What else can be upgraded to improve gaming performance?

My Spec:
Lenovo T500
T9900
4gb DDR3 1066
ATI 3650 256mb
80gb 7200 rpm samsung HD

I'm looking to maybe squeeze out a few more fps before my next upgrade which is roughly in a year or year and half. Would an SSD improve gaming performance or FPS?

 

Not in terms of FPS, but the SSD would improve load times of pretty much everything: Windows, applications, and games. Your GPU is going to be the limiting factor when it comes to gaming.

 

No, an SSD will not improve gaming performance or FPS (beyond load times, or if it needs to dynamically load textures or other items from the hard drive). For improvements in gaming performance of FPS, you need to look into a GPU or CPU upgrade (and I'm not certain if those are possible for your machine).

 

No an SSD will not help gaming performance. Your main limiting factor is the 3650 Mobility, which is only a mid range card. You still should be able to do moderate gaming with it, though that's really not what the T500 was designed for..

 

Back in the day it was designed exactly for that.
:-D

Depending on if the gpu is MXM and what kind of MXM slot is it.
If it's MXM II, then you would be able to upgrade to stronger gpu's.
Say 4650 DDR2 or DDR3 (Maybe)... though to be honest, if the price of the gpu's in question is high (going along with the theory you could upgrade the gpu AT ALL), then it might be better to just get a new laptop.


The cpu and the RAM are fine.
SSD won't do anything to FPS performance. The limiting factor here is your gpu as we already concluded.

 

I was thinking the same thing. I'm quite sure the GPU is not upgradable. The only alternative is to run games at a lower resolution I suppose.
Is MXM gpu becoming standard or atleast more common? That might be the next determining factor for my next laptop upgrade. I really like the thinkpad build but I don't think they will or have any plans to incorporate GPU on an MXM slot.

 

If you're running Windows 7 x64 then I suggest trying 8GB of RAM.

I've seen a couple of Mac's (a current one and one from 2008) that doubled the FPS's from 4GB to 8GB RAM upgrades in WoW.

I'm not saying it definitely will work for your system/games - just that it is worth trying and also a very cost effective upgrade too for every other use you put your system to.

Good luck.

 

That's more a result of Mac ports of games being rather poor. When I had my Mac, Half-Life 2 ran much more slowly on OS X than it did on Windows via Boot Camp on the same machine.

OP, unless you run virtual machines or want to use a RAM disk for your swap and temporary files, 8 GB of RAM won't help you much, at least not enough to justify the cost.

 

Well, the 3650m exists as MXM Type II card as far as I know... the question is whether you have it as MXM card in your laptop... never heard that Lenovo used MXM...

Maybe check out a service manual or open your laptop to see the card. If it is an mxm card chances are that you can upgrade it... but there's still the question whether your Bios supports a different card.

 

Err 8 GB DDR3 is like 90 shipped...not terribly expensive?

 

The t500 definitely does not have MXM. The Ideapad y530, y510 and y710 do but thats about it other than the y70* from lenovo.
You could try overclocking the GPU.

 

Chances are your machine is NOT MXM, although I'd find that out first. If it isn't then best thing you can do is utilize top notch thermal paste and overclock. Get a cooling pad for your laptop too.