Laptop Upgrade Options

[David Smith]

The story so far......A long time ago in a ...... 

I bought myself a new ZWO ASI178MM recently, primarily for solar imaging but undoubtedly will get used for lunar and maybe even some planetary one day. Frame rates were horrible with my Lenovo G500 laptop so I picked up a 240GB SSD to replace the fairly mediocre 1TB HD. From early tests looks like frame rates are better but still only 30FPS and the processor is at almost 100% during capture. The Lenovo's Celeron 1005M is removable and uses a socket G2 which means there is some scope for upgrade, see here

So my options:-

1. Junk the Lenovo and splash out £500-£600 on a new core i5 machine

2. Upgrade the processor on the G500 to a 3rd gen i7 3630 (top of the list of options in the link above).

The latter would cost me around £80 - £100 and maybe £30 for another 4GB of memory if needed. Won't be anything like as fast as the new I5 7th or 8th generation but for <£150 I can go from 2 cores / 4 threads / 1.9ghz / 4GB ram to 4 cores / 8 threads / 2.4ghz / 8Gb ram. Having watched various videos on how to replace the processor I am confident I can do the DIY job and ditching an otherwise perfectly good machine seems wasteful.

Anyway, purpose of this post was to get your thoughts on where I should go here? Do you have experience upgrading the internals of a laptop? Was it worth the time / money / effort? Are there other limiting factors with my laptop that I am missing that will still limit the performance on the new camera?

All thoughts, comments and input appreciated.

Thanks

[Oddsocks]

9 minutes ago, David Smith said:

2. Upgrade the processor on the G500 to a 3rd gen i7 3630 (top of the list of options in the link above).

If you do this are you certain that....

A: Will the laptop onboard regulated power supply be able to cope with the higher power consumption of the uprated CPU?

B: Will the current laptop's CPU cooling be able to keep the processor at a temperature where max performance is possible or will the CPU quickly overheat and the CPU clock slow down to prevent core damage?

C: Are the laptops motherboard north and south bridges up to supporting the higher performance CPU or will they become a bottleneck?

D. Is the current memory fast enough for a higher performance CPU?

[ChrisEll]

One way I increased the fps with my GPCAM was to use 8 bit rather than 12 bit and to record a ROI. I can now hit 38fps with a 500x500px ROI and I have a lowly Lenovo G700 laptop.

[David Smith]

17 minutes ago, Oddsocks said:

If you do this are you certain that....

A: Will the laptop onboard regulated power supply be able to cope with the higher power consumption of the uprated CPU?

B: Will the current laptop's CPU cooling be able to keep the processor at a temperature where max performance is possible or will the CPU quickly overheat and the CPU clock slow down to prevent core damage?

C: Are the laptops motherboard north and south bridges up to supporting the higher performance CPU or will they become a bottleneck?

D. Is the current memory fast enough for a higher performance CPU?

Excellent questions and just the kind of info I was looking for, thanks.

[bottletopburly]

Is your laptop usb 3 , if not your recording via usb2

[pipnina]

I think it's worth noting that the difference in speed between a 3rd gen and an 8th gen intel I7 will be considerable. They might only be working in 10-15% speed increments these days but there are 5 of those between 3rd and 8th. If CPU is a limiting factor i'd say it's best to go whole-hog and get a new machine.

Because of the way these systems are interdependent on other components, getting anything higher than the 3rd gen will require you to replace the motherboard and anything 6th gen and higher will require you to use DDR4 memory instead of DDR3. On laptops this is impossible, thus a new machine would be needed.

Also worth considering: is your laptop's CPU removable & replaceable? I believe many models are soldered.

I have a 4GHz 4c/8t desktop 6700k. I still feel like I need more CPU power for things like DSS. In this case, you can't have too much of a good thing.

Food for thought.

[David Smith]

3 hours ago, bottletopburly said:

Is your laptop usb 3 , if not your recording via usb2

It's USB 3.

[bottletopburly]

2 hours ago, David Smith said:

It's USB 3.

Maybe it's worth asking other owners of this camera what FPS they are getting for a comparison ,

[lenscap]

I know size & portability are factors but since you want more processing power is a Desktop an option? You get more bang for your buck and a desktop is so much easier to upgrade/customise when necessary.