m17 upgrades!

So I want to upgrade the m17 want the newer GPU 4850s how much will two of these run? Also interested in a quad core cpu and finally which ram can I by for my m17 800mhz or 1066? How can I tell? My machine is at least 6 months old perhaps more I forget. These upgrades should make a nice difference, if they're not terribly expensive. Thanks

oh and can the m17 have two hard drives in raid? What are those two things on the bottom labeled one and two?

 

GPUs when and if they ever become available to upgrade should run around $400-500 for the pair.

You can put a Qx9300 in your machine which is the fastest Quadcore available for the machine but there can be stuttering issues with putting a quadcore in the M17 , some have it worse then others or not at all. Look for the thread Project Freeze to get an idea of what im talking about.

Yes you can run raid on the M17 if you so chose.

 

Yeah I'm waiting for the upgrades for the video cards too. Like Quadzilla said about the stuttering, you might want to think about getting the X9100 which is what some of us have and it is almost at good as a quad with no stuttering. I've been able to oc mine to 3.5 in benchmarks but run 3.3 for normal stuff

 

1066 or 1333 ram

x9100 or qx9300

4850's are 600$ roughly

 

Yup what everyone else said.

If you upgrade the CPU you should also get yourself some good thermal paste too. Oh and depending on the amount of RAM you want to upgrade to, you should also look into flashing the B13 Bios or the OCZ bios.

 

I'll pass on the cpu I guess and likely the graphics but it could use the ram and hd upgrade and those are pretty cheap should make a nice difference for the machine. at this point I'm worried how long it will be around the house as my bro and dad whom are the real owners (they financed it etc) may not be able to pay it off. For now though its here and I'm playing with it till my m15x is back from the shop

 

4GB of RAM shouldn't be too much money nor a couple of 320x7200RPM drives. When setting up the RAID if I remember correctly you just go into the bios and turn it on then reboot, as it's rebooting it'll prompt you to hit something to go into the raid config (ctrl-i or something like that). Once there you select the type of raid and poof.. Restart, install your OS, and you're on your way.

 

Noone ever answers all the questions. The answer to this one is:

Yes it can run raid.
For RAID 0 (Faster access as data is shared between both drives) you should have two of the same drives installed. Because RAID 0 shares data, if one drive goes down you lose everything unless you have another backup externally. Also to switch to RAID 0 requires a complete reinstallation of your OS or Ghosted HD image.
For RAID 1 (HD 2 is an exact backup of HD 1 for data security reasons) the same type/size drive is not required but the 2nd drive needs to be at least the same size as drive 1.

The slot labelled 1 is your Primary Hard Disk bay
The slot labelled 2 is your Secondary Hard Disk bay