[JR23]

Hey Guys,

Well my Macbook Pro just died, hard drive failed after 14 months of little use. I never trusted the little bugger it would always be beach balling and freezing so this is a great excuse to send it on the ebay!

I have just order an M14X and before I even start I am thinking about upgrades, through dell 4GB > 8GB memory upgrade was £90 so I am planning on ordering some Vengeance for £38 . The only hard drive options were the standard 750GB or a 256GB SSD for £190 so a 750GB Hybrid Drive I felt would be a better upgrade as the space will be useful. Then I can put the original drive into the MacBook and sell it for good money.

The Specs with these upgrades will be as follows:

M14X 1.5 Base BLACK Soft Touch
I7 2670QM @2.2ghz, 6mb cache, quad core
GT555M 1.5GB (DDR3 version)
8GB Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz
Seagate Momentus XT 750GB hybrid drive (8GB SSD)
True life HD+ 1600x900 screen
Win7 64 Home
3.0MP HD webcam
5.1 Integrated Audio
Killer wireless N-1103

I would like to hear any opinions or if I should consider any other components? The laptop has been ordered and I am about to order the ram and hdd. Thanks and here's a sexy pic for you!

[SMOKEU]

Read this here http://forum.notebookreview.com/alie...ade-guide.html

[JR23]

Thanks, I had seen that before, just read the whole thing its really useful especially the teardown pics.

[SMOKEU]

Originally Posted by JR23

Thanks, I had seen that before, just read the whole thing its really useful especially the teardown pics.

Basically on that thing, don't do anything more to it. A CPU upgrade isn't worth it and you're better off saving that money for something else.

[Bluefalcon13]

I use an M14x daily, but it's works not mine. I would encourage you to look into some a data ram, if you want to squeeze better battery life out of it. A data has a DDR3-1600 8gig kit that runs at 1.35 volts, and it works well. Other than that, if your temps are high while gaming, get some IC Diamond 7 and repaste it. My CPU was thermal throtting before I repasted (and hitting 99c.......), now its sitting at 94c Max while gaming. The limitation on this laptop is heat. Its a small gaming laptop, and only has one heatsink/fan. OCing the gpu gives significant improvements, I use MSI Afterburner, and clock up to 700(w/ shaders linked to gpu core) gpu core, and 1050 vram, for games that need the additional horsepower.

Also, if you have never had a laptop with optimus, I would encourage you to learn as much as you can, as sometimes optimus requires a bit of encouragement to work. If you play mmos, make sure you white list the .exe file itself, and not the launcher.

[SMOKEU]

Originally Posted by Bluefalcon13

OCing the gpu gives significant improvements, I use MSI Afterburner, and clock up to 700(w/ shaders linked to gpu core) gpu core, and 1050 vram,

On stock volts, right? What are the temps?

[JR23]

I can't find anyone stocking the A Data memory in the UK especially not the gaming series. Even their official retailers have a very small selection of lowish end laptop memory. So if I ever find it i'm sure it will be very pricey and also pricey to post it over from the states and then I will have to pay tax :/

I expected temps to be the limit, before I had a Studio XPS i7 720QM with a M.R. 4670HD and that actually had throttling issues because of power draw lol. Updated BIOS and new AC Adapter sorted it out but then it got hot. I don't particularly want to pull the heat sync and completely tear it down when its new as i'm not sure Dell would appreciate that. I spoke to the Tech guys and they said the warranty would be unaffected by changing memory and hdd which was very considerate I thought. I will just have to see how it performs and what temps it gets. It won't be used constantly for serious gaming as I have my rig at Uni but it will see some work when I visit home or anywhere.

[Bluefalcon13]

Originally Posted by SMOKEU

On stock volts, right? What are the temps?

Stock volts, temps climb to 70Cish, but thats on one heatsink, with the CPU hitting 90+C on the same heatsink... Never had any issues with it either.

[JR23]

Are they stress testing temps on cpu and gpu? My old i7 never got that hot games only seemed to load it to about 40%.

[Bluefalcon13]

Originally Posted by JR23

Are they stress testing temps on cpu and gpu? My old i7 never got that hot games only seemed to load it to about 40%.

Stress testing and gaming both. I have an i7-2720QM, so mine should get a bit hotter than yours will. The processor is rated to 110 or 120C (I cant remember) but the laptop will thermal throttle @99C, so damage is extremely unlikely. It's a hot running laptop, cause there is a quad core, and a GPU sitting on the same small heatsink. I wouldnt worry about the temps too much, these things are beasts.

Turbo Boost is extremely aggressive on the SB i7s, my Asus G73 never peaked 70C, but it was running its own heatsink/fan for the CPU, and turbo boost is more conservative on the original i7 procs..

