Upgrade from Phenom II N620 to N970 possible?

[Ekuahx]

Hey,
I have a HP Pavilion dv 6 with a AMD Phenom II N620 which is a dual core CPU and want to upgrade the CPU. Now, I downloaded the manual for my PC and in the section about replacements parts there's a list of a bunch of AMD processors, the best of them being the Phenom II N970, which is a quad core processor.

I have google a little and according to notebookcheck.net both the N620 and the N970 have the same socket (Socket S1) which means that the N970 should fit into the motherboard.

However, I'm a little reluctant towards just purchasing the N970 only to find out that it may not fit. That's why I'd like some opinions on this. I have done a CPU upgrade on my former Acer laptop where I upgraded from a Pentium Dual Core to a Core2Duo. I did the same kind of information gathering before to check if the new CPU would fit and it did and worked like a charm.

Does it matter that my current CPU is a dual core while the one I want to upgrade with is a quad core? Is this upgrade possible?

System specs:
AMD Phenom II N620 ( want to upgrade to Phenom II N970)
ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5650
6GB RAM
Motherboard ( CPU-Z):
--> Manufacturer: HP
--> Model: 1440

[gshv]

There are four different revisions of socket S1, and they are not compatible with other. Nevertheless, N620 and N970 work in the save revision of socket S1, S1g4. What's more, they have the same core stepping and TDP. I believe that even initial version of BIOS for socket S1g4 boards supports all S1g4 processors, although it may not support overclocking features on X620/X64//X920/X940 processors. So, I would be very surprised if N970 does not work in your laptop.

One word of caution, though. N970 will only be faster in multithreading applications. The CPU has lower frequency than N620, and it will be slower in single- and dual-threaded tasks.

Genandiy

[debs3759]

If the manual says you can upgrade to the N970, then you can.

No point spending hours searching online when the manual tells you all you need to know

[Guest]

[debs3759]

It will only perform better in games that are able to use all 4 cores. So it really depends how new the games are (sorry, I'm not a gamer so can't be more specific). From what I've been reading in overclocking forums, most games won't use more than 4 cores, but I don'tknow if that also means they will use up to 4.

[Guest]