Sony NS CPU Upgrade

Hi guys
Have been reading this forum for a long time now but apparently never made an account, but anyway.

I have a sony NS30e laptop and in my local computer recycling shop I noticed they had a tray of socket 478 cpus including a p9700 which should be a lot faster than the current pentium t4200. The only problem is that the pentium has a FSB of 800mhz where as the p9700 is 1066mhz but the chipset (GM45) supports 1066mhz FSB so will it work?

Thanks
Chris

 

Unknown if it will work. The key is BIOS support. Your best bet is to see if your laptop (you didn't list the exact model) was ever sold supporting full Core 2 Duo CPUs with 1066Mhz support. If yes, then the BIOS probably will support it.

However, I'd caution against it. It's a complete waste of time. CPU upgrades don't yield any significant real-world performance improvement... especially when you're simply moving to a slightly higher clocked and higher-cache version in the same CPU generation. You might notice a difference in very specific CPU-intensive activities, or on benchmarks specifically hitting the CPU. But for real-world use, you won't notice any difference. It's so insignificant that even if someone gave me a free P9700 CPU for free, it still wouldn't be worth the time and labor to install it.

If you want performance, your best bet is to get an SSD. In my signature, there are a few videos I made back in 2010, using a Dell M1330 that was manufactured in 2007. From there, you can see the tremendous real-world performance boost you get from an SSD, even on old hardware like Core 2 Duo generation CPUs.

 

Yeah I recently got a bigger SSD for my main desktop so the old 120gb SSD will go in the laptop. The only reason I was asking was that I saw people talking about how it made a big difference to their Dell 1545 going from a t4200 to a p9700. After a bit of digging I found that sony did sell a ns30e with a 1066mhz CPU. But I will first see what difference the SSD and maybe some more RAM makes, if I've got any DDR2 lying arround.