New Asus G51VX-RX05 purchase, few questions.

I have been on the market to purchase a gaming laptop for quite some time now and had finally settled on the new G53 (was going to pre-order) until i got an offer to buy the G51VX-RX05 for 649$.

LED display 15.6" 1366 x 768
DDR2 4GB
HD 320GB 7200rpm
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0ghz P7350
Vista Home Premium 64-bit
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M 1GB GDDR3 VRAM

Seeing as i saved a lot of money (compared to 1599$ original budget), what would be the best CPU/RAM upgrade available for me? Would it be possible to upgrade the cpu to a Q9100? does it support 8gig of ram ddr2?

That said i will be adding an 128gig SSD in the second HD bay. Do i need to purchase anything else to instal the HD?

Thanks in advance guys.

 

What are you planning to use it for?

 

Mostly gaming. Wow, League of legends, SC2, D3 (when it comes out) and upcoming MMOs.

I mostly want to know if this was a good deal.

 

$649 USD is a great price. I have the 'cousin' of the RX05, the X3A and absolutely love mine to death. It's been a rock-solid machine.

If you really want to max it out, I'd do the following:

* Upgrade CPU to T9900.
* In the process of upgrading the CPU, clean off the OEM thermal 'gunk' off the CPU & GPU and use AS5 or something of similar or higher quality. GPU (260M) is the most important.
* Upgrade to 8GB DDR2 (Optional really, I still only have 4GB in mine).
* SSD as a boot drive/primary drive. Move the 320GB into the second-bay.

That's about all I can think off.

Q9100 is another CPU option, but even SC2 only uses two-threads max. The T9900 will OC to 3.4 GHz in the G51VX. Higher-clock rates still reign supreme when it comes to gaming vs. # of cores.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Kermee

P.S. Most of the games you listed will probably run fine with the stock machine. Games like LoL and HoN probably won't see any gains at all with the upgrades I listed above

 

Thanks for all the info Kermee.

Would you know if i need to buy anything else to install the SSD in the laptop?

 

Kermee,
T9900 has tdp of 35W, won't that substantially increase the heat and power consumption over, say a P9700? Both are 6Meg cache chips though which is a win... According to these forums, any Q series proc does not and will not work in the best buy model, the asus forums agree with this too...

Will be doing the AS5 thing next week myself hopefully. BTW, thanks for that from me too...

I only have 4 G RAM atm, 4Gig PC2 6400s are getting a bit harder to find nowadays (especially in Aus')

My SSD went into the second bay without removing the original HDD, but it did make re-installing the OS a bit more demanding of my attention...

My SSD just dropped straight into the vacant bay, it had foam padding and some other dampening in there too but seemed a reasonably snug fit. I figured the rust that spins around in the other drive needed the cage and protection a hell of a lot more than an SSD... I was pretty happy to see AHCI enabled by default within BIOS for better SSD performance too!

If you do want to buy a cage and some other crap like a spare back cover for when you inevitably mod the sh!t out of it because of the heat, try looking here...

Also the Asus forum still has a few posters if you want a look (as technical info is pretty hard to come by too)...

Regards from down under,
Dave

 

The Quad is not an option on the RX models. Faster dual core is a good upgrade. I have a G51vx with a60 GB SSD for the boot drive plus a 320 for storage. Very good performance. Even with the upgrades, that's a good price. You may need to purchase a second hard drive caddy.

 

No problem. GDavidF and KimoT both linked in their posts the HDD bracket that's needed to install a second drive properly.

Yeah. There will be increased heat. However from what I found from other posters who have done the upgrade, the G51VX chassis should be able to handle it. TDP of the P8700 is 25W (and a lot more if OC'ed), T9900 is 35W and a X9100 is 44W. T9900 is probably safe as long as you slap on some decent thermal paste/goo onto the HSF assembly.

Oops. You're absolutely correct. Forgot the Best Buy versions didn't support the Quads.

Yup. My bad. Quad isn't support on the RX's.

Cheers,
Kermee

 

I have an Asus G51VX-RX05 and love it to death! I had to install powermizer so the GPU would downclock, but otherwise its great! Temps where a bit high while gaming 93C after just 15 minutes of CoD 4. After I replaced the thermal paste with Antec Formula 5, it hits 92C after 1+ hour. Here's my thread about it: http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-gaming-notebook-forum/505552-asus-g51vx-overheating-fixed.html

As for 8GB's you can get it for under $190: 8GB (4x2GB) CenDyne DDR2 PC2-6400 RAM Laptop SODIMM NEW - eBay (item 330458936687 end time Sep-06-10 23:50:43 PDT)

 

SSDs are awesome and a cpu upgrade is fine but what are you going to do with 8 gigs of ram? Seems like overkill imo. I say save your money stay with 4 gigs.

 

Just wish my G51 had 4 SODIMM slots....

Corsair "Value SELECT" 8Gig (2x4G) SODIMM kit See what I meant?

Toms Hardware 4G/8G in Vista conclusions.

But I have managed to source a 25W tdp P8700 @ 2.53 for not a lot of money...

 

That's 4x2gb not 2x4gb. The g51vx only has two ram slots.

After some thought i decided to just upgrade with an SSD and a better C2D (still can't decide which)

 

Oops! thanks for catching that. I would've bought, and found out it was 4 sticks when I got it

Usually though, there's 8 gigs for around $240 on eBay.

 

+1. Agreed.

Especially with our breed of notebooks, SSD is probably the first upgrade that'll get you a huge performance boost. 8GB vs. 4GB is pretty far down in the priority list of upgrades. CPU is somewhere inbetween.

Cheers,
Kermee

 

if i replace the cpu to P9700 or P9500 or any other (that can be replaced with),
i need to do any changes or just replace the cpu and re-install the os?

no electrical stuff to mess with?

 

Would love to see some of that @ $240!

@Ngel
No, just change the CPU make sure you use thermal compound though (sorry for the no sh!t Sherlock, but I'm not into lawsuits so take NO notice of my post that will get you into trouble), the OS will look after itself. I just dropped a P8700 into mine and switched on and all good...

While I was there I removed original thermal compound and re-applied AS5 to the graphics chip too and gave a really good clean to the heat sink fan also. The posters here helped by providing much info, in fact this disassembly guide was a great help (especially with the G51 on its belly with the back opened up but my dual monitor desktop on and working behind the scenes... )

The SSD I had installed last week was undoubtably the biggest speedgain though...
Dave