Upgrade is completed
As to the answers to your questions:
A million pardons... I posted all the upgrade details in the other Toshiba Forum under... Notebookforums > Toshiba instead of continuing with this thread. I'll move the stuff over here instead. Hopefully the Forum Police won't chastise me too soundly...
The dissassembly instructions are at:
http://www.irisvista.com/tech/laptop.../satM35X_1.htm
No real problems... But as long as it was open. I cleaned the fan/radiator, which was pretty clean anyway. I also cleaned off the old thermal paste from the CPU heatsink and the graphics chip? and replaced it with a dab of Arctic Silver 5. Oh, there is one catch in the instructions... minor but so you don't repeat the same mistake. In the first part it says to remove all the screws from the BOTTOM of the laptop. Well there are 2 screws on the back edge of the computer.. not techincally the bottom.. I took them out along with the others but I didn't need to... later in the instructions they tell you to take them out. They actually hold the LCD screen on. Other than that.. the ribbom cable to the keyboard is a pain to get back in it's little slot. Just be careful but make sure you DO get it all the way back in.
Nope, no mini PCI slot. There is a pad for the wireless card also on the MOBO but there is no actual slot attached to the pad. So no chance of puttting in an internal wireless card... I don't know how you'd turn it on anyway, since there is no switch like there is on the ones with built in wireless.
Here's how i determined which CPU to use... price vs. performance. From what I gleaned from Notebook Forums if you have a particular model of notebook, like M-35X, you can use any CPU that was used in that particular model line since the chipsets are the same. If the chipsets were different it would be a different story. So... it just checked out all the models in the M-35X line and found that the fastest processor they used in that line was like a 1.8 GHz Pentium M. Well the difference in performance between a 1.7 GHz and a 1.8 is very small and I didn't even see one on FleaBay. Lots of 1.7s but no 1.8s. I paid $138 including shipping for a new 1.7 GHz chip. Don't know what a 1.8 would have cost but I'd guess significantly more.
So there you have it... as to the other info.. I'll just poke it in below for your perusal...
Well I finally got around to my threatened CPU swap. Went pretty well actually with the dissassembly instructions I had. Couple of head scratching moments but nothing insurmountable. The keyboard ribbon cable was a pain to get reattached... I've now done just about everything I can do to this thing to make is run better. I've installed 1Gb of RAM, upgraded the HDD to a 5400 RPM unit and now upgraded the CPU from a 1.5 GHz Celeron M to a 1.7 GHz Pentium M. Here are the before and after benchmarks for the CPU upgrade using various benchmarks:
3D Mark 2001SE Results are 2288 with 1 Gb of RAM 1.5 GHz Celeron M
3D Mark 2001SE Results are 2474 with 1 Gb of RAM 1.7 GHz Pentium M
an 8.1% Increase. Basically didn't do much for it's impressive graphics capability.
PC Mark 04 Results are 2423 with 1 Gb of RAM 1.5 GHz Celeron M
PC Mark 04 Results are 2814 with 1 Gb of RAM 1.7 GHz Pentium M
a 16.1 % Increase. This turned out to be almost what I expected. I was hoping to get 15 to 20%. So I'm happy.
And just for fun I also ran the PC Mark 05 benchmark suite and it came in at1556 with 1 Gb of RAM 1.7 GHz Pentium M. I didn't have the result of this test from the old CPU setup.
No real surprises in any of this. Just for info here are the benchmark results for all the notebooks and desktops in my family for comparison. All the results are from SiSoft Sandra Combined Performance benchmark. About the only thing that surprised me was the drop in the File System Benchmark which makes no sense. Though I did get an error saying my hard drive was too fragmented to do the test so I defraged it and ran it again. Don't think it worked very well. It probably didn't actually chage at all. I can't tell any difference. I'd just assume it is the same as the test I ran before I did the CPU upgrade...
CPU Arithmetic Benchmark
Stock Presario 700 1GHz Duron 5565
Toshiba S161 Celeron 1.4 GHz 7388
IBM Notebook P4 1.8 GHz 7635
Toshiba S111 Celeron 1.5 GHz 9065
Toshiba S111 Pentium 1.7 GHz 10301
CPU Multi-Media Benchmark
Stock Presario 700 1GHz Duron 18999
Toshiba S161 Celeron 1.4 GHz 25941
IBM Notebook P4 1.8 GHz 30639
Toshiba S111 Celeron 1.5 GHz 29881
Toshiba S111 Pentium 1.7 GHz 34054
Memory Bandwidth Benchmark
Stock Presario 700 1GHz Duron 1189
Toshiba S161 Celeron 1.4 GHz 4289
IBM Notebook P4 1.8 GHz 3558
Toshiba S111 Celeron 1.5 GHz 4183
Toshiba S111 Pentium 1.7 GHz 4363
File System Benchmark
Stock Presario 700 1GHz Duron 13162
Toshiba S161 Celeron 1.4 GHz 24901
IBM Notebook P4 1.8 GHz 21804
Toshiba S111 Celeron 1.5 GHz 31976
Toshiba S111 Pentium 1.7 GHz 22855
There was one thing I was wondering about with the CPU upgrade and that is bus speed.
My stock M35X-S111 says it's a Celeron M running at 1.5 GHz with a bus speed of 333 MHz.
After the CPU swap it automatically changed the CPU speed to match the Pentium M 1.7 GHz Dothan that I installed. At the time I wondered if the bus speed would remain at the 333 MHz setting. From what I understood about doing this is that I expected the CPU setting to change but didn't think the bus speed would change. From what I can tell it also changed the bus speed to 400 MHz to match what the new CPU is capable of... OR are these programs like CPUZ just reading what the CPU says? Do you think it really did alter the bus speed as well. I was under the impression it wouldn't... is there any definitive way to determine this?
That's all I have. If you need any more info just drop me a line.
