New member. Looking for opinions

Hey gang, new to the forum and looking for opinions and or suggestions. I have a M15x that I bought new back in 08' or 09' (don't remember). The system runs fine and never had a problem with it however I thinking about selling it or upgrading the CPU, graphics card, and HDD to an SSD. I am unsure of the exact version of M15 it is but it has the following hardware.

CPU: i5 M540 @2.53 GHz
Vid. Card: Radeon 5850
Memory: Maxed to 8 GB DDR3 1333
Hard Drive: 250 GB (non SSD)

I'm not a serious gamer at all and primarily use it for graphics and photo editing with Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. I started to create some paint schemes for an older sim-racing game and noticed the system starts to struggle rather quickly the more graphics and layers I create which looks mostly related to running out of available memory but suspect the CPU and video card are struggling as well. I have a 6 month old Dell Latitude 10 Tablet and older XPS laptop I am going to sell and can get $500+ between the two of them so cost wise I am weighing two choices.....

1. Sell the tablet and XPS and upgrade the CPU, Video card, and HDD in the M15x. I suspect the parts I can upgrade to in it would cost around $500 (or more) in total. Bad thing is buying a used video card and dealing with possible issues with it.

2. Sell the tablet, XPS, and Alienware and put the money towards a new laptop, something with more memory, i7, and better video card. I haven't really priced out a new one yet but figure one with what I am looking for would be around $1200.

I am leaning towards selling all three and getting a new laptop but depends of what I can get for the M15.

Thanks in advance.

 

That processor is woeful. If you can find a cheap i7 920/940xm then you'll be laughing. Huge leap in performance. Also ssd will make a big difference. Some GPU upgrades
will be cheap also, such as 7970m if you buy a used one as I did.

Keep you m15x because you'll have to spend $1500+ to get a laptop that can properly beat a fully modded m15x

Sent from my HTC One S using Tapatalk

 

Completely agree with you. Also, if you don't game much that video card will work fine for you for some more time.

 

Thanks guys, exactly what I was looking for. I am at least selling the tablet and XPS either way but going to price out an i7 at the very least.

A couple questions just to make sure. A 7970m will work in this thing? I know doing the thermal paste and such perfect is key but ask because I have read elsewhere people saying that depending on what version of M15 will depend how far up you can go?

Also, if I am not mistaken, the i5/i7's in these are the same used in Desktops and not mobile versions? If so, I'd rather upgrade the i7 (first generation) in of my Desktop and use that one in the M15.

Thanks again.

 

7970M will work on your system, there are lots of threads about it on this forum. It won't work on the older Area-51 M15x.

And no, you'll need to buy a mobile CPU, they're completely different from the desktop ones. i7-920XMs are going for under $250 these days on eBay, I'd recommend to save yourself some trouble and go straight for the OEM version, not QS/ES. SLBLW is the code for the OEM version, Q3B8/Q3JU is the QS/ES version.

 

The i7 920 XM is very similar architecturally to the i7 920,930,940 desktop chips however it is a mobile chip. You cannot put desktop chips inside the M15x.

Another choice on the GPU front is the 680M GTX. Not much more expensive and slightly more power efficient than the 7970M. If you plan to OC the 680M is also the more powerful of the 2 cards.