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Inspiron 15 N5030 upgrade possibilities
My brother currently has an Inspiron N5030 which has a T4500 CPU and 3GB DDR3.
He has asked me to investigate upgrading it. There are two issues that I have. One is the fastest possible CPU, and the other is compatible RAM.
1) The T4500 is rated at 35W and an 800 FSB. For the sake of battery life I can't be bothered with any "Extreme Edition" rarities which use 45W. I have read various other forum posts which suggest that this laptop can take any 35W CPU on Socket P, up to a T9900. Of course I understand the price premium of the fastest CPU for each socket, so I'm looking at putting a 35W T9800 into it. Will the A02 BIOS take this straight away, no matter what?
2) In searching for available RAM upgrades I have two conflicting stories. Crucial suggest that this N5030 can take 8GB DDR3 (2x 4GB), whereas another respected RAM website ( mrmemory.co.uk ) suggests that the maximum is 6GB (!?) Can anyone clarify this? Also, is the RAM which this model takes Dell specific, like the old days with Dell RAM, or can just about any DDR3 work with it?
Thanks for any help, and I wish you all a good day.
cuzman1977
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April 6th, 2016 14:00
Thanks for your reply.
The system has 64-bit Windows 10 upgrade (from Windows 7), so the RAM upgrade from 3GB to 6GB or 8GB would benefit it, and given the fact that the N5030 needs to be taken apart for a RAM upgrade I figured why not upgrade the CPU for around £25 ($40) at the same time. I may as well max it out. in both respects.
The system is not used for gaming. My brother has an Xbox One for that. The issue of an SSD is one for the future when prices start to drop. He currently has a 500GB HDD, so I will wait a while on that count before cloning his current HDD to an SSD, and getting an external case for his 500GB drive to use as storage.
And before you mention it, I know how limited his GFX is. I recently ran 3DMark03 on an old XP desktop with a P4 2.8GHz, 2GB DDR1, 160GB 8MB cache HDD and a 64-bit GeForce 6200 256MB. It came out with score of 1825. My brother's N5030 came out with a score of 1705. Go figure.
Still, I am purely interested in a definitive answer to my two original questions.
ejn63
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April 6th, 2016 14:00
The RAM upgrade may make sense -- you can go to 8G IF your system has a 64-bit operating system (if not, it'll need to be replaced by a 64-bit version).
The CPU upgrade won't really make much sense for anything this system is capable of doing. It would make much more of an overall boost to replace the hard drive with a solid state drive.
Faster CPUs generally help with things like gaming, calculation-intensive spreadsheets, databases, etc -- none of which are the forte of this system.