Reply 18420 of 39963, by nforce4max
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- l33t
wrote:wrote:Nice find! […]
wrote:Anywho. I bought a Dell XPS Gen 1 today. Ive been discussing buying this since early last year and I've actually forgotten which CPU and GPU it has in it. It'll be good regardless. It should have either a 3.4GHz Prescott or a 3.4GHz Gallatin (is there a major difference?). The GPU will be either a Mobility 9700 or a 9800. I think this one has a 9800 Pro. In theory the former can be upgraded to the latter anyways.
Nice find!
If it's a Prescott, swap it with a Northwood immediately. Those things are furnaces even in a desktop, never mind with a laptop's cooling restrictions. You'll also see better battery life. Even if it's a Gallatin EE, I'd still change it out. I'm pretty sure the Gallatins had higher TDP than the Northwoods thanks to their L3 Cache. It would run much better in a desktop. Also, if you're cleaning out the inevitable dust, remember that it has a third fan underneath the palm rest that cools the chipset and then blows across the top of the CPU cooler.
Basically: Swap in a Northwood, throw the Gallatin in a desktop, throw the Preshott in the trash....
If it doesn't have a full 2GBs of RAM, keep in mind when ordering that it contains an honest-to-god desktop i865 chipset, and thus you should order DDR400 SODIMMs. It'll take the more common DDR333 sticks, but you'll take a performance hit.
I'd also recommend finding a 7200 RPM HDD for it. They generally came with 5400 or (barf) 4200 RPM drives, and it makes a world of difference.I wonder if the XPS Gen 1 will take the Intel Pentium 4M Northwood processors used in early P4 laptops, if so I would imagine a 2.2-2.6 GHz model would be a viable replacement if you wanted to prioritize power consumption over performance. even then a 2.x GHz P4 should be good enough depending on the era of games you're targeting, off-hand I don't know anything that would run good on a Radeon 9700/9800 that would need a 3.x GHz P4 to run properly, for 1080p video usage it will mostly depend on how the player takes advantage of the GPU for decoding.
An older PATA SSD would be a great drive replacement depending on your chances of finding a good drive, I've heard of M-SATA adapters but IDK how practical they would be to install on older laptops like that, good find nevertheless.
Just about anything will take the mobile versions including desktops but there is one catch, the clocks will be defaulted low as the cpu has two multiplier states that are chipset controlled. They are good for high clocking boards and a small number of people used them this way back in the day but you are better off using a normal P4. For low power win9x with a p4 these things are overlooked at the low state is like 1.2ghz so they will only sip power.
On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.
