The Great Experiment

The weekend was good, my cousin Pauline and Amogharatna were both staying over at my Dad's so I spent Saturday and Sunday morning hanging out there with them. It was a good day, with a great lunch and lots of conversation and things. We watched Dinner for One three times, once the original, once in colour, and once in Lego. Very funny. Also did some long exposure stuff.

After some consultation on a forum with someone who knew intimate details about the BIOS, I decided to order a quad Core i7-720m for my 7741g laptop as I was pondering last week. It arrived today.

Getting at the CPU socket was rather troublesome because of the way it's mounted. It's actually on the underside of the motherboard so the whole thing has to come apart and the motherboard removed. Also, once it was all in bits, the somewhat fragile Acer build quality was evident. But I got it in, put my favoured Actic Silver 5 thermal paste on the heatsinks and fired it up. And there it was in the BIOS - Intel Core i7-720. Once back together, Windows 7 installed some new drivers and rebooted. A quick check showed 8 processor graphs in Task Manager as the i7 does hyperthreading.

In terms of clock speed, the i7 is actually slower than the i3 it replaced, 1.6ghz vs 2.1ghz. But the two extra physical cores are worth it, and if one core is maxed out, it can use the TurboBoost feature to speed up that core, something the i3 lacked. It also seems to run cooler than the i3, even with all four cores at full load.

So far, the experiment is looking like a success, so I don't feel quite so bad about ripping apart a laptop that was only a few months old and voiding the warranty. Also I might be able to sell the old CPU and get some cash back.