T9300 to X9000 Upgrade: Is it worth it?

An X9000 is around £400.

I can sell my T9300 for around £125

Therefore an X9000 would cost me £275.

Would you guys consider the performance jump from T9300 to X9000 worth the money and worth opening up my laptop?

I know the TDP of the T9300 is only 35w compared to the X9000's 44w, but the cooling system on my Acer 6920G is amazing and I think it will handle the extra heat fine. My idle temps are 29-31c and after 3 hours of Crysis: Warhead, the max temps on both cores are still only 59-61c.

Also, I would be using Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound when rebuilding and not whatever cheap rubbish Acer used when they built it

I take it the X9000 is the "best" CPU you can get for the PM965 chipset btw?

 

could be worth it, I don't know because the only difference I see is the clock speed.

Maybe you should try overclocking with setfsb before you fork out the ca$h.

When you open up the notebook, check what clock generator (PLL) it has.
I might be able to help you get setfsb working if you have trouble.
See my thread here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=393027

What ever you do, make sure you get some really good paste and apply it properly. AS5 is not the best paste available anymore...

There is a diamond based paste that seems to do a great job.
But if you already have AS5 then it's not worth buying more paste.

EDIT: BTW I have seen a cpuz validation of a T9300 @ 3.3ghz and a T9500 @ 3.9ghz. really the T9300, T9500 and X9000 should be the same.

 

I've never looked into overclocking my CPU with software like you suggest. I'll take a look inside it when I get home from work.

The last time I overclocked my CPUs it was either in the BIOS or the good old fashioned way... Jumpers

 

the problem with setfsb is that when you overclock the FSB, your ram may become unstable at the higher frequency.

You can use spdtool or thaiphoon burner to flash a lower frequncy onto your ram to give you more overclocking headroom.

Also if you like hardware mods, you can pin mod the PLL to get the FSB you want.

I can help you out with that if you know your PLL, but it is a little risky.
Depends how good you can solder tiny things.

Hopefully setfsb will work for you without needing a pin mod.

Otherwise an upgrade couldn't hurt.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, if we can't find the datasheet for your PLL it would be near impossible to troubleshoot or pin mod. So if setfsb doesn't work, we really need a datasheet.

 

Under the overwhelming majority of circumstances, no, there is no way that is worth it. The difference between the T9300 and the X9000 is 0.3 GHz of clock speed so the X9000 will be 12% faster than the T9300 at the cost of running around 26% hotter and also wasting your battery faster.

If you desperately need a slightly more powerful processor, I'm fairly confident that for this kind of money, you can build a cheap desktop.

 

Nope not worth it... overclock T9300 if your desperate..