What to upgrade first for Alienware M15X to better run call of duty

My son is complaining that his M15X is slow running call of duty 4. Its running Win 7 Home Premium with 3GB RAM on a Q740 processor and a 460M graphics card. Although happy to mess with bios and downloading new drivers etc I like the idea of the more plug and play solutions. From reading the other threads i think the plan should be upgrade the RAM (I gather the processor will make us of more RAM even if it will not report seeing it) but to what level (8GB or 16GB), the GPU to a 6970M but am not sure what CPU to aim for? (920XM probably as the 940XM is pretty costly). Any advice greatly appreciated on what best upgrade first appreciated, Julian

 

All you need to do is bump RAM up to 6GB or 8GB. Anything else would be a waste of money for CoD4. The i7-740QM and GTX 460M can handle it maxed out just fine. I had the same CPU and a similar GPU (Mobility Radeon 5870) and had no problems running MW3, a more demanding game, at 60 FPS.

 

Simultaneously upgrade ram to 8gb and get a better gpu. I would recommend at least a 7970m and then the 920xm.

 

Everything except the RAM is overkill for CoD4, and you can get away with 6GB and not see a lick of difference.

 

IIRC, CoD4 can run on modern iGPUs, so buying a 7970M and (especially) a 920XM would be a **massive** waste...

Just get the 8GB total RAM and that system will be fine for awhile (for playing older games like CoD4).

 

Yeah that M15x should cut through CoD4 like a hot knife through butter. It's really not a very taxing game at all; I think even TF2 is more demanding at this point after years of bloat er updates. For comparison's sake, my HP 8710w with a C2D T9500 and Quadro FX 3600M (8800M GTS) gets 45 FPS with CoD4 maxed out. Mind you, that's at 1680x1050, but still, the M15x is at least 3x as fast.

Now that I think about, even 4GB RAM is a non-issue as the game recommends just 2GB and doesn't come close to using that much by itself. Unless, of course, the Windows install is really bloated, in which case a junk cleanup or OS reformat is in order. And it never hurts to do a virus scan either. Tell your son to stop torrenting so much pr0n, mkay? :laugh:

 

question not asked yet is are you running 32bit or 64bit operating system.

if 32bit then pointless updating the ram until you update the operating system as 32bit can only see and use 3.1gb even if it had 16gb ram installed.

 

You just need to get a 64 bit OS if it is 32bit and the 7970M is enough of an upgrade although it might be easier to upgrade to the 680M as the NVIDIA heatsink will work with minimal modification..