Is it worth to upgrade from banias to dothan?

[radiator]

I have an opportunity to upgrage CPU in my t41 from banias to dothan. My friend gave me cpu dothan 1.7@400mhz 2 L2 for free. Currently, I have banias 1.6@400mhx 1 mb L2. My question is will I notice the differencie in performance? And what would be the difference in the temperature of my cpu will my dothan produce signifficantly more heat than banias? How about noise with that dothan, is it going to be more noisy than banisas?
thx

[aaa]

It will be less noisy, and cooler. The performance difference will be hard to notice.

[FTC]

Hi, the difference in speed will not be that much. More in some tasks than in others, but you will feel it works a bit 'snappier'. However, the temp decrease will be highly noticeable. I remember seeing more than a 10ºC load decrease when I swapped my 1.5 Banias for a 1.8 Dothan 3 years ago... besides, if it is for free, then a definetly recommended change! ... and you will be able to use the surgery to clean that heatsink.

[sktn77a]

No reason not to, if you're comfortable swapping laptop components. Just don't expect to notice any significant speed difference.

[jdhurst]

For an upgrade like this to make a noticeable difference, you need to consider a 7200-rpm hard drive to go with it. Also (since you didn't say) also consider upgrading to 2Gb of memory. .... JDH

[Binh]

If you are going to keep this T41 for 2-3 years then the upgrade is highly recommended.
And don't forget to try to overclock it to 2.26Ghz after upgrade

[yukit]

I just upgraded my T40p CPU from 1.6 banias to 1.8 dothan. I found one on eBay for $40.

I wasn't expecting a miracle, but I was hoping to give the laptop a bit more horsepower to run SlingPlayer slightly better till I find a new netbook I like. I am happy to report that it does seem to handle H.264 decoding better. Perhaps the bigger cache has more impact than the faster clock speed. It was a worthwhile upgrade for me.

A quick check running super_pi, I gained about 20%. That seems a lot, but again the bigger cache helps a lot for that type of workload. I obviously have not noticed any change web browsing & email.


I also needed to take the laptop apart to blow out the dust collected over the years. It has been a while since I upgraded the RAM to 2GB.
I have also put Windows 7 (public beta build) & Ubuntu (jaunty) in dualboot. It would have been cool to get aero glass & eye candy, but I am not crazy enough to upgrade the video chip for that They work good enough without Thinkpad specific drivers & software. The two things I miss are:
1. Access Connection to control the networking
2. Keyboard customizer to reassign keys (enable Windows key)

[McLuvin]

I bought mine on ebay what I would say that it was fairly loaded from factory. Mine came with 755 dothan 2.0ghz and runs pretty well and I think that the 2mb cache really helps it out as well, it came with 1.5gig ram but I just noticed from running cpu-z one of the sticks is 2700 but the 512 is 2100 so I ordered another 1gig of 2700 so that should help it out just a bit. I don't know much about the banias specs but sounds like I would be looking for more of an upgrade than just 100mhz, if you could get your hands on a 755 or even a 765 if you could even find one that is, but hey if it's free all you would have is the time to swap them out then go for it.

[sktn77a]

I have a T42 that I upgraded from a 1.7 to 2.0GHz Dothan (didn't go for the 2.1GHz becasue of the heat), 512Mb to 2Gb RAM and a 5400 to a 7200rpm HDD. It was WAY faster after the upgrades! However, If I had to guess at the relative contributions of the upgrades, I'd say the HDD made the most difference (especially on bootup) followed by the RAM, followed by the CPU.

My T42 (ATI 9600 GPU, XP) is subjectively as fast as my T61p (Vista) on everyday applications (no 3D apps to compare, unfortunately).

[McLuvin]

most people think about to upgrade the memory or think that upgrading the cpu will give a good boost in performance but often times they neglect to upgrade the older and much slower hard drive. If you notice most manufacturers are going to use those bottom of the barrel hard drives mainly because they are cheaper. I took the old 4200 rpm 463k cach drive out of the 390 and put in a 5400 rpm 8mb and it made a world of difference more so than anything else I did to it, also I just got done fixing my dad's dell dimension 8200 it had a wd 5400rpm 80gig 2mb and I happened to have lying around a wd 7200 80gig 8mb cache so I used that one instead.