Worth upgrading this P170em?

Hey guys and gals,

I have an aging p170em laptop. It has served me faithfully for a long time, but it is getting on my nerves, but by nature I hate replacing things if I can tinker with them. So here is a list of things needed to be done:

1) the 7970m is still kicking arse, plays games like Witcher 3 and GTA V just fine. But it is overheating lately. So a repaste and new pads are in order. Both are ordered and will happen regardless of what will happen with the laptop.

2) The keyboard is an absolute piece of ****e. Seriously, it is garbage. I actually bought not one, but two alternative keyboards off ebay, but had no luck with both despite researching the serials and what not. The keys do not register properly. So now I just use an external one.

3) The 500GB mechanical drive needs a replacement as it I keep having to delete stuff. So a new one will be ordered.

Finally, the big number 4) Despite the GPU pulling its weight just fine, I would like to upgrade to an newer one. Here I am completely lost. I read like 10 threads, but for the love of god I cannot figure out what GPU and I can put into the laptop without many mods. Would something among the lines of a 1060 work? What would you recommend? Or should I not even bother with this upgrade at this point?

Thanks for your help.

 

No hard/soft-mods - 8970m from p1x0sm series, with hard/soft-mods gtx 1060 from msi.

 

Good luck on your upgrade! Curious to know how this goes.

 

yes, a MSI Gtx1060 is a really good upgrade. check my signature for more infos about that upgrade

 

That's strange about the keyboard(s). Mine started to play up but I put it down to being ~5yrs old and when I swapped it out for a spare one from a P370EM it was fine.

One thing to check that I learned early on was not to have a hardware monitor polling the dedicated GPU for sensor data when it was not active at idle (optimus), that would manifest as micro pauses that would cause missed keystrokes

MSI 1060 is the best upgrade. Robust card that will overclock to near the performance of the weak eurocom 1070, that's more like a maxQ because its sold with a low vbios power limit they don't advertise or disclose. The Msi 1070 is a real 1070 and is a much better quality board but unfortunately won't fit in the P170EM as its slightly larger than the usual rectangular MXM board size (it hits a tower capacitor next to the gpu slot, I guess it's theoretically possible to desolder and relocate that component using wires)

Also if you have 3720-3840qm and premabios you can unlock the CPU, raise turbo power limits and run the CPU at max turbo multiplier permanently (no 55W/45W limits), but to keep temps OK it'll need a good TIM - liquid metal or a high end paste. A 3720QM at 3.8ghz load is generally a bit faster than 7700HQ

 

You can use the built in activity monitor in the Nvidia drivers to check nothing is using the GPU that should not.