Aspire 6920G - which parts to upgrade?

Hi, new here,

I've had my Acer Aspire 6920G laptop for several years now (and have actually become very fond of it) - I bought it for the sole purpose at the time of getting a portable system on which to play TF2. I'd previously fallen foul to the low integrated GPU performances, believing a GeForce 6150 on an HP Pavillion tx1000 would be adequate for gaming (how naive I was back then), and at the time that I bought my Acer it could run TF2 with mid-high-spec settings (all high + 2xAA/AF) at a decent level. Then the Sniper/Spy update came along and my performance dropped completely out of nowhere, and I haven't been able to fully regain it since, although it's come close to.

(As a side note, I recently had a similar problem with a desktop and after a re-format everything worked well again - don't know whether the same type of thing might be happening here, although the desktop did have the added bonus of a trojan.)

Anyway, I've been playing on mid-settings for a long while now with no problems, but today I remembered that from what I've seen of the insides the graphics look distinctly non-integrated, so I decided to quickly research whether an upgrade of any performance-related parts was possible. I found this site with threads such as http://forum.notebookreview.com/acer/320860-tehsuigis-upgrade-experience.html (who was also trying to get more performance in the same game), so I guess it is potentially possible for me to upgrade - but I need to know exactly what. I think it's my graphics that would be the first port of call: I've found through experience that the CPU in the Acer actually seems to be superior to the 3GHz dual-core AMD I have in my desktop.

My specs are:

2x Intel Core2 Duo T5750 @ 2Ghz
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650
3GB RAM
250GB hard drive

My Vista performance scores in case they're useful (they may not be):
Processor - 4.9
RAM - 4.5
Graphics (Windows Aero) - 5.4
Graphics (gaming) - 5.1
Primary hard disk - 5.2

Basically, if a hardware upgrade is possible and it's needed, I'd need to know what to upgrade first. If an OS reinstall would be a good idea too then I could try that, but if hardware is going to make more difference then I'd deal with that first off.

Many thanks.

 

Welcome to the forum.

You can upgrade to nVidia 9600M GT or better yet to ATI HD4650 or 4670 if you can find one.

CPU could also be upgraded but it's probably not as important as GPU in terms of performance.

BTW HD3650 wasn't the stock card for this laptop- it came with nVidia 9500M GS for all I know. Did you upgrade or bought a used one that someone else had upgraded?

 

I got this one new, straight from a PC World near us. I live in the UK, so maybe the standard spec here is different?

I think I'd prefer to stick with ATI (they seem to work better with Source engine games, which are 99% of what I play), so the 46xx ones sound good. I'm assuming I need to look for mobile versions of them?

 

Yeah- just don't assume that everything will work- i.e. the ones made for Toshiba look almost exactly the same but have no on-board BIOS so these wouldn't work. If you find something online just ask the retailer for confirmation and/or post here.