How viable is it for me to install a new CPU?

My laptop specs are in my sig. Basically, I'm CPU-limited pretty severely in a lot of games and don't have enough money to upgrade to another laptop or buy a desktop. How viable (and affordable) would a CPU upgrade be? Any idea if it's easy to find the parts separately and, if so, whether or not my Motherboard would prove to have any compatibility issues?

 

The highest you can go is the i7 940XM. The next generation of Intel processors used Socket G2 (yours uses G1). The 940XM should be available for around 600 bucks. For me, that is a pretty high price for something that is three generations old. I would upgrade. If you upgrade your RAM, you should get about 500 bucks for your laptop. For 1100 bucks (600 which you say you can shell out for the CPU + 500 from the sale) you should be able to get a pretty decent desktop. That is what I would do. If you HAVE to upgrade, then the 940XM is your best bet. It should work in your laptop considering it is the same socket and the same generation.

 

Or if you want a laptop there's plenty of options for around $1000 that are plenty powerful, like the Clevo P151EM / Sager NP9130. But I agree, your options are quite limited and your best improvement is an expensive one that doesn't make much sense financially.

 

Thanks! I'll look into selling this old thing and getting a new laptop instead. Unfortunately my battery died a while ago so I likely need to buy a replacement first before I can sell this for a decent price.

I'm guessing an upgrade from 4GB of RAM to 8GB would increase the resale value by a fair bit? Seems like a no-brainer with the price of RAM these days.

Thanks for the advice!

I'm happy with the performance of most games (High settings at 1920x1080 on multiplatform releases usually gets me a constant 30FPS or more unless it's a CPU intensive open world game) but certain titles just don't play nice with my machine (BF3, the newest games in the Total War series and Dark Souls).

EDIT: I should also mention that I'm in the UK so while I would love to buy directly from Sager, I don't know if they ship internationally... The retailer I bought this unit from has closed so I don't know anywhere cheap in the EU but I have some American friends who might be able to help me out

 

Not really. You certainly would not get back what you put into it.

This company has pretty much taken over as the premier Sager retailer in the UK.

 

Sorry if I'm being a bit dense but what do you mean by 'this company'?

 

Click on "this company", it's a link.

You could get an i7-840QM from laptopmonkey for around £100. Turboboost up to 3.2 and has the same wattage as your current i7-720.

 

But 840QM you won't gain much if anything over the 720QM. 3.2 GHz is for single threaded apps. It won't help much with newer quad hungry games.

 

True, but there's a big difference in price between the 9xx and the 8xx. Whether the OP upgrades or sells to buy a mid range desktop s/he is going to be back in the same boat in a year or so.

 

My friend bought a Sager from their website 4 months ago. They DO ship internationally. ( he live in UK by the way)

 

Ah, thanks! For some reason the link wasn't highlighted for me.

And £100 is a cheap upgrade but the jump up from 1.6 to 1.8 seems negligible. I'll look into selling my current laptop and getting something for around £1000. That site seems to be the cheapest I've found outside of getting a friend from the States to bring something back with them.

Still, I've heard mixed things about the 670m. Apparently it's just a rebranded 5xxm series? How much of a leap would that be from the 285m? While my laptop is over 2 years old, it still performs well graphically in most games. That being said, I might just save up and try to go for the 7970m as apparently that's almost high end desktop performance. At least that would last, although again I'd have to go for a cheaper processor to compensate for the expensive GPU (not that I'd be going below a 2.3Ghz quad core though).

 

Not much -- you get maybe 30% more processing power and 15% more bandwidth. The 285M is a surprisingly powerful card for its age -- to beat it by a large margin, you need either a 7970M or a 680M (either of those is better by a factor of 2 or maybe even 3).

 

See:
PassMark Software - Video Card Benchmarks - Video Card Look Up

See:
PassMark Software - Video Card Benchmarks - Video Card Look Up


From the above, it would seem that as long as we're comparing Mobile gpu's; the 670M is a worthy upgrade from the 285m.

Certainly more than 30% better...

 

As I must have said at least half a dozen times now, PassMark is a random number generator. Look at the 285M link and consider the four cards above the 285M:

GeForce 9600 GT 930
GeForce 9800 GT 916
GeForce GTX 280M 906
Radeon X1900 CrossFire Edition 905
GeForce GTX 285M 900

First, the 280M is somehow better than 285M despite being exactly the same card except with lower clock speeds. Second, the 9600 GT somehow beats the 9800 GT despite the latter having nearly twice as many shaders. And finally, there is the X1900 from 2006 which I don't even have a straightforward way of comparing to the others because it's so old that it pre-dates the unified architecture (but trust me, it's way slower). There just isn't any rhyme or reason to PassMark's results.

 

While it may seem that PassMark has no rhyme or reason to it's 'scores', it doesn't mean you need to totally write it off either.

When a PM 'score' is almost double than a more than three year old gpu card's score is, well - let's just say that I would believe (if only a little) in PM.

Something to consider which PM does not show: the same component's 'score' can depend on the rest of the platform it is tested on - this is why it may seem to you to be a 'random number generator'.

I take all 'benchmarks' with a grain of salt - but major trends (as shown by the links I've provided above) are very hard to ignore (even in the real world).

I'm not defending PM - just using it as one data point to show that components 3 years apart have really progressed.

As for your claim that a 670m has 30% more computational power and 15% more bandwidth is (I'm assuming, since you don't provide any other 'real world benchmarks') based on simply the spec's given by the manufacturer?

