Sony Vaio Z series upgrade to X9100

I would like to request your opinion on upgrading my current Sony Vaio VGN-Z590 P9500 2.53ghz processor into a X9100 3.06ghz one. I would like to know if it would still be possible to upgrade my cooling system by just applying a thermal compound on the existing copper wire cooling system. I also plan to add more thermal compound on the cpu and heatsink. Sorry for my noobish questions.

 

Unless you do serious number crunching (like large MATLAB or C programs), you will only notice one thing: heat.

I strongly recommend you do NOT upgrade.

 

I see. Thanks for the input. Is it totally impossible to upgrade it this way?

 

Using a better thermal compound will do nothing to alleviate the fact that the heat assembly of your machine is only designed to carry away 25W of heat. So even if you manage to lift most of the 45W of heat off the Q CPU, it's still not getting out of the machine as fast as you produce it.
At the very least you'll need a much faster (and louder) fan, and probably an extra heat pipe to bring the heat to the cooling ribs.

 

Would a stronger fan be good enough to make it work? Sorry for my questions. I would just really like to upgrade my laptop to it's full potential.

 

your just gonna sacrifice battery life..if i were you id leave it be

 

I don't mind sacrificing some battery life. I would prefer it if the speed would increase.

 

A fan can only do so much. A serious analysis is required to understand whether the bottleneck in heat dissipation is in the thermal compound, heat sink, air flow or fan speed. A better fan only helps with the last one, just as a better thermal compound only helps with the first one.

I again say that it's a very small benefit (only in number crunching apps and benchmarks such as SuperPi), for quite a serious hassle. You can try it -- probably, you can fit the other CPU and turn the laptop on, and stress test it. If you get a blue screen or it shuts down, it wasn't able to manage the heat.

 

Would it shutting down totally fry my laptop?

 

Probably not, I think modern laptops shut down before the temperatures can actually do any damage. Is it worth the risk to you?

I'm sorry for being this blunt, but the hassle and risk aren't really worth the benefit.

 

Ok thanks. Would it be a more viable solution to just upgrade to a t9800?

 

i think the japanese model has the t9800, they had to modify the normal Z with a different heatsink and a bigger fan (i think), so... i really think that the 2.66 is the max for your machine

just like everyone else is saying, there is no point to upgrading it, all it will do is kill your battery life and cause the fan to run constantly

 

Will it be worth it to upgrade a p8600 to the higher end 2.66ghz?

 

no.. not at all.. p8600 => p9600 = small difference (but you'll probably notice it)

btw, don't you have the p9500? the difference between your processor and the 2.66 is so ridiculously small that it's not worth your time and effort to change, especially since the p9xxx processors have the same fsb

 

yes. that is why I'm looking to upgrade it to a 2.93ghz or better yet a 3.06ghz. Right now however, I'm just considering on upgrading it to a T9800 which is 2.93ghz. Having a faster processor IMO is important especially when running video recording programs as well. This is just my opinion. Please let me know yours.

 

Way more important than that is the video recording software itself and having a low DPC latency. The only way the CPU upgrade would make a difference is if the CPU load is at 100% (i.e. both cores fully loaded) when you record video. Have you tested that? If they are not 100% loaded, then the CPU upgrade is not useful because the bottleneck is elsewhere.