How To Change The FSB On A Laptop

I have been asked this question numerous times: How do I change the Front Side Bus speed on a Laptop?

Answer: On most laptops you have to upgrade the processor and/or memory to do it. That is most laptop BIOS publishers do not give you the option to modify the clock speed of the processor or memory through software.

If you check the specifications of your laptop on the manufactures web site you may find that the base model of your laptop came with a certain processor.

A little further investigation may find that the same model has three to five higher end models that had faster processors than the base model.

This is how I find out what I can do to a laptop (as far as upgrading the processor) to change the F.S.B. (Front Side Bus).

Lets say you have a Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz processor in your laptop. Can you upgrade it to say a Core 2 Quad 2.66 GHz?

Good question!

I have such a laptop, an ASUS K50IJ, checking ASUS's web site tells me that the fastest processor supported is already in use in my laptop. The high end processor is the Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T6500/T6400, which is what is in my laptop.

So lets see what I can find.

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I have found two possible candidates for an upgrade:

• Q9000 2 GHZ, 1066 MHz Front Side Bus
  • The Q9000 is a Quad processor although the core speed is 100 MHz less than the current processor.
• QX9300 2.53 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB
  • The QX9300 is a Quad processor that has a 430 MHz speed increase over the current processor.

The question is:

Will either work in the computer? I am using my experience to say yes, they will.

• Do I want to pay around $100 to see if the Q9000 will work? Thinking about it at this time...
• Do I want to pay around $260 to see if the QX9300 will work? No, that is too much money to experiment with.

Another thing I would have find is the memory that is 1066 MHz or faster to upgrade to also.

The trade off would be a Quad for a Duo processor and an increase in speed for the memory from 800 MHz to 1066 MHz which should increase the overall performance of the computer by at lest 40%.

In the Laptop Chapter of the Self Computer Repair Unleashed 2nd Edition Manual I show you how to upgrade the processor of a laptop to gain the increase in FSB and processor speed.

Yer talking me in to ... [maybe]  :)

Update 02/14/20 - I didn't do the upgrade to this computer, mainly because I moved this web site from commercial hosting to my business network. Now that I have moved this web site to a more powerful computer it will be converted to Server 2008 R2 as either a Domain Controller or Backup Domain Controller...