Is it worth $60 to upgrade a ML-30 to a MT-37?

The title pretty much says it.

I purchased one of those NASCAR Laptops (a rebranded AOPEN Openbook 2000) in a Black Friday sale last year for $499. AMD Turion 64 ML-30 (1.6 GHz, 35W TDP, 1 MB Cache), ATI 200M IGP, 512MB RAM, 60 GB 5400RPM drive, DVD+/-RW, built in A/B/G wireless, and a MS/SD/MMC card reader along with all the standard ports. It wasn't really what I wanted, but the price was right. I don't like the keyboard, my battery life stinks and its a bit large to try to use on an airline seat tray. But it works fine for everything I do so I don't mind it most of the time.

I had planned on keeping it around for a year then scapping it in favor of whatever will be the latest and greatest this Christmas season (something dual-core with DX10 mid-range grafics in a 14.1" size hopefully). But we are going through a laptop refresh at work at I was able to get 2GB of old RAM for free (2x 1 GB DDR333 w/ 2.5 cl) and it fits this laptop nicely! So I'm running an outdated laptop, but with lots of RAM. Now I suppose I may as well keep it around for a while longer. If I going to keep it past the end of 2007, then I'll probably load Vista on it in the future. I don't really game at all so the 200M grafics are fine for me. (I only play old Nintendo and Sega emulators and the occasional game of CIV III or the original Half-Life.) Even with 2GB of RAM it still seems a bit underpowered. If I'm ripping a DVD to my Zune it takes quite a while. I'm also used to operating with a dozen different programs open at once so I do end up taxing the processor a bit.

So all that gets me back to my original question. Do you think it is worth $60 to upgrade the ML-30 (1.6 GHz, 35W TDP) to a MT-37 (2.0 GHz, 25W TDP)? Do you think I'll see any improved performance, or will it even be noticable? Do you think the lower TDP in the same socket will improve my battery life? Would it just be a drop in replacement or would the BIOS not automatically adjust to a lower voltage? Would I be better off looking for a faster ML series chip? (ML-40/42's are about $250 and ML-44's are about $300 - I don't really think its worth spending that much to upgrade a laptop I don't really like)

Thanks for the advice.

 

You said you rip and encode DVDs and that is where you will surely notice a speed increase. With office work and surfing the net I dont think you will notice anything.

Check if there is a Bios upgrade for your mainboard. It is hard to say if the MT-37 is supported by your laptop. If it is supported it should detect the lower voltage and improve your battery life.

 

I just thought I'd close out this thread by saying I've made the swap (very easily actually). All I could find from the manufacturer was that they supported chips up to the MT-34, but it recognized my MT-37 immediately.

I should have benchmarked it before and after the swap to give people an idea of what kind of improvment it is, but I didn't - sorry. It does feel a little snappier, but that could just be the placebo effect.

If anyone else is concidering a similar swap, I'd recommend it. For this laptop swapping the CPU was easier than upgrading the RAM. I just took off about 6 screws on the bottom, and removed the heat sink and swapped chips. Upgrading the RAM required me to remove the keyboard!

 

Not often i'd say go with a cpu upgrade on a laptop but in this case I'd imagine it helped, given your usage. $60 is pretty reasonable.

Could you post up some benchmarks, like the difference it made in encoding films to the zune and some other benchmarks like super pi?

Thanks