New G74sx Owner

hi all got the G74sx with 16gb ram non glossy screen and 2x750hdd, GTX560m, 2630qm second gen, must say i am loving it, really want to know what i am looking for to put a faster processor in as am new to gaming on laptops and pcs in general. have found after installing the beta 301.24 drivers for the gtx (best drivers for skyrim ultra setting at 1080 between 29-38FPS) that i can run crysis on 1920x1080 all set to very high with only the post processing set to medium (i find it gives the image a smudgy look anyway as i like images sharp), getting around 29-31fps pretty solid only dips to about 25-26fps when big explosions, and its absolutely destroying Dead Space 2 (75-150FPS set to 1080 with 120hz refresh). i decided on the Asus as i like the wedge design and alienware is just to overrated IMO. so other than overclock what can i do to boost performance even more? (not really keen to overclock)

 

I think the two things that will allow you to get the most performance out of the laptop would be a clean install of Windows 7 (whitout all the ASUS bloatware) and GPU overclock (using nVidia Inspector or MSI Afterburner).

It's actually really easy and quite safe to overclock the GPU using those tools. Since you cannot up the voltage anyway, overclock will be limited by the stability of the chip (and if it's not stable you can always just remove overclock). Also you can set up that it will only overclock when the GPU is under heavy load. Most of the GTX560m on ASUS g74sx go easy mode to 850Mhz core/1500Mhz memory (have mine running 900Mhz/1600Mhz in games) and the temperature compared to not overclocked is only 3-4 degrees higher under full load for me.

Maybe also you could fine-tune driver settings to get a bit more fps at the minimal loss of eye-candy, so the games feel more fluent and natural without sacrificing too much on the looks.

Br,
Cross