 'up to' 10% equivalent in clockspeed, more noticeable in multi thread programs that thrash the cache (duh) but it's very situational.

The other aspect is: does op have absolute confidence to not brick the laptop during the change - as cash is tight a replacement is not easy to afford in worst case scenario?

Sent from my iOCEAN X7 using Tapatalk

 

A CPU swap on a R400 is very straightforward, and can be done in less than an hour with an open HMM even if one has never done it before...I wouldn't be too concerned.

I just don't see that going to P9600 will change much of anything, and still believe that the perceived slowness is software-based and not hardware-related.

 

The reason why it feels so slow is because I used to have a desktop that I sold a few weeks ago cuz I needed the money for college. My desktop had a 4960X oc'd to 4.7Ghz, 16GB Ram, 512GB SSD and a GTX780Ti and compared to that, my laptop feels like it's running on a pentium 3 or something. I think I'm having a hard time adjusting psychologically to a slower computer even though this computer may not be that slow.

 

I have not messed with rmclock in years but there is a way to start up rmclock automatically. There is a setting where you can start rmclock at windows start up and set it to minimize. I downloaded the program to help out but I cant open the program on any of my laptops. The processor might not be compatible, maybe that's why.

So just look around, its there.

 

Settings are in section 6 of the first post.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...arket-upgrades/235824-undervolting-guide.html

 

Well, yeah...that would explain a large portion of the problem. Reality adjustment.

I've got nothing on that one. As far as you can upgrade a R400 - and there are a couple of insane options out there - it will never be able to match the type of raw power that your desktop must've had. No ifs, ands or buts there.

Good luck.