CPU update for V200Z

Hi, All

If I buy a V2000Z with a sempron CPU now, is it possible later I replace it with a turion CPU after the Vista comes out?

Do I still need to change other parts such as MB, etc?

Btw, how much is a turion CPU in the market? I mean is it worthy to replace it later or just buy turion V2000z now?

Thanks

 

You can replace the CPU with no additional changes but I hope you know the amount of work to be done; it's a lot and it voids your warranty. If you want an MT processor you might have BIOS issues because no one knows if the current version supports it.
If you search around, there were several similar threads with greater details.
What's your budget? If you can afford it now, why not?

 

what i am worried about is the heat issue in V2000z. I read many user opinion says that it gets pretty hot after use for a while. Any experts here give me a reasonable comment about it?

 

The heat issue is much more serious with the HD because the laptop is very thin and the palm area gets warm. Depending on your drive, I guess, it may become hot; mine only gets warm (l2000=v2000z).
As for the CPU, undervolting helps a lot to reduce the heat and the new Bios version helps even further in reducing fan time. My processor (ML-34, 1.8ghz) usually runs at 46-53 degrees depending on the ambient temperatures. 53 is high and it rarely does it; if I play games and then do some browsing it'll probably be around 52-53, slowly going to 55 where the fan kicks off and puts it back to 50.
I don't know if the Sempron will give you less heat because the case of the laptop is the same (thin) and this is what blocks heat dissipation.
Search the undervolting threads!

 

I second that, undervolting helps tremedously.

 

Yes, you should be able to replace with Turion ML , but not sure about MT as no one tried on this series( nx6125 is working fine with MT though).

But my question why you need to replace CPU when VISTA comes? It comes in 32 bit and 64 bit.

Turion CPU price has gone down since last month, but Turion ML-30 may cost you about $160. So if you insist on 64Bit then it is good idea to buy a Turion version, rather than changing it later.

As Vassil said, HDD temps are more concern than anything else. With new current BIOS, cpu fan kicks in at 58C and stops at 50C, so less fan cycling is less than before. BTW fan never kicks in while browsing and listening to MP3s.

 

Vista will run on 32 bit. You'll get a bigger performance boost upgrading the hard drive.

 

Sorry, I know that Vista will have 32 bit version, but I am not sure if the 32 bit version has the so called "aero glass" display. If yes, I will certainly forget about turion.

 

"aero" is very very similar to Mac OS X's Quartz. It uses pixel shaders to create most of the effects, and those run entirely in the GPU (presuming your GPU supports it).. If your GPU doesn't support it, then usually you can emulate it on the CPU, but your performance will go down pretty bad, regardless of if you have a 64bit or 32bit processor. I sometimes emulate pixel shader 3.0 on my 1.0 Ghz Athlon CPU, and I'd be lucky if I got more than 2 frames per second. On my sister's computer, it runs in the GPU (GeForce 6200), and it runs at about 67 Frames Per Second. The latest word [ http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1886829,00.asp ]
is that aero will be mostly Pixel Shader 2.0. The Xpress 200M in this laptop can do Pixel Shader 2.0, so you should have no problems.. Though if you *really* want to take advantage of aero, you'd want to lookup the benchmarks and see which graphics cards have the fastest Pixel Shader performance. Most likely, it'll be the nVidia Go 6600 (which also supports Pixel Shader 3.0 btw).
Pixel shaders are EXTREMELY parallel operations and are usually executed in 8 or more graphics piplines simultaneously.
Emulating this on a CPU will give really crappy performance. And will completely tie it up doing graphics instructions instead of program instructions.
When emulating pixel shaders, having a 64bit CPU isn't going to help because the instruction length and mathematical precision in the pixel shaders are typically smaller than on a 32bit CPU. So, I'd have to say "no" a 64bit won't help aero at all, but it will help any multimedia applications run faster (presuming the application was compiled in 64bit). The industry is moving to 64bit, just very slowly.. Don't be so quick to dump it.

 

Especially 64Bit Audio/Video encoding, Image processings software,scientific softwares really shine on 64Bit as those take advantage of 64Bit.

As per DivX, their 64Bit encoder is 4 times faster than 32bit version with similar hardware, same for quite few Image/Video processing softwares.