-->*OFFICIAL: MSI GT725 Owner's Lounge*<--

there has been much speculation regarding whether quadcores are better at the moment than dualcores, but it really is dependant on exactly what you are doing with your computer. Games largely don't see any benefit from quadcores at the moment, however more and more are coming out with multicore support, and as quads become more mainstream, it may continue.

Game performance at this time will more than likely benefit more from the speed of the processor and the fsb, rather than multiple cores, i will say that in terms of comparison, your p8600 has the same processing speed, as the q9200, but since its a quadcore it has a whopping 12 vs the 3mb of your l3 cache.

for $300 theres not much that can really be done, if you havent already gotten yourself a good 4gb kit than can overclock well, theres something thats a must, or if you want better loading times get a 7200rpm laptop hard drive, or if youre really daring you can get a 8gb ram kit for your laptop.

if you do alot of other stuff that can take advantage of those other two cores, then id say get on it, quads are better for data crunching, if you are doing lots of stuff in designing programs, recoding/editing movies, photoshop, etc that extra cache will help considerably.

if youre looking for battery life, a dualcores gonna win, if youre stuck on that $300 pricetag then get a 9cell battery with any of those other things i mentioned, then you will have a nice amount of batterylife on the go.

its really just dependent on what you do.

 

Very much agree with your post Automatik, the GT725 is generally well balanced for the price, more so than anything else in the same sector of the market. There are other gaming notebooks which only come close for the same money.

Rather than spending, relatively quite a lot of extra cash and going through some potentially hazardous aggro, I would just 'same grade' ie: don't do anything for 15 months or two years.

I bought my GT725 210UK in May last year. I use it for gaming, HD video, 3D rendering, general graphics, and it does all this very well.

Granted mine does have the quad, but to be honest I'd be just as happy with the dual core, and the lower native res, since there's so little noticeable difference in gaming.

I may depending on what's going on with the new mobile core i5/i7 and 5 series graphics consider getting a replacement early 2011. I'm confidant I will be able to carry on using this machine to it's full potential until then.

Gaming would be the only possible area in the mid future, where I may consider getting faster RAM, but at the moment you just don't need too. Scaling res and fidelity down a touch is obviously far easier.

 

"Short" answer to your question , yes it is as easy as changing some ram modules , no force needed whatsoever. IF you need a guide , any one available online will do as it's basically the same process and don't forget to buy thermal paste!

To be honest I think the Q9200 is worth every penny (though i got mine for £1.35 ) and is future proof as most games are now quad optimized , GTA4 , ARMA II , BATMAN , well the list is very long and there's more coming ...

Going from a 5200rpm to 7200rpm is useless , just go for an SSD is you want speed.

 

how the hell did you do that death? is it an es?


Also, i finally got my laptop benched in vantage, and got a score of 5688 marks! hows that compare to what everyone else is getting? im curious?

temps are more manageable at the moment with the copper shim ive installed, it seems to idle at 60-62c and maxes at just under 80c, apparently 3dmark pushed it to 87c for a brief moment...

ive reapplied thermal paste multiple times, and it seems to me that the low fan speed is probably part of the issue.

mandrake said that the other 4850s he had had were running quite hot also, so im wondering if it isnt just me...

so what im thinking of now... is possibly flashing to the gt725 bios, anyone here see any objections? since the boards are identical, there shouldnt be a problem right? and i imagine that since that bios by default deals with the ati card, maybe theres an optimized set of fan speeds to accomidate the 4850...

or i may just try the ecm firmware for the gt725, since they should be the same right? this is turning into such a headache due to my location, but its still fun. I just figure if i think out loud, (or well, over the internet) i can get a second opinion before i got murphying things up.

 

Part exchange yeah it's an ES , the 1.35 is the shipping cost. Even at full price it's good compared to the QX9300.

My vantage is 6950 , could have got a higher scores if CCC wasn't on High Quality ............

Are you sure you wanna do that ? Won't there be any issues regarding device id if you flash it to the MSI ones ?

