Is it worth doing either of these to a Inspiron E1505/6400?

I'm currently using a Dell inspiron 6400/E1505 notebook although i wish to upgrade to a studio 15 or 17 i cannot afford it at the moment i can however afford to upgrade the notebook i have a little bit more, the 2 upgrades i'm considering are,


Upgrading the RAM to 2 x 2gb (I spoke to someone on these forums a while ago about it and apparently it is possible) but i'm unsure if its worth it because i can't see anything that'll be different enough to warrant the upgrade.

Or

removing the ati X1300 card and replacing it with the ati x1400 card, anyone know what changing the card would result in games wise? Would it result in a significant performance boost?


I should point out that i do only usually play older games, the newest games i play are TF2 and L4D so if it results in a fps boost in those 2 games i'll be very happy and consider it worth it

Any assistance would be much appreciated

 

Considering the price of DDR2 memory these days, it's hard to go wrong with the memory upgrade. But if you're just doing basic computing, you probably won't see much of a difference going from 3 to 4GB or 2 to 4GB, maybe some going from 1 to 4GB. If you have a 32bit OS, it'll effectively be somewhere around 3.5GB.

I doubt there's much of a performance increase going from the X1300 to the X1400. Can't speak from experience, though.

 

I have a 1505 with an X1400 in it. I'll try to run TF2 and get you a FPS report.

 

Well, Steam is telling me the servers are too busy when I try to start TF2, but I'm getting 42 FPS on Half Life 2 with all settings on high and AAx4. How much does an X1400 MXM run anyway?

By the way, 2GB of RAM and a T7200 @2.0GHz

 

The E1505 can support 4Gb of memory, however some people get different results. There must be different motherboard revisions or something because mine only reads 2Gb when 4gb are installed, while others usually read 3.2Gb of memory with 4gb installed.

The processor is upgradeable to a T5600, T7200, T7400, T7600
The harddrive is upgradeable to any 9.5mm thick SATA I or SATA II harddrive.
The graphics card is upgradeable. The X1300 is a bit slower than the X1400. I do not think the performance difference is tremendous, but it should be a few fps more.

The Dell part number of the X1400 in my E1505 is:
FBFM1017013

The card is completely removable and upgradeable as seen in this image:
(The X1400 is the red graphics card, it comes off the motherboard by removing two or three screws)



K-TRON

 

The 6400/E1505 are based on the Intel 945GM/PM chipset, which maxes out at 2GB of DDR2 RAM. Specs are shown here- LINK

K-TRON says that 4GB works on his, so the info from Dell's site could be incorrect!

Have you considered a hard drive upgrade? Maybe to a 7200rpm drive? It would help speed things up a little, especially startup and program loading times..

 

Cheers for the help guys


I think i'm going to the gfx upgrade, the dell specific x1400 seems to be getting harder to locate atm so i wanna grab one while i can, I read reports of the ram upgrade to 4gb working on some 6400s but not others plus with RAM prices dropping i'll grab a couple of sticks when its not too expensive incase my laptop is one of the ones that it won't work with

and i upgraded the hard drive from the stock 80gb to a 5400rpm 320gb one so im not keen on updating that until i have to


out of curiosity anyone know if a x1400 will handle bioshock at all?

 

Well, if it runs anything like Oblivion, which I think it does, I'd say barely. I played Oblivion on mine and it was somewhat playable at 800x600, with medium settings. I bought Bioshock recently (CC clearance) but am waiting on my new laptop to break it open. It will be much more enjoyable on High at Native Res.