MSI GT70 inquiry about CPU upgrading

Hello everyone, as this is my first post and I'm not an avid forum guy please bare with me.

I have an MSI GT70 dragon edition (1) with a 2.4GHz Core i7-4700MQ CPU. However, I would like to upgrade it to a 3.0+GHz CPU. The reason for that is that I play a lot of MMORPGs, Wildstar to be specific, and they usually require a good CPU to run in ultra mode.

My questions are: Is my laptop CPU upgradeable? And if yes, What are the available 3.0+GHz recommended CPUs for my laptop.

Thank you for reading.

 

Yes it is upgrade-able, however, you may void your warranty doing so as MSI are known to use "warranty void if removed" stickers on the CPU screws in some countries (like Australia). However, have you tried using Intel XTU? to my knowledge, you can overclock your i7-4700MQ to at least 400mhz higher on 4 core, 3 core, 2 core and single core turboboost bins, plus you can also raise the TDP/TDC to force full turbo.
Your first problem with that model is heat, the GPU and CPU share the same cooling assembly as far as I know, this means that you're close to your thermal limit of the cooling already. Try the overclock with XTU first, only do an upgrade if you are unhappy with the extra perfomance of +400mhz, if you are sure the machine can handle the extra heat and/or if you cannot overclock with XTU.

The best bang for buck CPU above your current one is the 4800MQ because the combination of stock clock increase plus the extra overclock bins means that you are potentially gaining 3.9Ghz on all cores for a modest price. The 4900 is a much poorer upgrade since the cost is much much higher.

 

It's 200mhz extra available on the 4700MQ.

 

Your warranty isn't void if you are in the North America region.
You can upgrade to 4900MQ to be able to handle most of the MMORPG games out there.

 

The best value per $ would be the 4810MQ which has a large jump in performance and is very tweakable.

 

4900MQ is the one with feelable difference if you want something that works without doing any manual tweaks.

4700MQ - 7916 points / 2.4GHz/6MB
4800MQ - 8589 points / 2.7GHz/6MB / $368.75
4810MQ - 8630 points / 2.8GHz/6MB / $386.00
4900MQ - 9108 points / 2.8GHz/8MB / $548.39

 

Which benchmark are you using there? Most games are not very cache dependant on the modern I7s so the difference will be smaller usually.

 

There was a testing done previously using CPU-heavy applications, so 4810 will help a bit but if you were really going to shell out nearly $400 bucks might as well go for 4900MQ for the extra L2 cache.

 

The cache will make no difference in his game, you are after the frequency so the jump to the 4810MQ gives you a little more breathing room, and then if you tweak it still has the same potential as the 4900MQ due to thermal limits.

 

L2 cache has been known to affect performance, and the thermal limit isn't realized unlike 4930XM (57W vs 47W TDP).
This is why GX60/GX70 failed in MMORPG due to weak processor with 4MB L2 cache.

Tom's hardware also concluded that cache size matters.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cache-size-matter,1709-8.html

 

The GX fails due to a very weak core implementation, it would not get past the I7 in terms of performance even with 20MB of cache, it would be a bit of tangent to go into the flaws of 2 integer modules paired with a single floating point unit here though.

The cache impact on performance is best measured in the desktop space when comparing the 4770K with the 4670K running at the same frequency with HT off, the differences are so minimal even at higher frequencies that everyone discusses the fact that one has HT and the other does not.

When talking about thermal limits I mean that you can get both to around 3.9-4.0ghz when overclocked temperature stable (if you set it up right) so the extra +200mhz of the 4900mq makes no difference there.

 

Thank you all for the feedback I really appreciate it and I have decided to go for the 4810.

 

Nice It will be a nice bump.

 

Yup, it has everything, even has the VT-d feature that is missing from 4700MQ.

 

If you find you do still want a bit more, tweaking is fairly easy for the first 200-300mhz more where you can even undervolt at the the same time to keep it cool.

 

Unvervolt and slight multiplier increase ftw! I like how these CPUs are advertised from their standard 2.4+ghz speed but we end up having them run all turbo all day haha.

 

Yup, it's fun to squeeze the extra juicy out of it.