Upgrading my Pentium M 730 1.6 Ghz to a 760 2.00 Ghz. Will it be worthwhile?

I recently just got my laptop and I'm feeling that the Pentium M 730 that came with it is just lacking. What do you guys think if I upgraded my 730 to a 760? Can anyone here estimate how much more performance I can get if I upgraded to a 760?

I'm going to buy another 512 Mb 533 Mhz RAM stick next week and make it dual channel. Hard drive upgrade probably in a month or so. I'll probably get a 160 Gb 5400 rpm SATA drive. Will the Pentium M 760 2.00 Ghz upgrade be worth it? I need some suggestions.

I'm using my laptop now for Photoshop, video editing, web browsing and occassional gaming.

 

The minimal performance increase you will get is not worth the cost of a whole new CPU. Buy more ram and a 7200RPM (not 5400RPM) hard drive instead.

 

Though the CPU upgrade might make a difference for the Photoshop.But before that, upgrading the RAM and the HDD [as mlkmnz] said will be better.

 

Upgrading the RAM is the cheapest and easiest way to boost system performance. Instead of buying another 512 MB stick, replace both RAM's entirely. Get the whole shebang with a full 2 GB of RAM.

 

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I'll put that thought of going 2 Gb into mind. The thing is I forgot to mention that I won't actually be disposing of my Pentium M 730. I can easily trade it here for a Pentium M 760 by adding around 2000-3000 Philippine pesos (around $40-$60 US). I won't be able to dispose of my current 512 Mb RAM stick if I upgrade to 2 Gb. The 40 Gb hard drive, I'll just turn it into a portable by putting it in an enclosure.

Any other suggestions? And also, how much performance more performance can I get if I'll going to use a Pentium M 760? I'd totally go for it if I'll get a 20-25% or more performance boost.

 

Well, if that's the case, I'd trade for the 760, and get a 1GB stick of RAM, so your total is 1.5GB. The Pentium M doesn't do dual-channel like the Core Duo's do, so it's not as important to match the sticks. A faster hard drive is great because it'll read your big files faster.

the 20-25%, you will only see that on CPU-limited tasks, such as some filters in Photoshop, etc. If you don't have to jump on the CPU deal right away, I'd say get the memory first, and play with that. That will be the most apparent and performance-enhancing upgrade you can do first. Then do the hard drive. Lastly, if it's still not fast enough doing video rendering and such, then you should do the CPU upgrade.

 

Thanks again for the suggestions.

BTW, are you sure the Pentium M platform using the 915 chipset can't go dual channel? I'm quite positive it can go dual channel.

Anyway, I've decided. I'll get a Pentium M 760. I won't be able to get a new laptop in another 3-4 years so I might as well maximize my current laptop.

 

Doh. Looks like it will do dual-channel. My bad. It won't add that much performance though, and the extra RAM is easily worth the 0-5% drop in speed. And if you don't have two sticks of memory in there now, you won't miss it at all. I think you'll be amazed at the performance difference between 512MB of RAM and 1.5GB.