CPU upgade

Juliano

Hello,

So I purchased an MSI GE75 Raider 9SG last year thinking It could handle anything I threw at it.. I was wrong. The laptop has a 9750H CPU and an RTX 2080. I do a lot of 3d rendering/design, video editing, ect.. The CPU is my bottleneck. I have searched high and low but can not find a solution to upgrading my CPU. The answer I keep on getting is that I'm SOL. Its a great laptop just not as powerful as I want it to be. I would like to have the CPU upgraded. Any advice at all would be appreciated.

PowerSpec_MikeW

Greetings,
This is always a tricky subject with laptops. Usually manufacturers will share a common board and BIOS version across a model family and what you can do is look at other models in the family and see if they offer a version with an  upgraded CPU. That processor may work, but you also have to consider if a BIOS update will be required. Was the upgraded CPU available when your laptop was built? If not, you're going to have to approach the manufacturer about a BIOS update to support it.

Intel i9-9880H would be my first thought here, as there are systems available for the GE75 Raider *SG series with this CPU, but because of the reasons mentioned above I would contact MSI and verify. Even though it's probably the same motherboard, it may be labeled different in the firmware, making in incompatible with the BIOS on the same, system with a different motherboard, when it shouldn't be, or doesn't need to be. Contact MSI is the best advice here, or you can stop by our store and we'll do so for you and see what upgrades are available.

sbski

@Juliano
I will start off by saying most laptops are going to have a soldered processor. You realistically cannot upgrade that yourself and I wouldn't even do it   You do have a few options in terms of getting more performance out of it.

The first one is to use a utility like Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility to undervolt the CPU if you are running into thermal bottlenecks. To complement that, if you feel comfortable re pasting the laptop that will also help. You may be able to overclock a bit (this will void your warranty) but I wouldn't go above stock voltages as otherwise you are going to get very high temperatures. 

You also could buy a new motherboard and replace that but you may be looking at nearly the price of the laptop itself. At that point I would just sell that laptop and buy a new one. If you want to just buy a new system, I would wait to see if Nvidia ends up releasing new graphics cards here. My guess is that we unfortunately won't be seeing any top trier graphics cards for the next little bit.

I hoped that this helped but feel free to HMU if you have any questions. 

PowerSpec_MichaelB

sbski said:

@Juliano
I will start off by saying most laptops are going to have a soldered processor. You realistically cannot upgrade that yourself and I wouldn't even do it   You do have a few options in terms of getting more performance out of it.

The first one is to use a utility like Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility to undervolt the CPU if you are running into thermal bottlenecks. To complement that, if you feel comfortable re pasting the laptop that will also help. You may be able to overclock a bit (this will void your warranty) but I wouldn't go above stock voltages as otherwise you are going to get very high temperatures. 

You also could buy a new motherboard and replace that but you may be looking at nearly the price of the laptop itself. At that point I would just sell that laptop and buy a new one. If you want to just buy a new system, I would wait to see if Nvidia ends up releasing new graphics cards here. My guess is that we unfortunately won't be seeing any top trier graphics cards for the next little bit.

I hoped that this helped but feel free to HMU if you have any questions. 

I second this. Undervolting is definitely the way to go with laptops. Since you're bound by both thermal and power limits, undervolting can give you a decent enough power/thermal overhead to boost higher/longer. My 7700HQ managed to handle a -120mv offset and dropped thermals considerably. Just be mindful that playing with voltages will often void warranties for most manufacturers, even if you are using less voltage. Be sure to check with MSI for confirmation.

Repasting is definitely another great option, especially if you don't mind the risk of using liquid metal, but that requires a pretty flat heatsink, something most laptops don't really offer unfortunately. It also requires a ton of prep work, isolating all conductive components with tape or clearcoat nail polish, not to mention it would stain the heatsink and void most warranties as a result. With that said, I managed to drop another 14C off my 7700HQ by swapping the stock paste over to liquid metal. This, coupled with the undervolting, dropped my stock 7700HQ temps from 94C under 48k FFT Prime95 (AVX2) down to 72C under the same loads. 

@Juliano , I'd definitely take a closer look at how your CPU is performing under your workloads. See if the clock speed is throttling at all due to high thermals or power limits. If that is the case, you should be a decent performance boost if you can remedy whatever is causing it to throttle. Aside from that, you won't see much of a performance boost going to the 10th gen laptops unless you are doing heavily threaded workloads and need the extra processing threads.

Here is a quick guide on how to install MSI Afterburner and RTSS and use them to monitor your CPU resource usage: https://community.microcenter.com/discussion/3077/guide-how-to-install-enable-on-screen-display-in-msi-afterburner-rtss. This should help you narrow down the cause of the bottleneck and from there, you can determine how best to work around it.