Can someone tell me can i upgrade my old laptop processor i3 330m to better one, for example i5 560m? My laptop is Toshiba L500 1xc with i3 processor 330m. The socket of the motherboard is PGA988.I heard that is important not only the socket,but bios and chipset as well!How can I be sure that i5 560m will work on my laptop?

 

Can someone tell me can i upgrade my old laptop processor i3 330m to better one, for example i5 560m? My laptop is Toshiba L500 1xc with i3 processor 330m. The socket of the motherboard is PGA988.I heard that is important not only the socket,but bios and chipset as well!How can I be sure that i5 560m will work on my laptop?

Long time since I did any cpu upgrade, I'm out of touch, a lot of factors have to be taken into consideration.

1 Laptops are generally much harder to upgrade than desktops, the Bios may not be new enough to accept your upgrade cpu, a lot of manufacturers openly discourage this sort of thing for obvious reasons, so they don't update their bios, often or ever, I personally would'nt bother contacting Toshiba. A brief word of caution, be very very sure of any bios upgrade (called flashing), make sure it's the correct one, you cold ruin your laptop completely ie. bricked. Do this at your own risk, and ONLY if necessary and you are 100% confident. Enter your bios and take a note of the bios version you have before any flashing attempt. A few can be saved by de-soldering the chip and putting in a new one pre-flashed with the correct bios.

2 Your Bus speed is very important, check your chipset for compatibility.

3 Socket, a starting point, if the socket don't match exactly, your doomed.

4 Heat and power, can your laptop cool a faster cpu, laptops can run very hot, will this be an issue?. Do you like using your laptop on battery power, a faster cpu may both consume more power and run the fan more often, thus chew up you battery quicker. If a laptop consistently runs very hot, it does shorten the lifespan of your battery pack, and heat causes stress all around your laptop.

5 Are you competent enough to try this, I don't mean to be insulting but they are delicate and many plastic clips and connections are easily damaged, and once you start opening them many repair technicians won't go near a half attempted repair/upgrade started by someone else.

6 Is it really worth the effort, I have done many upgrades and often ended up disappointed afterwards, a few moving from i3 to i5 like you and honestly not seeing a big improvement. The software on your laptop has to make use of the faster chip, more treads/cores. It might surprise you how much software lags behind chip development. Do you have a SSD, if not, this may be more fruitful, with a fresh os. install and more ram. Look in your task manager and performance graph when running your favourite software. If you use your laptop on mains mostly, have you tried turning off some of the energy saving settings, this can boost performance. They called this bare bones, turning off unwanted services running in the backround using up computing cycles, but this was more a bit of fun, do this with caution and slowly.

Here's my advice; look online, do a bit of homework, due diligence, find out all you can about your present cpu, see if anybody has upgraded the laptop, and what cpu worked. If you buy one be gentle removing and inserting the cpu,, which only fit one way and require zero insertion force, drop them in.
There are or were?, a few good websites whereby you can type in your cpu and they will suggest an upgrade. Also websites which will rank/benchmark both cpus. The fastest compatible one may not be the right one for you.there are also sites which will do a full scan and tell you all the specs. of your laptop.
If you do go ahead you could run a stress test for testing (one I used in the past called Prime, very intensive math) to make sure it works under load. Keep an eye on the temp. of the cpu (one piece of software was Coretemp). Be warned this will really make your laptop work hard.

People may be nervous about giving you a definite yes or no answer.
Be wary of all advice, the internet is full of overinflated benchtesting. It is only worth the effort if the particular software you like to run, runs faster with the upgrade. I wish I could help you more but I have'nt done this in a long time. There are people here who could guide you better than me.

https://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/7...vs_Intel_Core_i5_Mobile_i5-560M_(PGA988).html
https://www.cpu-upgrade.com/
https://www.mersenne.org/download/
https://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/
https://www.belarc.com/products_belarc_advisor
good luck

 

Upgrading depends a bit on the BIOS of the laptop, whether it supports the i5 you are looking at. Your i3 330M PGA988 chip is a 35W processor, so if the BIOS supports the i5, you could look at the 540M, 560M or 580M, which are all 35W CPUs. Other option is to upgrade to a faster i3 like the 370M, 380M or 390M. The i3 390M is the same clock speed as the i5 560M (but the i5 has turbo boost). All have the same number of cores.
Check the vendor website for their BIOS updates. Often the description will list if they added any newer processors. Or, look at your specific model of laptop and see if it was ever sold with an i5, and if so, which chip. Between those checks, you may be able to determine if upgrading is possible.

https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_i3/Intel-Core i3 Mobile I3-330M CP80617004122AG.html