 

Does the ES work fine? I was tempted to get one, but then I read that it is illegal for you to own one, and I believe someone reported a company selling them to intel and in return for the engineering sample, they gave him a new processor for free. (Will find link later as I am on lunch break)

Blazin

 

Hello stranger It Works amazingly well , doesn't get hot , temp sensors are as they should , perfect ..

Yeah post it here need to see that ! we had some discussion here on NBR regarding these .. some been crying out that we shouldn't be allowed to talk about it and stuff ..

However I saw a threads from the Intel website , the community sections , they been talking about it freely , asking questions ...

Intel doesn't seems to care that much as the are already dominating the market and few ES won't even scratch em.

 

haha yeh i've had tons of assignments lately so not had time to come on here.. although I can't wait for bioshock 2 and I am tempted with Aliens vs. Predator.. is anyone else getting it?

As for the link, i can't find the original, but they talk about it here
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/263755-28-legit-help about half way down

Blazin

 

Read the 2nd post , that guy is as |||| as you can get ! there's no 12mb L2 cache out there ... what about the QX9300 then :laugh:
Socket P478 never had quads ..

Which AVP are you after ? I don't know which one to get .. colonial marines or the other one

 

Haha that made me lol

Well I got the AvP multiplayer demo from steam yesterday (not colonial marines) and it is pretty fun. If you play as humans it turns into a survival horror, but the aliens/predators are really fun to play as. Also it's only £24.99 on pre-order and it will probably go up to £39.99 when it comes out, like most new games on steam.

Blazin

 

:laugh: !

AVP (not C. Marines) is 17 on amazon , I think I will go for it as I'm not into multiplayer that much. Sounds nice though , 10 more days to decide

Steam pricing suck !

 

yeh but you also get universe at war free.. (not that i'd even bother installing) and its the price you pay for only having to install it once and not needing to use a disc.

Blazin

 

True and don't know what kind of DRM crap they will be using on the physical copy ...

 

Whos that pokemon!

Sorry i had too, i thought this looked pretty cool.

We've been invited to a 3dmark06 challange against gateway machines if anyones up for it?

 

haha is that on a cooler with blue leds?

and which gateway machines are they using..

 

Yeah thats on a fairly cool, rather innefective cooling unit with 6 LED's which are fairly strong,

The cooler doesn't help lower temps, but when the fan wants the juice, the low power fans are actually airing the chasis quite nicely, resulting in a nice couple of C chopped off!.

Gateway P series, duals and 9800gts's i believe,

 

They gona get served (hopefully)

 

What's their highest score ? I managed to achieve 11376 on a non OC'd cpu .. will probably sweep em aside if OC'd (had to flash bios again ).

Bane will definitely destroy em , he hit 8000+ on vantage

 

I think 11500 for their highest,

I'd push clocks again but it'd take a whole night for me to achive stable 3dmark06 overclock + optimisation of the drivers,

And yeah, im sure bane will eat 14k plus with that stupid thing....lol.

 

Lets take these mofos DOWN!!!

 

Wootttt. Just keep the CPU score at 2.7k ish T9900 level cause we can't OC our CPUs. Btw, is it difficult to OC the GPU on the GT725?

 

No we have the turbo function on our touch panel. We can change the amount this overclocks through the bios out of 16%, 20% or 24%.

EDIT: Sorry misread your post, though you said CPU.

 

Will install 06 tonight and start running optimisations, then i'll begin clock pushing.

 

We can use ATI overdrive to clock to 550/900 out of the box. It takes flashing to get any higher.

Why don't we do a Vantage competition? Then we can just run ours at stock and wait for the gateways to catch up.

 

Actually neil, that isn't....quite....true buddy. (We can clock up without flashing.)

