Upgrading my Dell Studio 1555

I purchased this beauty about a month ago now, and my only complaint is with the processor. Dell charge an extortionate amount ot upgrade to a better processor and after selecting several other options I though I would stick with the £650 price tag! Im pretty tech savvy when it comes to desktops, building them on a regular basis for a little cash, so I know my way around. When it comes to laptops though thats a different kettle of fish, im a little unconfident! So thats how I wound up here. I thought it best to get the advice of people who know a little more than I do :]

Basically I want to upgrade the processor, currently it has a 2.0Ghz Pentium Duel Core.. which is painfull. In an ideal world id like to upgrade it to a core 2 quad 2.6Gh at least, which is what i was going to do until today when I realised that the one I ws going to buy may not fit. There the same socket (lga775) but from what ive read, there are "mobility" editions which are harder to come by, and will most likely be all i can fit in here. Im unsure if id be able to fit this within my laptop, and even If I could I then come to the problem of heat dissipation. Dont want to burn anything out!

So, what processor would you reccomend I put in here? Can I use normal processors or do they have to be mobility? Any help you could give me will be greately apreciated :]

Peace

 

You need to stay with the "mobility" version of the CPUs. Heat and power requirements are touchy on notebooks.

Look for 2.26-2.4 range CPU

cheers ...

 

Have you tested that your current CPU is the bottleneck in your usage or do you think it is?

 

Well, currently my specs are as follows:
OS: Vista x64 SP2 (Believe me when I say I plan on upgrading to windows 7 VERY soon)
CPU: 2.0Ghz Pentium Duel Core
GPU: Mobility Radeon 4570
RAM: 4GB DDR2
HDD: 320GB Sata II

As i said, not to well knowledged with notebooks and laptops, but id say the processor is definately bottlenecking. Its slow, and ontop of that has a terrible cache.

2.4Ghz Mobility at the highest youd say? Is it not possible to get anything better than that? I think im probably expecting far too much out of this laptop, im so used to having a powerful rig. It would just be nice to be able to do a few renders on the move, or not have to wait ages for things to load and install :]

 

The T4200 is actually a very capable Dual Core CPU with enough cache for normal use. If you want to check whether the T4200 is bottlenecking your system try checking your CPU usage with ctrl-alt-del. If it's not going beyond 90% the CPU is not bottlenecking your system.

For normal usage like webbrowsing, office, music and videos a T4200 2.0GHz will not be bottlenecking the system.
For gaming a T4200 2.0GHz will not be bottlenecking the system.
Only for CPU intensive applications like math calculations, decoding/encoding, zipping/unzipping the T4200 will be the bottleneck.

It is far more likely that your Hard drive is bottlenecking your system.

 

The T4200 is not socket 775, it's 478. Might wanna' check on that. Besides, the T4200 is also not as bad of a processor as you may think. Check where it stands in rank.

It's low on that huge list of course, but at least it's rated in the High-End CPU's.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Pentium+Dual-Core+T4200+@+2.00GHz

 

The T4200 is what is known as Socket P. And it's quite a capable processor; it is extremely unlikely that it is bottlenecking your system.

If you really want, though, you can replace it with any Socket P Core 2 Duo (quads do not work in the Studio 1555), with FSB of 667MHz, 800MHz, or 1066MHz. This grants you pretty much any T-series (up to the 3.06GHz T9900), or any P-series processor, possibly the X-series as well.

Keep in mind that replacing the processor does require you to fully disassemble the laptop, and remove the motherboard. It's actually simpler than it sounds, though; I just did it to my 1555 last week.

eBay is actually a great place to look for mobile processors. I've bought several from there with great success.