Dell 1720 and HP 8710p Processors

I have a Dell 1720 with a T9300 and an HP 8710p with a T7500; could I swap processors? Is the T9300 that much faster to make swapping them worth it?

 

You can indeed swap those. The T9300 is only about 15% faster, however (13.6% on clockspeed plus change for more cache), so it's not going to be a particularly dramatic speedup. Whether it's worth it is up to you - how experienced you are with swapping it, how much you max out the T7500 on the HP, etc.

 

No real experience with swapping laptop processors but lots of general hardware exp.

I live and die on Adobe CS4 and do some gaming, so I use the hell out of the processor.

Also, what's the deal with this 320M video card? is this a 3d card? is it possible to fool games into thinking it is?

 

The Quadro 320M is a professional GPU, it is based on the 8700mGT. More information below.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=80145

 

CS4 has the GPU acceleration option which can really help take good advantage of the 320M Quadro FX card you have, and yes games do work on this card well enough and it is pretty powerful over the 8600M GT which the 1720 possess. If the games do not accept the card you have, you can download the GPU drivers from LaptopVideo2Go.com and various games will perform better in many cases I have tested. The 320M is a great card if you want more gaming power from this card.

The CPU speed difference can be seen drastically between the two processors when you do some 3D Max rendering of scenes, and since you do alot of photoshopping work you'll see a difference when you process filters on large files, or when you're Photomerging multiple images - And with that of course, alot of RAM is needed too.

For the everyday user not doing these workstation implications the upgrade vs performance gain isn't justified, however.

As I have said in the other thread you made they're both using the same GM965 chipsets and therefore capable of handling the 45nm Penryn generation 1 800MHz FSB processors like the T9300. Do make sure you update the BIOS of the 8710 to the latest one if an upgrade is available.

PS, perhaps you may want to tell us what kind of games do you play, and perhaps what kind of photoshopping work you do on your system?

I think you had a similar thread like this once in another forum.

 

I do a lot of photo-realistic illustration in Illustrator and a lot of web graphics in Photoshop. Gaming I am into the Battlefield series and some other FPS.

As long as I can find instructions on how to remove/replace processors I am not afraid to do it. I think you posted the instructions in the other thread on the 1720 but I can't find the one for the 8710p; anyone know where to find these instructions?

When you say "download the GPU drivers" what exactly do you mean? Are you talking about the Nvidia drivers? Don't the Nvidia drivers contain the GPU drivers?

 

When swapping these processors using Arctic 5 thermal compound, should I just add a drop to the die and then put the new processor on, or should I put on a drop and spread it evenly before putting the new CPU on?

 

Should be on the HP support site. Somewhere on this page: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsuppor...eId=321957&prodSeriesId=3369264&lang=en&cc=us

The Nvidia drivers are the GPU drivers. They are the same thing.

Arctic Silver's instructions suggest that you spread out the paste manually.

http://www.arcticsilver.com/pdf/appinstruct/as5/ins_as5_singlecore_expsd.pdf

 

Thanks Wolf.

EDIT: I noticed that that procedure for spreading paste is for a single core processor. On dual core Intel processors they say to squeeze out a thin line of paste and then put the heat sink on. Don't spread the paste, let the heat sink do it for you.

http://www.arcticsilver.com/pdf/appinstruct/as5/ins_as5_intel_dual_wcap.pdf

 

Anyone living in Minnesota that has a lot of exp with installing laptop CPU's willing to do this swap for me? I'll pay of course, but it would have to happen fairly soon here.