Upgrading CPU/RAM worth it?

Hi everyone,

I recently purchased a 9600M GT DDR3 from ebay for my 7720G, since my old graphics card died. During my research I stumbled upon this forum and the amazingly detailed upgrade-guides for most acer models. So first of all, thanks for all those MxM-threads!

Next up: after reading more and more I got excited like a little kid on christmas eve. My current setup is a T7500, 4GB RAM and the aforementioned 9600M GT, running win 7 64-bit on a 160GB partition of a 320GB HD 5400 rpm.

I can upgrade my CPU to a T8300/8500 or T9300/9500 for under 100€ on ebay.

I can upgrade my RAM to 6 or 8GB (but I've heard you should always use the same type of RAM in 2 slots, so 8 would be better).

I *could* upgrade my HDD to an SDD, but this probably the most expensive and least appealing option to me. Yes, I know SDD's make loading up applications/pictures/games blazing fast, but generally this has never concerned me that much. What's more, if I buy an SDD now and my laptop dies in a few years (it's already 4 years old), I won't be sure I can fit the SDD in a new laptop (or I might even end up getting a desktop then).

Anything else?

I'm wondering if any of these upgrades would be worth my time. I use this laptop for general browsing, watching movies/listening to music, skyping AND gaming. Mostly league of legends, starcraft, the occasional left 4 dead, etc. I generally don't care about graphics at all, prefering instead to crank down everything to low to get the maximum amount of frames per second. I know I can't expect to play the latest graphic-heavy games at high detail, but just running medium things like the new quantum conondrum would be fun.

Will any of these upgrades help at all? Or are most games only limited by GPU these days? What about HD-videos, is that GPU or CPU? What about heat production? Currently I'm undervolting my T7500 to stop it from overheating and shutting down. Will a better processor produce less heat?

Thanks in advance!

 

Two notes on this that are just my opinions. Don't worry about the Ram, you won't notice a difference between 4 and 8 unless you do a lot of video editing and such, which I don't think you would do on that particular system well anyway.

Secondly the SSD will fit in just about any laptop. The big issue is how much space you use. If you use a lot of hard drive space and want only the internal SSD it is going to cost you. However if you don't use a lot of space and you might have an external HDD (such as putting your current one in a case) then you would be fine with one.

The SSD is going to fit into a laptop you buy in the next few years and with a 3.5" extension plate it can actually fit into a Desktop as well. (In fact, they are pretty much interchangeable.) As far as I know the only difference in laptop and Desktop SSds is that the Desktop ones come with said plate.

Personally I think you could toss the money you save from keeping the four gigs and grab the SSD it will give you quite the difference.

This is just my opinion and you don't have to accept it at all of course.

 

Thanks for the reply!

I forgot to mention it in my opening post, but this laptop actually has two 320GB drives. So swapping one for an SDD would still leave me plenty of room to store all of my data.

I'm relieved to hear most SDD's are interchangable between laptops and pc's!

EDIT: Also, I just realised I have 4GB of DDR2 RAM. Upgrading to 8GB of DDR3 might be a bigger step in that case?

EDIT2: And now I found out my motherboard is probably only compatible with DDR2, never mind this ;p

 

If you do love to hog the RAM like me, 8Gigs would be useful even without doing video editing

As for the SSD, it's good and you can "reuse" it in any other machine, be it desktop or laptop. Just make sure to get relatively new stuff and not throwing a pile of money for it