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    Will this upgrade make enough of a difference to spend a few hours on?

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by jason9922, Apr 14, 2013.

  1. jason9922

    jason9922 Notebook Geek

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    Just wondering what some of you think about this upgrade I have the parts to do but don't know if it's worth my time. I recently re-furbished a Compaq F-730 from the blank screen dead. LOL After a reflow to the NVidia chip, new fan & copper mod upgrade to the cooling heat sink assembly $7.00, added cooling holes to the bottom plastic base, 1gb ram to 4gb DDR2 6400 ram $30 (already had), 60GB Kingston SSHD boot drive $35, moved 250GB OEM Samsung HDD for saving over to optical drive using HDD caddy $8, DVD-RW optical drive in external caddy $8, grade A palm rest & touchpad & badges to replace wore down scratched wicked bad original $6, Vista to Win 7 Pro 64 bit + tons of software (already had, all legit). Laptop runs very fast, boots to desktop in 13 seconds and is much faster than any new notebook I've been on lately that runs a regular HDD. The cooling fan very rarely even turns on and it idles at 102'F with the three fan laptop cooler I also have it sitting on ($6). The highest I've gotten the temp to go running a DVD with 15 tabs on 5 different browsers running youtube videos was 132'F.

    Having said that I bought a AMD Turion X2 TL60 CPU a while back to replace the TK55 in an HP DV2809 laptop I was refurbishing at the time. After I re-balled the GPU, the motherboard was still acting up. So I gave up on that notebook for the time being and never used the TL60. Well I just realized after thinking I had put the TL60 in the Compaq F700 that I in fact did not. I just put the TK55 back in that came with it.

    So to use the TL60 I must take apart and clean off the new MX4 thermal grease, swap the TK55 out for the TL60, and then go through the process of putting it all back together once again. I know some of you are thinking, it only takes a few minutes to take one apart. I timed it last night. It took me 48 minutes to put the entire laptop back together from motherboard to powering it on. So I'll figure it to be a two hour, possibly three hour job.

    I guess I am looking to hear back from someone experienced in this type of stuff to tell me if the difference in the way this laptop is running will be much better if I put the TL60 in. Would it be worth the time and make a noticeable difference? I just hate to take it all back apart when it runs pretty good.

    I added a couple pics of the heatsink mod

    View attachment 94745 View attachment 94746
     
    jason9922, Apr 14, 2013
    #1
  2. Prostar Computer

    Prostar Computer Company Representative

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    Performance difference would be pretty imperceptible. From what I see: 200 MHz faster clock, 4 watts difference TDP, and twice the cache (2 x 512 KB, where the TK 55 is 2 x 256) from the TL 60. So with that, do you think it would be worth 2 hours ± of your time? If nothing else, you get some bonus experience in disassembling and reassembling the unit.
     
    Prostar Computer, Apr 15, 2013
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