Performance Upgrade Suggestion for M17xR2

Hello Ladies and Gents-
I use my computer a lot for a Remote Controlled Plane and Helicopter Simulator called G5.5 by Great Planes.
There are a lot of custom airfields that are photographic intensive. The modeling and sim characteristics I'm sure are resource intensive as well.
Not often but sometimes the video rendering stutters a bit. Can this be cured with more Ram, better processor or graphics card?
Are upgrading these items even possible or recommended? If so, what should I be looking at?
Thanks.

 

6GB RAM and GPUs are pretty much maxed out, you cannot upgrade even if you wanted to (more RAM aint gonna make that much more of a difference). what you may upgrade is the CPU and the HDD to faster options. If the G5.5 does incremental loading (which it may do) a faster HDD may help the stutter, I'm thinking SSD or the momentus XT.
Processor-wise the max you can have is the core i7 920xm, with base 2.0Ghz and turbo of 4 cores up to 2.26 and unlocked multiplier. Depending on the source of the cpu you may pay up to $700 for that CPU alone (retail). Look on ebay for cheaper versions.

 

Hey, thank you. That gives me something to think about. Looks like Amazon has the processor you mentioned for about $500, new.

I have an extra slot for an HDD. Is it possible to to run two hard drives in series, meaning the computer looks at them like one drive @ 1000GB for example, instead of two separate 500GB drives? Or is the second HDD going to always be treated as a separate slave drive?

 

You can raid the drives in raid 0 to get those two 500gb drives to appear as one. Raid 0 is risky though, if one drive goes down, all you data will be lost. Raid 0 performs faster than non raided harddrives though.

As for the cpu, it wont be worth it if you are going to run it at stock speeds. The xm processor should be overclocked if you go from a 720 to 920, otherwise you will only be having a minimum performance gain.

Edit: you could get a free " upgrade" if you overclock your 720 cpu with goodstone's bios mod http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...r2-bios-mod-need-suggestions-future-mods.html

 

stuttering crossfire usual! Replacement of video is to solve!
But so far not much in video r2. after 5870.
Processor and memory will not help much in FPS gaming.

 

So do you think the video card is bad or it's just the nature of the component itself?

 

actually if you look on the performance of SLI and Crossfire. you should realize that a general complaint the gamers. The technology still is not totally usual for most games, I even did the substitution my r2 of one for r3. to be only a graphics card, which is much easier to work. without many problems of stuttering. I had so many grievances with the dual 5870m do not recommend more. m18x

 

Old topic, but you will find if you upgrade the CPU to an i7 920xm you will get better performance out of the GPUS.

Also like wise if you were to upgrade your RAM to 8gb you will be running in "true" dual channel and will see a small increase in performance there.

But as others have said i would suggest an SSD, you will see a massive improvement in any app that could be using the hard drive as cache or loading files on the fly (excuse the pun) i know for a fact the Flight Sim X is a big user of this.