dell xps m1730 upgrades

hi ppl, i am looking to buy a xps m1730 but was wondering if it is upgradeable.
can the core 2 duo be upgraded to a quad core?
can i upgrade the memory to 1066mhz ddr3 ram whats the highest i can fit 6 or 8?
can the hard drive be upgarded to 1TB 7200rpm if not whats the highest?
can i upgrade the video card to say the new nvidia gforce 260 or 280m and how much gig can i fit? if not whats the best next video card and how many gb can i fit of a graphics card?
thanx.

 

Your Core 2 Duo cannot be upgraded to Quad cores due to the fact that it uses a PM965 Santa Rosa chipset, and thus no support for Quads or any 1066MHz FSB processors. No can do.

Supported 45nm Penryn CPUs are: T8100, T8300, T9300, T9500 & X9000

Same answer, the RAM type is limited by the chipset and motherboard type a notebook posses. For the M1730 it will only support a max of 667MHz effective RAM speed. Anything more than that number, say DDR2-800, will downclock to 667Mhz effective.

DDR3 RAM types will not work. As usual, it is chipset and motherboard depandant and DDR3 counterparts have a higher pin count and cannot be fitted in.

The highest the M1730 can attain is 8GB RAM. Unless if you tell us what you will be doing, 4GB is enough for the general/gamer/everyday user.

1TB, which is 1000GB. The new WD6400BEVTs have 640GB, which no one has tried yet, but I guess it shouldn't be a problem for the M1730 hitting 1.28TB (1280GB) with two of them. All in the name of BIOS support for this one.

But yes, it does support 1TB, which I am using now.

Unfortunately, no. The card is a differently designed proprietary slot by Dell, and thus you cannot fit in a GTX 260/280M into an M1730 unless Dell makes one, which of course, not bloody likely.

The highest the M1730 GPU is the 9800M GTX SLI, which is rare to attain now. It has a total of 1GB VRAM memory. But that does not conclude that fact that it has a huge performance difference between the other GPUs the M1730 can handle such as the 8800M GTX SLI and the 9800M GT SLI, both with GDDR3 512MB VRAM, the two common cards around here, and what I'm also using.

If you're using an 8700M GT SLI card you can pick up a 8800M GTX SLI card up from ebay. It's powerful enough, the 8800M GTX SLI = 9800M GT SLI.

Hope this helps.

PS, you can see my sig below of an example maxed out M1730. This is practically... Well the highest maxed out specs you can get for an M1730. Except that I do not have an 9800M GTX SLI card.

 

for what you just asked you minds well skip buying the m1730 and buy the alienware m17x instead

 

so is it safe to say that a fully maxed out m1730 would probably be the second best gaming laptop you can get under alienware?
i got a choice between a alienware m17x or a desktop and a m1730 obviously i would rather go for the latter and because i dont like the alienhead things on the m17x. also how would the m1730 maxd fare up against the latest games? thanx.

 

oh yeah and is the m1730 hd? also is quad core better than dual core and is the ddr2 ram a big difference over ddr3. this is gunna be my first laptop and i know nothing about them im looking for a gaming laptp that looks nice and can perform well with this years and possibly the next couple of years ahead of games.

 

The Alienware m17x is the m1730's successor ... therefore an upgraded version. Also, Dell does no longer produce m1730 for the future, the gaming section belongs to Alienware now.

 

so how much gig of vram can i fit on it?

 

For RAM is 8GB max for Alienware M17x, and you can't so called "fit" VRAM, is which, and will depend on the GPU of your choice. The GTX 260s and 280s have 1GB VRAM. Read up on the website. Do remember that VRAM isn't everything. The card itself, is still the overall matter.

And as for Quads, it depends on what applications that you use that benefits them. Applications that are coded to run on multiple cores will definately out perform any Dual core CPUs no matter how high they're clocked.

I've seen a live 2.0GHz stock Q9000 destroying an OC'ed X9100 @ 3.4GHz in 3ds Max rendering.

So it depends on what you do. For gaming, you won't really see a huge difference, let alone the GPU does the job. However games like L4D or GTA IV work better with Quads.

 

how much gig of graphics card ram can yu fit on the m1730?

 

A total of 1GB, with two 9800M GT's, two 8800M GTX's, or two 9800M GTX's in SLI with 512MB each.

I would really consider everyone's advice though; get an M17X. The M1730 is based on an outdated chipset, and it's an end-of-life model. Upgrade options are very limited. Suck it up and ignore the alien head on the lid...most of the time you'll be looking at the display anyway, so you won't see it.

 

Actually for SLI, it still accounts as a 512MB GPU. It does not add up or share VRAM. The 9800M GTX card itself has 1GB VRAM. And even if it's SLI it will still be a 1GB VRAM SLI GPU. It will not show as 9800M GTX SLI "2GB GDDR3 VRAM" GPU. For more SLI info, that'll be another topic. Don't want to confuse anyone. LOL. And the same goes for CrossFireX as well.

 

what do you guys think of th asus g51vx a1?

 

Ah, my mistake. I've never actually had an SLI system.