Going to Buy a T9300 for my X205

Hey it's me again. I know some of you guys helped me out before, and I greatly appreciate it. It turns out that I will be buying the T9300 processor soon - very soon, actually. I'm only a couple tens off from the total price. One more paycheck, and it should be paid for completely.

I'm thinking of buying from NewEgg.com, but unless anyone has a better site to purchase it from and possible save a couple dollars, please, by all means let me know.

Now, there's just a couple things that I would like to know. I know you're all going to say that this will possibly be one of the best investments I would make for my laptop, but I mean besides that. But before I ask, here are the specs again:

TOSHIBA
Satellite X205-S9349
2.00 GB RAM
32-bit operating system (Vista Home Premium)
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7100 @ 1.80GHz
64-bit capable

One, I got a question about the whole port deal. I've seen some people make mention of "P" ports or something like that, so, for an X205, which port should I be looking for?

Two, I bought my laptop from Best Buy. I saw some notes about how the drivers that came with the laptop will not work with this new installation. That's fine and all, but how do I determine when to reinstall the rest of the drivers, and make the laptop recognize the new processor?

Three, I understand that doing a complete restore of the laptop is part of the process, and my files have been backed up as soon as I thought about making this purchase. But people were saying that I would have to get a completely different OS? Is it possible that I can just keep my 32-Bit OS? Because I'm not really looking forward to spending another 300 or so for a 64-Bit upgrade that most people claim has more issues than its "younger brother," as I call it. I have the 32-Bit OS CD, so I can do a clean reinstallation with that and save some money, can't I?

Four - yeah, I said a couple, my bad - I know some people already bought and installed the T9300 on similar X205s, so does anyone have an estimate on how much cooler my laptop will run "overclocked," if that's what it's called?

That's about as much as I need to ask. Now, two questions that I want to ask:

One, the whole GHz thing: from the looks of it, I will be going from 1.8 to 2.5 by upgrading the processor. What does this mean for me? What can nearly one more GHz do for a person who mainly uses his laptop for entertainment purposes?

Two, and I guess this was inevitable...has anyone tried playing Crysis with this processor? If so, how did it stack up? Because on the T7100, surprisingly, it would run with nice graphics, but it was jumpy. Very jumpy. So what kind of improvement would I be seeing for such a high-end game?

That's about it, now. Sorry for all the questions, I just want to make sure that I won't regret this purchase.

 

A Penryn needs the Chrestline series chipset. This includes the GL960, the GM965 amd the PM965. the T9300 and T9500 will work with the current 800 MHZ bus of the older Merom chips.

Your model has the same PM965 chipset as my Qosmio, so you should be all set. The Qosmio F45 was first launched with your chipset running a C2D T7300 then refreshed with the same motherboard with a Penryn CPU.

Your laptop should run not overheat as both your current processor and the new one run about the same wattage.

As for a performance boost. You should see a big improvment on processor intensive tasks such as encoding/decoding audio/video, manipulating photos, running multiple programs at once and other tasks. Keep in mind that 64 bit programs would run a lot faster on this system then 32 bit programs, so yes a Windows upgrade may improve things as well.

Unfortunatly, games and disk entensive programs won't see much improvment. These can be helped by using a faster hard drive. I guggest going with a 7200 RPM drive. Most Toshiba systems use 5400 RPM hard drives.

Your graphics card seems pretty up to date. 500 MB video ram should be more then enough. I know the system uses both graphics ram and shared ram, so maybe a boost to 3GB might be worth while.

 

I was actually thinking of doing something for the memory, but I kind of figured that would be a later upgrade to the computer once I get the processor going.

The whole hard drive deal isn't exactly my cup of tea, though. I really only see them as just the amount of space available, which I already have plenty of. But the whole RPM thing is new to me, so I'll probably look into one soon enough. A lot of people suggested 7200 around the forums here, so I'll look into it. Thanks.

 

I went from t7500 to t9300, 3 gb of ram to 4 gb, 32 bit ultimate to 64 bit ultimate. I could not be happier with the results. I already had 7200 rpm hard drive.