Series 7 Gamer NP700G7C RAM Upgrade

Hi all,

My first post here

Has anyone managed to upgrade the RAM on this machine? I can easily upgrade the two sticks on the bottom, as samsung made them very accessible, but how can I reach the other two sticks? I understand they are under the keyboard, but there is no obvious way of accessing them. I can see some small notches at the top of the keyboard and a screw on the bottom. Is that all it takes or is there some other stuff I need to be aware of?

Would love some pointers on what to do. I'm not brave enough to open it up more than the bottom hard drives compartment without some idea of what to do.

Thanks

 

I recall that some of the Series 7 have one RAM slot and 4GB soldered on board. Perhaps the G7C has two slots and 8GB soldered on board. I would use CPU-z or HWiNFO to find out more details of the RAM. Does each logical module have exactly the same description and part No?

John

 

The G7C has 4x4GB DDR3 sticks, two on the bottom between the magnetic hard drives, on top of the SSD. The other two are under the keyboard. It is those that I don't know how to reach. I replaced the other ones with 8GB sticks so with 24GB the immediate problem is solved, but I would still very much like to upgrade the rest for a full 32GB.

I simple hadn't considered the possibility that the sticks might be soldered. Its perhaps possible that they did that, since they made no attempt to enable access to them and made no mention of upgrading them in the manuals. I really hope that's no the case. CPUz has no way of knowing exactly how they are connected, so I suspect I will have to wait until someone who knows posts about it.

 

CPU-z will tell you the part No. of each module and from that you can figure out what is inside: On the SPD page there is a pull-down list where you can select each slot. If it comes up blank for two of the slots then you know they aren't standard SODIMMs - It can't find any RAM in my NP900X3B which uses soldered RAM.

If you want more info about the RAM then download and run SiSoftware Sandra which tells me that the soldered RAM in my NP900X3B is made by Sanmax (and gives the other details). To find this info go to the Hardware tab and then select Mainboard. The RAM is about 1/3rd of the way down the list of info.

John

 

The two remaining original SODIMMs are identical samsung 4GB PC-12800 modules with sequential serial numbers. I assume from this, that they are in fact regular DIMMs like the other two. So assuming I can actually remove the keyboard safely, they should be swappable.

 

That's good enough evidence to justify getting the screwdriver out. Am I correct in deducing from the photos that this is a normal, not separated type, of keyboard? If so, then it's probably a case of removing some screws on the base (they used to be marked 'K' or 'KBD' and releasing the clips around the edge of the keyboard. Seeing a hi-res photo of the keyboard may improve my advice.

John

 

There are 4 SODIMM slots, two underneath and two under the keyboard.

These guys took apart the A version of the NP700G7 which pretty much the same unit design with slightly older hardware, if you want to see something for reference.

http://www.3dnews.ru/mobile/622780/

 

There are some interesting photos near the end of that link which show that the other two RAM slots are on the other side of the main board from the two visible RAM slots. The board will need to be taken out and turned over. The physical location of the RAM is under the touchpad, not under the keyboard.

John

 

The 4 SODIMM are in the same spot just oppsoite sides of the board. That pic is the same board flipped over. Looks too high to be under the touchpad, looks like it starts just under the spacebar. I'm just judging by placement of it in relation to the HD bays on the picture above where the board is still in the chassis.

EDIT: on second look, it does look a little low, I think you're right! Definitely going to have to dismantle the entire unit. Take a picture of the GPU board while you're in there superciliousdude I bargain it's probably almost identical to the 6970M in the A model.

 

Having had a good long look at the pictures in that link (thanks for digging out that awesome teardown info btw), I am hesitant to attempt that stuff. It looks like its not designed for a relative n00b like me. For the time being the worst of my problems running out of RAM are solved by the upgrade to 24GB. If the situation gets worse, I'll probably replace the second hard drive with an SSD too and enable a second and a third swap file (one on each SSD and one on the ExpressCache iSSD). That should hopefully make the system usable even with about 30GB of committed memory. The paging is a little laggy but much less so than remoting in to my house from abroad.

Thanks very much for all your help guys.

 

The keyboard is easy to remove. Take off the one screw on th ebottom, then the left side is held on with sticky tape so yuo can carefully pry that up. With that said let me save you all the trouble and say the RAM is not accessable with keyboard removed and a full disassembly will be needed.

I am sticking with 24 GIG for now but this was a disappointment. I am using as a portable VM server so really need to get the 32 GIG installed at some point.

With that said this is the only disapointment I have with this machine. Fantastic screen that simply blows away my MacBook pro screen, and any other I have seen on a laptop. Nice keyboard for typing, fast boot and I have a 512 SDD in here along with one of the 750's so this thing smokes as a portable server and gaming machine combo.

 

That is the same conclusion I came to. Glad to see I'm not the only one who I using it for such a purpose I asked around about the possibility of higher RAM densities and a crucial rep told me that there will likely be 16GB SODIMM sticks on the market relatively soon, though they will of course be quite expensive initially. They already exist in full-size DIMM form factor. I will stay on 24GB until then or until I find someone who is competent enough to safely disassemble and reassemble the machine.

In the meantime, my second SSD arrived (Crucual 512GB), and while it is not as fast as my Vertex 4, it is still plenty fast and has enough space that getting rid of the regular HDD was possible. I was pleased to find that windows (when configured with 2 pagefiles) will load-balance between the two drives, making swapping even less painful. At this point the machine stays quite zippy even with 30GB of VMs running. Some things do suffer occasionally like launching programs inside rarely used VMs since they are almost entirely swapped out, but my media no longer skips and things remain fast as ever on the host.

On the whole I am very pleased indeed with this machine. It is finally possible to forgo remote desktop and work at full speed wherever I happen to be.