HD upgrade

I have an asus laptop that I use for gaming/work 2ghz c2d, 2gb ram, 512meg 7700go graphics. I feel like its being held back by the 5400rpm HD pretty substantially. So my question is; as Ive not really used a laptop with a 7200rpm drive, would I see a decent gain going from a 5400rpm drive to a 16mb 7200 rpm drive? It is sata, and the laptop is a year old.

Im not overly concerned with battery life changes as Id say the laptop spends the majority of its usage time plugged in and on battery settings I get around 3hrs with the wifi active, almost 4 without. So if I give up 20min or so because of a faster drive I can live with that.

You would see a very nice performance gain, with very little difference in battery life. The power utilization of the 7200RPM drives is not tremendously different than that of the 5400RPM drives.