[ajrettke]

Just kind of curious why you got the 750GB XT but plan on upgrading the HDD? The XT is ok if you need all the space, but the best option would be to get an SSD 120-256GB and getting an optical SATA bay and putting in a mechanical HDD for storage.

Other than that though not much to upgrade, should be a nice machine!

[JR23]

I didn't order it with the Momentus XT it had just a plain old 750GB HDD which is going in my dead MacBook, I was planning on buying the XT hence included it in the whole spec. Well I have it now the ram and hdd came earlier in the week and the laptop is due to arrive on Monday hopefully it still makes it despite the weather (there was 3 inches of snow today, that will destroy all infrastructure).

The vengeance ram is some of the sexiest looking hardware i've ever seen, I will take some quality pictures when I put them in.

I chose the XT not only for its performance/volume combination but also it doesn't use much power as it spins down and uses the buffer for editing small documents and pictures then transfers it when the buffer is full. Hopefully that will out way the disadvantage of it lagging when it has to spin up.

My last dell had a PCI-E for a potential SSD but I didn't feel like losing my optical bay although maybe they are redundant now. I can't really be bothered with a twin drive setup in a laptop either it always seems like my SSD is too full on my desktop so all of the games end up on my hdd hopefully the hybrid drive will give all applications a share of the performance increase.

[JR23]

It showed up on Monday which was pretty awesome as I had only placed the order the previous Monday so just one week to assemble and ship to me.



The new parts came just before the weekend too



I booted it all was well checked out everything worked and it was as I ordered, no problems, I backed it up and shut it straight down again. Then was about to go straight in when I thought my screwdrivers from building my desktop were a bit cumbersome for this precision equipment so I ran to the hardware store and picked up some nice #O screw drivers and tore it open.

[JR23]

The ram was tucked away neatly in its own little vented compartment. Pretty simple to get at and switch. The New and Old ram beside each other-



New ram installed, sexy black and gold. I love the look of this stuff even better than my desktop vengeance.



After that I booted checked it installed good on its own and yup easy peasy! So shut down and pulled it open again, I didn't take any pictures as it was a little difficult and all that happened in the end was the hard drive changed from a 750GB Momentus to a 750GB Momentus XT.

[JR23]

The design detailing, quality and finish are beautiful and exceeding that of my previous Studio XPS and very close to my MacBook Pro although as the space bar squeaks when you don't hit it square its not quite on a par but that is all I can fault it on.





I bought a Cyborg RAT.3 to go with it. I was thinking about mice and I love my RAT.9 so much I figured it would make a pretty good sidekick to the M14X to have the baby one. The quality and design reflects that of the laptop and its nice to use too. I would have had the RAT.5 but I know the dual sensors have issues with dust from experience so I didn't think that would go down too well with using it all over the place.

[JR23]

Here it is against its predecessor my MBP13, I didn't think it would be quite so big in comparison but they are similar weight and it still fits in my bag so it is perfect! I took it on a half hour walk to another Uni campus today for a lecture and it didn't get heavy at all. It performed well and was silent in the lecture giving a projected battery life of over 4 hours. Very pleased with that. I half expected it to maybe be a bit of bitch to use in those kind of everyday situations but it was sweeeet.





AND Here it is with the Daddy! My rig both RAT's out and my Alienware Keyboard all looking slick together. Thinking my 6ft desk is a little small now.



And Finaly POW! The dark shot everything bathed in red light



Well as you can tell im really pleased with it and can't wait to put it through some serious testing!

I forgot to say also that it boots Insanely fast! Faster than my rig even but it is brand new.

[snowbrdd]

UUUUUUUUUgh i'm so jealous. GIMME DAT MONEYS xD. My rat died and i switched to the mamba and the orochi. I don't know what I was thinking. The rat is so much better then the mamba no offense razer fans.

[JR23]

The rat is a different animal

[marketpantry]

Originally Posted by Bluefalcon13

I use an M14x daily, but it's works not mine. I would encourage you to look into some a data ram, if you want to squeeze better battery life out of it. A data has a DDR3-1600 8gig kit that runs at 1.35 volts, and it works well. Other than that, if your temps are high while gaming, get some IC Diamond 7 and repaste it. My CPU was thermal throtting before I repasted (and hitting 99c.......), now its sitting at 94c Max while gaming. The limitation on this laptop is heat. Its a small gaming laptop, and only has one heatsink/fan. OCing the gpu gives significant improvements, I use MSI Afterburner, and clock up to 700(w/ shaders linked to gpu core) gpu core, and 1050 vram, for games that need the additional horsepower.

Also, if you have never had a laptop with optimus, I would encourage you to learn as much as you can, as sometimes optimus requires a bit of encouragement to work. If you play mmos, make sure you white list the .exe file itself, and not the launcher.

how much battery life would that ram add to it?

[nightelph]

Nice pics! I have an m11x. I'm really cautious about OC'ing it, I've never had good luck with OEM laptop cooling..