Overjoyed with my G73JH

I just wanted to give a big thank you to everyone who's been answering my myriad of questions lately. I just completed a large amount of upgrades to my Best Buy G73JH, and I've been more than overjoyed with the system so far. I went with a drive upgrade, replacing the ODD with an HDD caddy; I now have two 640GB HDDs and a 160GB Intel X25M SSD in this machine. I know the Momentus XT is a good, solid choice but I'm blown away by the SSD. I never thought I would have seen such a performance difference, but Win7 now boots in 20 seconds and the few games I have installed on this drive simply fly. Combined with the 740QM and HD5870, this is an absolute powerhouse of a system. I also bumped up from 6GB to 8GB of RAM; not much of a difference there but at least I no longer have an unoccupied DIMM slot on my machine.

The other major upgrade was the display; I opted for the AUO B173HW01 V5; I had a 1600x900 AUO glossy display that I was much less than impressed with. The V5 is matte and the lack of reflections is simply awesome; if you want a matte display for your G73 I highly recommend it. It was a straight swap on my G73 but YMMV; I didn't have to swap the cable to the other side of the panel but that is likely because I swapped out an AUO for another AUO. I found this thread on the Sager section that gives a good indication of what this panel is like; IMHO it's an awesome upgrade for the G73.

My upgrades have transformed the G73 from a notebook that I was merely happy with into one I"m purely overjoyed with. While it might not be as powerful as the M17x or the larger Sager systems with a desktop CPU and hard-hitting dual GPUs, the G73 is probably the best bang for the buck gaming notebook I've come across. I'm completely stoked about this system, and I wanted to thank everyone on this section for giving out good, solid, accurate information and being very friendly about it! Once again, thanks!

 

I've always been curious about SSD and gaming. Do you acutally have to have the games installed on the SSD to fully benefit from its speed? i.e., instead of installing OS on SSD and games on an HDD. I'd like to get an SSD but something 96-128GB simply can't hold that many games and any larger they get ridiculously expensive.

Thanks.

 

To get the maximum benefit from an SSD while gaming, yes you'd have to have your games installed on it. I don't have all of my games installed on the SSD; just the ones I still play very regularly(in my case, Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 3, Independence War 2, and a couple of smaller, older titles). However, the benefits other than gaming are great; boot times on Windows, opening any program installed on the SSD(Office apps, browsers, Photoshop, etc) is extremely quick... it's a great experience. I wasn't really much for SSDs until I actually started using this one. You do have to do a bit of picking and choosing, but overall I think it's well worth it. With my setup, I have one of my 640GB drives dedicated for music, documents, and etc; the other 640GB is for games. The SSD is mainly for the OS as well as my few favorite games. I don't have much use for an optical drive other than installing software; I don't like carting around a bunch of fragile discs in my gear bag every time I go out.

 

Wheres the mandatory blu-ray upgrade bro?

Where did you buy your new screen? Thinking of upgrading from 1600x900 as well....

 

I don't find my SSD to be THAT beneficial, I've got a sandforce 1200 based one ...

Some people think the difference is phenomenal. I think it's noticeable, but not particularly amazing.

 

Haha. Well, if I need Blu-ray(I only have 3-4 movies on BD at the moment), I figure I can pick up a bare bones drive somewhere and install it in my external DVD burner casing. I like having all that added space for all my junk.

I picked up my display here: NEW B173HW01 V5 17.3'' LCD LAPTOP SCREEN EXACT | eBay

The seller shipped very quickly(FedEX), it was very well packaged, and no dead pixels or anything. Awesome display.

Definitely understandable on that. I've been used to slower HDDs(usually the larger the better, 5400RPM units). The Intel drives seem to have faster access times and read performance; it seems faster than the 256GB Samsung drive I picked up for my X200 a week or so ago. It's a great upgrade that I'm very content with, although it really depends on the drive itself and the way you use one as to how much better it really performs. I like mine for quick application access and boot/shutdown times, mainly.

 

SSD's only benefit the game on startup's. The game will start up fast, but thats the only thing it will increase.

 

Chiming in to be part of the Overjoyed club.

 

Try going back to a HDD; it is painful.

 

It's true that it won't increase framerates, however any disk access a game does(loading a new area, etc) will be quicker on an SSD versus an HDD. I enjoy quite a few older games, one of which is a strategy game called Jagged Alliance 2. On a standard HDD switching areas would incur a load time of about 15-20 seconds; on the SSD it's nearly instantaneous. I still think that SSDs aren't quite ready to fit everyone's needs just yet, but give it a few years and I think we'll start seeing more affordable, larger drives. I'll likely start going SSD-only once the price on 512GB drives drops between $150-200.

 

Hey, pretty neat, just noticed this thread. Nice to have a fellow Thinkpad lover with a G73! Sounds like you're enjoying this powerhouse of a laptop! Enjoy!

 

Wow, awesome! Looks like we have a pretty similar machine roundup, only that I've got a T500 instead of a W500. The X200 makes for a great companion piece to the G73, too!