Upgrade M17x R4 or buy new?

Hi all,

I had to let go of gaming for a while as I moved countries for my job, those things took priority so my M17x R4 has been collecting dust since then

Last night I fired it up and finally got started on BF4, it runs nicely but not with everything cranked up and I had to lower the settings even further when connected to my LG 29" monitor. It was ok when I bought it and for the games that I played during the first year but it doesn't seem to be up to speed for today's games (running GFX options to the max).

Now I'm debating if I should do some upgrades on the M17 or sell it and buy a new one.

I could swap the 680M 2GB for an 880M 8GB (540£), get some better ram and eventually upgrade the MSATA, that should set me back around a 1000£.

Or I could sell it for 750£ and buy a new one for 2000£, that would set me back 1350£.

What would you do?

Thanks,

M.

 

Honestly if your that dead set on the upgrade I would look at the 780m instead of the 880m as there are tons of problems floating around with it thus far. The 880m is a rebranded 780m with a slightly higher clock speed and double the memory but there are A LOT of people having throttling issues with it, enough that Alienware is actually switching out people's 880m's for 780's. The 680m is no slouch either, just IMO I would try to get by for now until the next gen comes out as you will see an improvement in the 780m but it isn't going to be mind blowingly better I don't think. If I had to guess I would say the 2gb of ram is possibly holding it back in BF4 as that game eats memory up pretty good but that is just as assumption on my part as I don't have the 680m( wait wasn't the Alienware 680m's 4gb?) . You would be looking at a 20%-30% improvement after the upgrade, not worth the price premium IMO but you may feel differently

Ram won't make any difference, or not much , when your talking about your FPS so I wouldn't go dumping a bunch of money into that one. If you already have 16gb as your sig suggests then you should be good there for quite some time.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Battlefield-4-Benchmarked.105583.0.html

That might give you a better idea of the 680m to 780m difference, don't know if that is the boost you were hoping for, about 9fps on max with BF4.

 

Agree with MogRules. What you have now is good. 780M 4GB vRAM would be helpful if you are pushing more pixels with an external display. Depending on which CPU you have, an XM CPU might be a good upgrade. If you are only gaming, not all that important. Or, if you're itching to spend money a couple of 1TB SSD would be nice, and also something you can "export" when a worthy system upgrade eventually surfaces. I would not recommend spending any money on a new Haswell-powered system of any brand... not worth it, and in the views of many Haswell is a downgrade (I think it is a joke) for anyone that has an Ivy Bridge i7. Don't waste a dime on RAM if you are only playing games... faster RAM is an absolute waste of money unless you're really into benching and want to score a couple of extra points. It will make no difference in your gaming experience.

 

I would get the 780M and if you want even a 3840QM/3940XM... It should be around £500 and your machine will be top notch...

 

This seems like a reasonable price to get better performance. Personally, I would go for the next gen though.