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    L501X CPU upgrade vs battery life

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by acaaew, Jul 7, 2011.

  1. acaaew

    acaaew Notebook Enthusiast

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    Since I just ordered my new 1080p screen its time to upgrade my next component. When I ordered my XPS 15 I had to go bare bones because of my budget. I figured I can upgrade later if something was too slow or not enough. Because of my small budget I got a i3-380M. Its not a bad daily use CPU but when it comes to running some virtual machines, decompressing something, or encoding a video it sucks. I get pretty good battery life because I opted for the 9 cell. With moderate to light use I can get 4-5 hours before having to plug in.

    I was thinking about getting a i7-820qm because I see them all the time on ebay for around $100 for a ES. I do understand that I will loose the intel HD graphics which includes nvidia optimus. How bad will my battery life suffer when it comes to day to day web browsing? I don't do much more than that when I am running on battery anyways. My guess is that I will get about 3 hours with the upgrade.

    The other option was a i5-540m. This would give me the same 2.5Ghz stock clock but it will turbo to 3Ghz. The other chip I would also take is a i7-620m but they seem to be pretty pricey on ebay. My guess with either of these chips is that my battery life will stay the same. I may loose a few minutes with the i7-620m because of the extra MB of cache.

    Let me know what your opinions are. I just don't want my battery life to be reduced too bad with the quad core. I use to have a asus g73jh that had the i7-720qm and everything seemed nice and snappy with that chip. I remember getting about 2 hours of web browsing life out of it and it had a 17" screen with a 5870 for video and 8 cell battery. Also let me know if there are any other CPU's that might fit the bill better.
     
    acaaew, Jul 7, 2011
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  2. Tsunade_Hime

    Tsunade_Hime such bacon. wow

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    If you have a L501x with Optimus, you cannot go to any Clarksfield i7 quad core as they do not have Intel GPU and Optimus must have it (Optimus final display is through Intel IGP). Best bet would be Arrandale i3/i5/i7 which are all dual cores with hyperthreading. The best bet would be an i5 which offers Turbo Boost which the i3 does not. The dual core i7's only offer faster out of the box speeds, slightly more cache and higher turbo frequencies (aka no real performance difference in real life use, unless you render/compile which then you should be buying a business laptop).
     
    Tsunade_Hime, Jul 7, 2011
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  3. acaaew

    acaaew Notebook Enthusiast

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    I am sorry but I forgot to list the model of my laptop. I have a L501x with a Geforce GT 420M. I can replace my CPU with a clarksfield and all it will do is use the nvidia card for the graphics. I know this for fact because the clarksfields where an option for my laptop.

    My main question here is how much will my battery life be effected by going to the clarksfield? Can any L501x clarksfield owners post there real world battery life and the size of battery they have?
     
    acaaew, Jul 7, 2011
    #3