Upgrade for old L501x...

Hi,

This is my first laptop and its been going great for more than 2 years now. Apart from the failed DVD drive everything else is working fine. Now I am considering an upgrade in terms of processor and others.
I have already decided that I am going to get an 8GB RAM. Other than that, Can you guys give me suggestions on processor and a possible Graphics Card upgrade.

My present configuration:
Intel® Core™ i5 CPU M 460 @ 2.53GHz × 4
Intel HD3000 & GeForce 420M
4GB RAM

Thanks,
Rahul.

 

Graphics card cannot be upgraded unless you change the motherboard (the video card is soldered into the motherboard). Another possibility is to get an eGPU, but I don't think anyone has done that for the L501x yet. Anyways, the GT 420m is a good pair with the i5. If you upgrade the video card, you will probably get a CPU bottleneck.

Processor can be upgraded but it really isnt worth it. The fastest processor you can upgrade to is the i7-640m which is still only dual core and is very expensive since not many laptops used that CPU ($200). You can also try getting a faster i5 but it really wont give you that much of a performance boost. I personally went from an i3-370m to i7-620m and the performance difference wasnt that noticeable (in my cpu-bottlenecked games).Luckily I got the CPU from a friend because it definitely isnt worth the price of the CPU for that change in performance.

The best upgrade you can do right now is to take out your defective DVD player. Buy a Hard drive caddy for the L501x, and buy a SSD and basically have two harddrives in your laptop.

 

As stated above your best bet is getting an SSD and instead of 8GB do 16GB, I believe you can do it on yours, I just took my 1502 from 8 to 16, it helps. Also maybe windows 8 if you're into it, I'm still running mechanical drive an it boots up really fast, think of it at win7.5 and should be getting better.
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