ASUS L5GA Notebook Review - Installation of CPU
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The ASUS L5GA is a barebones laptop, so you will need to install the CPU, memory, and hard drive. For the CPU you can use any Pentium IV 800MHZ front side bus processor. This includes processors built on the Northwood, Prescott, an Extreme Edition core. However, at this time will Northwood cores are still available. I recommend them over the Prescott cores due to the additional heat Prescotts generate and the additional price premium for performance that is roughly equivalent to Northwoods. The memory and hard drive form factor is not shared with desktop PCs. Below are examples of the memory and hard drive that can be used with the L5GA; notice they are significantly smaller than their PC counterparts. You will also need a small philips and a small flat-head screw driver.
The hard drive is a Hitachi Travelstar 80GB ATA 4200 RPM (currently fastest available for laptops) and a 512 MB stick of PC2700 (DDR333). Since I do have a couple of desktop CPUs laying around but did not have laptop memory or a hard drive, ASUS was kind enough to supply these with the review unit. Oddly enough they chose to only side a single stick of RAM even though the L5GA supports dual channel memory. I would suggest for personal use using two sticks of matched memory to increase the L5GA's performance.
All right so we discussed the parts you will need. Now I will tell you where to put them.
CPU Installation
To begin installation of the CPU, the panel with the two fans on the bottom of the laptop needs to be taken off by removing 5 screws.
After removing the rear panel, you can see the fan assembly and heat pipe based CPU cooler.
After removing the fan assembly the CPU cooler and motherboard are visible.
As you can see in the above pictures, ASUS choose to use a heat pipe based design. I thought it was rather clever for ASUS to use a heat pipe to help conserve space with the chassis. The CPU cooler comes with a hard plastic protective coating on it as well as pre-coated with a thermal compound. I was happy to see them use thermal paste instead of a thermal pad. I've always believed thermal paste was a better conductor of heat than a thermal pad.
And finally, after the CPU cooler is removed, you can see the socket to install the CPU.
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Hard Drive, Memory and Battery >>
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