So, I recently got a Lenovo Y550 with a Core 2 Duo T6600, GT 240M, 4GB DDR3 and a 320GB (WD320BEV) for a little over 600$. I got it mostly for general usage (some gaming and some work) so I needed it to have good battery life, be able to play the latest games and at the same time not be super heavy or super expensive.
The T6600 does not support virtualization so I immediately thought about fiddling with it and considered replacing the processor myself because I use VT on a daily basis.
After talking to people at the NotebookReview.com Forums I decided to go for it. I went ahead and got a Core 2 Duo P8700 from Newegg, together with a little tube of Artic Silver 5 and also a 500GB Hitachi 7200RPM IDK/7K.
Today the processor arrived - here are the photos from the procedure:
*By far the easiest CPU install I have ever done.
As you can see.. pretty easy. I decided not go with the Q900 or the P5500 because of the battery life and the salty price tag.
Anyway.. I made a stupid mistake of measuring the benchmarks on 32bit instead of 64bit. With that being said, here are the results from BEFORE:
and AFTER:
Now for the hard-drive benchmark (very impressive) :
The hitachi has some weird drops but when I benchmarked it on an external SATA it didnt have those drops.. so, I am not sure why that happened.
Conclusion:
When I ordered the Laptop I would have purchased already with the P8700 if I knew better... but at least now I (and whoever wanted to know) knows that the CPU upgrade on a Y550 is easy. The P8700 is a great choice because it is less power hungry than the T6600 and yet, it is more powerful.
The HDD upgrade was the best 79$ I have spent on this laptop yet.
Anyway, I hope this was useful and I hope this also shows that if you want to go hardcore and install a Q900 - you will have a very inexpensive gaming machine.
Make sure you check out our Youtube videos of Gameplay on the Y550. (http://www.youtube.com/user/ncompservices)
Modern Warfare 2
Empire Total War
Left For Dead 2
Need For Speed shift
GTA4
