Laptop CPU Upgrade

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So I decided to go for the ultimate upgrade on my trusty HP Pavilion G6 laptop which was given to me 3 years ago by a kind guy on Freegle. At the time I had to replace the fan and keyboard to get it going (see post here), but this upgrade was at another level entirely as I've never swapped out a laptop CPU before. 

A lot of research went into this to make sure I was getting the right APU (combined CPU and graphics processor or GPU), because the same motherboard can work with a wide range of Intel and AMD processors. I went for broke and got the most powerful one the motherboard could handle for £20 on eBay along with an additional 4Gb RAM to bring it up to 8Gb.

Here is the old 2-core APU (E2-3000M) ready to be removed.



And the replacement 4-core APU (A8-3520M) installed with a smearing of heatsink paste ready for reassembly.



So did it work? Thankfully yes and I am editing this post using the computer. The GPU runs a little hot which I am keeping an eye on, but there has been a noticeable improvement in performance so the work was worthwhile as well as a learning experience.

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