That is just a random number generator to me too.

(Something along the (1960's) argument that a 500 cubit inch engine should be 25% more powerful than a 400 cubic inch engine would be - and - therefore be 25% faster too).

 

Compare specs:

670m vs 285m

Cuda Cores: 336 / 128
Core Speed: 598 / 576
Memory: 1500MHz 192-bit GDDR5 (72 GB/s) / 1020MHz 256-bit GDDR3 (61GB/s)

2.5 times more cores, and GDDR5 vs GDDR3 (even with the limited 192-bit GDDR5) offers a significant improvement. I'd say ~ 40-50% FPS improvement not to mention an Ivy Bridge CPU will be significantly faster than the first gen i7's.

 

Yes, it does. A benchmark is worthless if things that are very well known quantities from the same generation (tested against each other by multiple reputable sites) like the 9600 GT and 9800 GT do not behave as expected.

If the other hardware distorts the result to the point where a 9600 GT beats a 9800 GT, then the test is of the other hardware and not of the graphics card.

It's the manufacturer's specs somewhat adjusted upwards for architecture.

Only if you do not understand what you are doing.

Here are the results with some real games:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285M - Notebookcheck.net Tech
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670M - Notebookcheck.net Tech

The comparison here is not perfect either because the poor 285M is inevitably paired with the piece of junk that is Clarksfield whereas the 670M goes with Sandy or Ivy Bridge. Looking at the highest available settings to minimize CPU dependence:

285M vs. 670M
Mafia 2 (ultra): 39.6 vs. 55 (+39%)
Starcraft 2 (ultra): 32.8 vs. 58 (+77%)
Metro 2 (ultra): 13.7 vs. 14 (+2%)
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (ultra): 26 vs. 45.3 (+74%)
Risen (ultra): 30.3 vs. 44.4 (+47%)

The average is around 48%. Adjust for the massive difference in CPUs for the tested laptops and 30% is not so unreasonable. Call it 40% if you want -- the point is that the difference between the 670M and the 7970M/680M is night and day.

 

Keep in mind that these are not the same cores -- starting with the Fermi architecture, Nvidia switched to more cores each of which can do less. The theoretical processing power of the 285M is 576 GFLOPS while for the 670M it's 803.6 GFLOPS. The improvement is indeed about 40% though (I tried to do it in my head before and somehow got 30%).

 

Difference between 670m and 7970m/680m is absolutely night and day. 680m is faster than 580m SLI.

 

Thanks for the real world results.

But you're still basing things on mere 'numbers' and not on actual results...

If we can agree that a minimum (not maximum or average) of ~30FPS is the goal here; then the 285m is not even in the running today (at identical quality levels) - while the 670m is (and what PM 'randomly' shows ).

Also: no doubt the 680m is in a different league - but we're discussing 285m vs. 670m, right?

 

Weirdly, I can still run most games at 1920x1080 on Max (or at least high settings with some odd options cranked down to medium) and still get 30FPS on non-CPU intensive titles with the 285m.

If the 670m is a mere 40% performance increase, then it's hardly worth it. I've found a 7970m with a 2.3GHZ i7 combo for £1030 (skimping out on HDDs and only 4GBs of Ram but still, that's an expense I can afford further down the line) and that seems like it would be a monumental shift.

To be honest, anything less than a doubling of my FPS isn't really attractive, not if I'm spending £1000 anyway (even if half of that would likely be paid for by selling this thing).

Thanks for all the advice though! Once my next paycheque comes in the middle of next month (and if I can sell this laptop by then), I think I might take the plunge and go for that 7970m.

 

The 7970m willl be a good performance improvement. Just your initial comment was about being CPU limited, so didn't think you needed as much of a GPU boost. But 40-50% is significant and may end up being more because you are CPU bound. I think you'd be impressed with the difference in any case. Good luck with your purchase hope it works out for you.

 

Thanks! The 1Ghz increase in CPU speed should help a lot though and I hear that the 7970m can even max out BF3 at 1080 so that's pretty rad.

I'll likely be CPU limited again in the near future but at least I can count on this new rig for another 2 years or so.

Now I just need to wait for my paycheque and hopefully find someone to buy my current laptop. I'll have a look around the boards here to see if anyone's interested.

Thanks for all the advice!

 

I've come back to this thread because I can now find a laptop with an i7 3630QM and a 660M powering a 15.6" 1920 x 1080 screen for around £600, half of what I would have been paying for the 670M model which I never did buy in the end.

Still not sure though about the upgrade. If the 670M 'only' offered a 40-50% improvement, I guess the 660M would be 30-40% or maybe similar with overclocks (which the kepler architecture should allow to an extent).

Not sure whether to pull the trigger and buy this one though. But for £600, it does seem like a lot of bang for my buck. I am a little worried about covering the cost though as the battery in my current laptop died and I'm not sure how badly that would affect the resale value. A new one is certainly too expensive to consider replacing now that I no longer use it extensively.

It also doesn't help that PCSpecialist can guarantee delivery by Christmas, but only if I order by the end of the day... I'm at a complete loss.

I'd love a new laptop and at £600 it seems like something that I could easily sell on and replace within a year if performance does become an issue. Plus I could surely get around £400 for my current one which means it's a £200 spend for a CPU that's almost twice as fast and the added 50% GPU performance. Tempting, so tempting.