 

Bah, as soon as I get my core situation stabilized I'll be jumping in also, I neec to start playting around with clocking my processor, or at the very least trying to get my ram andprocessor in a 1:1 ratio, I know my ram can take ddr1000 stable, just need to get the fsb straightened out through setfsb hopefully. If not I might bench my t9400 and see if I get better scores with that badboy... So who all here has considered a q9100 or better? I'm thnking of getting one, or I might just wait and get an i7 later

 

I was concidering a qx9300, but then again the Q9 handles all my tasks just fine,

The t9400 should work very nicely for 06 as well as nice overclocking.

 

PM45 / socket P doesn't support i7. PM55 support i7 (GT740 etc)

 

Aye the next gen, isn't there suppost to be another mobo in the GX740, Like hm55 or lm or something?

 

PM55 support i5 & i7 only , whereas HM55 will support i3 and up ... it's just an updated version of it and has some extras and functionality.

Yes the GX will be HM55

More on the way , HM57 , QM57

 

Aha, so i3, i5 and i7 will work??

Seems pretty good to me , i7-640m i'd like to see.

 

They got a lot to choose from .. we are stuck at only 4 version of quads :cry:
Only 3 of them is legal.
Which the i7 640 ? there seems to be 2 of them

 

Its a dual core with hyperthreading, and on par if not better then the i720m .

 

I just wanted thank those that responded to my questions. I did go ahead and order the Q9200. Maybe I'll give that OC thing a go. Competition is always fun.

 

Obviously our chipset isn't going to support all the new processors, our laptop is old

 

It's a great processor worthy upgrade from a dual

 

Different socket unfortunately, curios to see what the GPU looks like though, what mxm standard its using or if its propietary (Hope nots).

 

Have a look at this http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/355429/amds-fusion-processor-first-details

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/355423/nvidia-optimus-transforms-laptop-graphics

 

The GPU in the 725 or in the next generation of MSIs?

 

Duuuude, fusion processor is looking immense

Optimus graphics means interchangable switching in a second flat out, so thats not so big but quite nice, i think its already being implemented.

Lambo the new gen of gts will have adifferent mobo and socket unfortunately our gen is still capped at Q9300 (Which i concider to be the powerfullest CPU out for us)

 

Yeah fusion is looking great so far

It's already here but you have to do it manually , Optimus will be an auto thing .. i still prefer 1 GPU instead of 2 though , screw battery life

 

hey
I am wanting to upgrade my q9000 with a q9200, i would like to know if it voids the warranty, i remember somebody who was saying that the warranty wasn t void, is he right?
Does everybody who have changed his cpu send his GT725 to warranty?
If we open the laptop, the warranty sticker isn t break, is there any other hidden warranty seal?

 

There's no hidden seal apart from the one on the cover. My advise , get the Q9200 and kept your Q9000 for warranty purposes. (Just in case)

I'm pretty sure it will void it once you decide to go ahead with the upgrade.

Contact MSI support and tell them you want to Upgrade to a QX9300 not to the Q9200 as it's illegal , well you know the mumbo jumbo crap right ?

Last time I emailed them the said upgrading my rams will void my warranty so as changing paste. Couldn't care less , still went ahead with it

 

Ok, so if i keep my replace my future q9200 with the q9000 that i would have kept, they kill not be able to see that it was open if i take care to the screw?

Did it give you an important fps boost in game? I am thinkin that the 2.0 ghz is to few for new game.

 

I upgraded from a dual , so it did add a few FPS , from a Q90 to a Q92 there won't be much of a difference I think .

Get in touch 1st , as some been saying that if you ask they might let you ...

I didn't care that much so i just did it , might be costly but who cares 1yr gone already ..

 

Have you tried any new games? Because my quad does fine with Arma 2, Modern Warfare 2, Gta 4, NFS Shift, Farcry 2, Bioshock 2 (just to name a few) all at 1920x1200 on high settings.

Blazin

 

hey does anyone know anyone who can make custom size shims? im looking for something 20mm in size.

 

K-Tron down the marketplace.

 

i am playing the beta of battlefield bad company 2 wich eats lot of cpu and sometimes it s not very good

 

As in performance Rupp3r?

Oh and long time no see man, welcome back?