I have an old HP Elitebook 8760w and I want to make it a usable laptop.
It has 16 GB of RAM, an SSD drive, and 2 GB of discrete GPU VRAM.
This is amazing for a 2011 laptop. But I can't even run lightweight games on it.

It says CPU is running at 99% meaning the CPU must be the bottleneck of this build. It's an Intel Core i7 2630QM.
I refuse to scrap this laptop if it only has one bottleneck. How do I solve this problem without soldering in a more powerful CPU? (impossible)
I've heard rumors that the 2.00 GHz CPU can be somehow boosted to 2.9 GHz or thread count doubled somehow, but there are no such settings in BIOS.

I have Linux Mint and I'm pretty sure whatever Intel Turbo Boost driver exists out there wont run in Linux

>>1534338
>>1534335 (OP)

I think it also might be my GPU drivers.
Does this look accurate? I don't see any Vulkan driver there.

>>1534346
2/2

>>1534346
Why is the vendor Mesa instead of NVIDIA?

Quadro 3000M requires NVIDIA's Legacy 390.xx drivers

No idea how to install them in a modern Ubuntu though

>>1534335 (OP)
>How do I solve this problem without soldering in a more powerful CPU? (impossible)
It should be socketed, in which case you could upgrade it, but you're already near the top of what's compatible.

>the 2.00 GHz CPU can be somehow boosted to 2.9 GHz
Turbo boost. Should be enabled already.
Install `i7z` and run it to monitor the frequencies.
Run a single core stress test (e.g. with `stress -c 1`).
You should see one core boosting to 2.9 GHz.

>thread count doubled somehow
Hyperthreading. Should also be enabled already.
Run `lscpu`, and you should see `Thread(s) per core: 2`.

>It says CPU is running at 99% meaning the CPU must be the bottleneck of this build.
Not necessarily.
As >>1534438 said, you need to install old legacy drivers to get a Fermi GPU working.
As it is, you're either not using the Nvidia GPU at all (IGP instead), or you are, but with the crappy Nouveau drivers.
Considering you need Optimus to switch to the Nvidia GPU, it's probably the former.

Now, with 390.xx, you don't get official support for Optimus with PRIME.
As such, you'd have to use some hackish solution like Bumblebee.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA_Optimus

Honestly, you'd have a much easier time getting everything working right with Windows 10.
Although it's going out of support, there's IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 that's supported until 2032.
For download and activation: https://massgrave.dev/
Optimus, Boost, and Hyperthreading should all be working without a hitch.

If you insist on using Linux, there's CachyOS, which recently dethroned Linux Mint on DistroWatch.
It's Arch-based, so although much of the info in the Arch wiki can transfer to Mint, it'd apply nearly 100% to CachyOS.

>>1534471
Hello I'm OP.
Yes I noticed that my problems were caused by not having a driver for the Quadro 3000M GPU.
And yeah, I would need a legacy driver but I can't see how any modern Linux kernel would support it. No idea how to install it.

>Turbo boost. Should be enabled already.
I downloaded some weird-ass "Cinnamon spices" addon that turned it on. Checked with CPU X that it's running at 2900 MHz.

>Honestly, you'd have a much easier time getting everything working right with Windows 10.
True. I just installed Win10 and it automatically got me the Legacy drivers and my laptop is now working like a charm. I hate to give Windows any credit but it just worked so well for this purpose. My games run smoothly now. Since this is my secondary computer maybe I'll accept that it's not Linux until I find out an easy way to install the drivers on Linux.

>For download and activation: https://massgrave.dev/
How safe and legal is the Massgrave activation thing that you do in Powershell? Will Microsoft agents storm my room?

>>1534505
>How safe and legal is the Massgrave activation thing that you do in Powershell? Will Microsoft agents storm my room?
The repo is hosted on Github, which is owned by Microsoft.
If they even gave two shits about it, they would have taken it down already.
Heck, I've even heard tales of Microsoft technicians directing people to it, in order to solve activation issues.

If you're paranoid about potential malware, you can use the HWIDGEN option, wipe the drive and reinstall Windows.
It'll get re-activated automatically upon connecting to the internet because the activation servers will recognize the computer's HWID.