As a general rule, laptops aren't made to be upgraded in that way.
But, I have no room to tell you NOT to do this, because I've done similar things to both my Dell Inspiron E1505 and my Lenovo Y460. The question becomes this: how lenient was Acer when they built your BIOS?
My Dell came with a T2300E (Core Duo 1.66Ghz, 32-bit, 35W) that I was able to upgrade it to a T7400 (Core 2 Duo 2.13Ghz, 64-bit capable, 35W.) The performance increase was quite significant, mostly because I moved up to a new architecture along with the 30% increase in clockspeed along with an additional helping of (faster, larger) cache. Fortunately for me, the Dell firmware did not balk at the CPU upgrade, even though this was never a supported processor for the machine.
At the same time, I installed a 64-bit operating system to take advantage of the new processor, and also upgraded to 4GB of ram (similarly unsupported by Dell.) While the operating system functioned without issue, the 4GB of ram sadly did not... There was a chipset limitation that causes even 64-bit operating systems to still only show ~3.25GB of available ram. So while I was able to install more than Dell supported, I wasn't able to take
full advantage of it. It was still worth it though
My Lenovo Y460 is a Core i5-520m platform that I wanted to upgrade to an i7-640m. The firmware would boot, but every time started with a processor unrecognized error. You could simply press a key to bypass the error and the machine would continue to function, but the performance increase was not significant. Both processors are the same architecture (Allandale) with only a minor bump in core speed (~15%) and a minor bump in L2 cache size (3Mb -> 4Mb) and the same number of cores. Ultimately, it wasn't worth keeping the 640m as the trivial speed increase did not outweigh the irritating boot error.
To get back to your own situation: your T7300 is a 2Ghz PPGA478 socket that runs at 800FSB. The fastest chip with those specs looks to be the T7800 at 2.6Ghz. It has the same architecture, the same cache, the same number of physical and logical cores, but has a 30% clock bump. Realistically? You will certainly be able to measure the performance difference in dedicated benchmark apps, but your gaming experience will likely not be much different given your video card.
And as for upgrading the video card? That's a stretch... Even if it "works", I'd be weary of the heat that it will put out in a laptop form factor. The TDP of an 8400GS is significantly lower than a 9600GT. But even with a 9600GT, the video card will be the slowest part of your gaming experience.
So, I'd save the bucks and put it towards a gaming rig
And that's coming from someone who has upgraded two laptops in the last three years.
Any thoughts on this?
