Beef Up Old Laptop?

Hardware Hub
1

Hey everyone:

Fresh off of giving some new life to my old desktop via hardware upgrades, I'm thinking about doing the same with my laptop. It's an Alienware M17X r2.

Current specs:

  • i7-720QM (4-cores (8) @ 1.6 ghz)
  • 6 GB 1333 DDR3
  • 2 x Radeon 5870 HD

Considering:

  • i7-920XM (4-cores (8) @ 2.0 ghz)
  • 16 GB RAM. Apparently this thing only officially supports 8 GB, but 16 works in most cases.
  • SSD upgrade from existing 1 TB disk drive.

My question is whether or not this machine is worth throwing a few hundred dollars at for the parts? This thing has been good to me over the years (purchased in 2010) but it's really starting to bog down now. I don't think I'll go out and buy a new laptop if the consensus is that the parts upgrade for this one isn't worth it. I'll probably just keep running this one until it meets its demise and then build a budget desktop. Thoughts?

2

My advice...

Upgrade to an SSD first.

3

As it stands, the M17x-R2 is the best version Dell ever made, being the first and last to support both SLI and Crossfire internally before the M18 series launched (and costing a bit more).

Those are all great upgrades. Look into the unofficial A11 BIOS as it allows a bit of decent CPU overclocking (with voltage control) and you can get that i7 up to 3.3GHz rock stable. I had the same CPU in an M15x and it went to 3.5GHz stable without thermal throttling, the M17x has a much larger heatsink and should allow for some higher clocks.

Look into upgrading the GPUs, since the M17x supports Crossfire all the way up to the 7970M/M290X from AMD. Consider that this will require a much higher wattage power supply (the charger).

There is a whole thread here with guides on how to unlock the full graphics potential of the M17x-R2: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/m17x-r2-7970m-crossfirex-ultimate-installation-and-tweaking-guide.720908/

2 Likes
4

I think it might be worth to give your notebook a boost, it's pretty nice. But if the upgrade comes at a price similar to a new notebook, I would not do a full upgrade but just buy 8GB of RAM and an SSD (RAM are pretty cheap and the SSD might be re-used in a new notebook if you're not going for ultrabooks). I think that for less than 300$ is worth to upgrade.