SSD and CPU upgrade suggestions??

Hi,

I have a Samsung R522 notebook which has 5400 rpm hdd and T6600 2.2 ghz cpu. I want to upgrade my notebook because T6600 can't handle some new games and my hdd is too slow, especially Windows 7 and heavy programs like AutoCAD 2011 starts too slow also.

- I am considering to buy a new SSD for my notebook. Is it worth for upgrade? (I think it is worth.)

- I found T9900 and P9700 around 300$ on ebay (probably it is expensive too much but it is unused item). R522 has an HD4650 Mobility 1 GB DDR3 video card. If i buy one of this cpu, are there any bottleneck with my graphic card? Or should i buy P9600 - T9600?

PS: If i load T6600 to %100, It reaches to 80-85 C (idle: around 50 C). My notebook are not cold enough.

 

Need help ...

 

(1) If you want performance, then an SSD is the fastest storage technology you can buy. Yes, you will get more performance. But whether it is "worth" it is an individual decision that only you can answer. How much are you, as an individual, willing to pay for that performance?

You can check my signature for examples of SSD boot times, and Windows boot + load 27 applications in about 1 minute. That might give you an idea of the kind of performance you get with an SSD.

The sweet-spot for SSD's from a price / capacity perspective is a 120GB SSD for about $200. If you absolutely cannot wait, you will want to get an Intel X25-M 120GB drive, or a drive based off of the SandForce SF-1200 controller (G.Skill Phoenix, Corsair F120). Stay away from OCZ. They are currently in the middle of a customer relations nightmare, where they are basically porking their customers in the behind and being jerks about cleaning up the problem.

If you can afford to wait a month or two, you'll start seeing a lot of next-gen SSD's showing up on the market based off of the 3rd-generation Intel SSD controller, and the SandForce SF-2500 controller. Even though these drives are SATA-3 drives, they will be compatible with your existing laptop (which only supports SATA-2), and will give you immediate performance benefits over the Intel X-25M or SandForce SF-1200 drives you can buy today. Plus, you can easily transfer these drives to any future machines that you own that do have native support for SATA-3.




(2) No, not worth upgrading your CPU. You will get practically zero real-world performance benefit by upgrading your CPU, unless you are doing something that specifically bottlenecks on the CPU (e.g. CPU-based video encoding). If you want a performance boost when loading applications, then an SSD is the smarter purchase. If you want a performance boost for gaming, then the only thing that you can really do is to just save your money and eventually buy a new laptop.


(3) Your temps aren't out-of-range for what the Intel CPU can handle. But I don't know if those temps are normal for your laptop. Have you checked what temperatures that other Samsung NP-R522 owners get?

 

-I can't afford 120gb ssd now, i was thinking to buy 60gb ssd. So, i can wait a month, maybe two. Not a big problem.

-I changed my mind because 300$ cpu is too expensive for my 1.5 year old notebook, i think. I want to use my graphic card with all capacity, without a bottleneck. So what is the best price/performance cpu for my hardware?

-Other R522 owners get same temperature, who has a P series cpu like P8700 gets 5-10 degrees down from T6600. It is a problem for this model. It has an inadequate cooling blocks. Anyway, it heats too much but it isn't shutting down because of heat.

 

As too SSD Samsung 470 Series or Intel SSD K series

Cheers
3Fees