Question about upgrading D900c

Hello! First off i just want to say that although this is my first post here, i have actually read these forums and articles on this site for a couple of years, and it has been very helpful from solving problems to interesting reviews, you guys are great. Its what help me decide upon buying my clevo d900c two years ago.

Unfortunately now the d900c is a little out of date, I bought it for the reason of running autodesk maya and photoshop on it, however i also want to game a little bit on it, my specs are:

Intel E6700 Duo Core 2.66Ghz
nVidia 7950GTX SLi
2G Ram
running on windows vista

I was wondering about maybe upgrading my ram and videocard on it, maybe possibly to a videocard that can handle directx 10 games, i bought dragon age recently and it ran terribly even on low graphic detail settings. Maybe its because of vista i dunno, i suck at all this tech stuff so if anyone can tell me what videocard i should ger for it or if its even possible to upgrade the system it would be awesome, Thanks!

 

Welcome to the NBR forums.

That system of yours is still plenty fast... still out performs 99% of the notebooks out there.

As for upgrading, it will come down to your motherboard version.

If you got the first batch of D901C's, then:
- you can still upgrade CPU to Q6600 or Q6700
- you can still upgrade RAM up to 8GB (4GB is all you really need though)
- videocard... up to a single 8800M GTX / 9800M GT

If you have the later revision, then:
- you can upgrade CPU to Q9650
- RAM up to 8GB
- videocard... up to 9800M GTX SLI

For you, the cheapest way to get performance is to get 4GB of RAM... that would probably give you better performance overall.

 

Well maybe i must be doing something wrong, cause i can barely run grand theft auto IV or dragon age on my system. Unless...well I've been running my game off my external hard drive, but it has an enclosure and everything, do you think it would be faster if i was running it from the main hard drive of the laptop?

 

running games from an external HDD should be fine usually... although the latency might not be as good as it being from an internal HDD.

your performance might be due to a few things:
- 2GB of RAM (especially in Vista) is not enough for high-end gaming.
- make sure your Power Options and Nvidia Power options to be set to Max Performance.

 

Well unfortunately now it looks like i have no other choice but to get a new video card cause it looks like mine is fried right now...

I don't know if this happened to other people in this forum before but my display right now has all these screens tears and matrix like all over the screen. The laptop will freeze on a black screen every time i start up windows (its vista by the way). Only when i start it on safe mode or when i either disable my videocard or uninstall my video card driver does it kind of start. Even then there are still screen tears and matrix crap everywhere.

The matrix looking crap is on the screen even when the bios are starting up and when i ran windows vista problem fixing scan it said there were no problems with it. Oh and every time i run a dvd movie or something it says the tv port of my video card is out or something. This all happened when i was watching a movie on my laptop and just suddenly froze. Do you have any solution Gophn? Have you heard of a problem like this before? Thanks in advance.

 

It can't be via eSATA since the D900C does not natively have an eSATA port. You must be using it via USB. That's a terrible idea for modern games. USB doesn't have enough throughput. It works well enough with old games, but forget it for GTA 4. You do realize that the D900C can support up to a maximum of three internal hard drives, right? You should only be using an external for backup or extra storage (or both). Get 2 additional 2.5" internal laptop hard drives (7200 RPM), and install them!

Don't know what to tell you about your video card woes. I'd guess one of them is fried (perhaps the main one). If it's not that, the cable connecting your LCD to your motherboard could possibly be loose.

As for upgrading, identify your motherboard revision so we can try to help you further.