Question about a couple upgrades

Comments

• sacredfool Member UncommonPosts: 849

  January 2014

  Originally posted by flguy147

  Hello, i have a couple questions since i am not that knowledgeable with computers/laptops compared to a lot of people on here.  I am about to upgrade my laptop, i need a laptop because i travel and game away from home a lot.  I only care about it for gaming not regular use really so i want good performance.  So here is the laptop i am going to get:  http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np8275-clevo-p170sm-p-5913.html?wconfigure=yes  .  My 2 questions are:

  1.  Thermal compound section:  Is it worth upgrading for 35 bucks to the ic diamond compound?  I dont want to try and do it myself because i am a computer noob and would rather pay to have it down.

  2.  Hard drive section:  Would it help my performance gaming if i upgraded to the 1TB 7200RPM hard drive for 20 bucks?   Or should i just stick with one of the 2 free options?  And which free option is better? 

   

  Thanks everybody for your help.

   

  I have no idea about the thermal paste I guess it wouldn't hurt if you have the $35 to spend. Laptops run pretty hot anyway though... 

  The hard drives:

  Get one hard drive, whatever speed really, for storage. Get another drive (120 GB SSD) for the OS and 2-3 most commonly used games.

  The SSD drive won't improve the performance of the games (you won't get better FPS) but it will cut all the loading times by a lot. 

  ---

  Originally posted by nethaniah

  Seriously Farmville? Yeah I think it's great. In a World where half our population is dying of hunger the more fortunate half is spending their time harvesting food that doesn't exist.
  

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• Quizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,355

  January 2014

  Originally posted by flguy147

  Hello, i have a couple questions since i am not that knowledgeable with computers/laptops compared to a lot of people on here.  I am about to upgrade my laptop, i need a laptop because i travel and game away from home a lot.  I only care about it for gaming not regular use really so i want good performance.  So here is the laptop i am going to get:  http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np8275-clevo-p170sm-p-5913.html?wconfigure=yes  .  My 2 questions are:

  1.  Thermal compound section:  Is it worth upgrading for 35 bucks to the ic diamond compound?  I dont want to try and do it myself because i am a computer noob and would rather pay to have it down.

  2.  Hard drive section:  Would it help my performance gaming if i upgraded to the 1TB 7200RPM hard drive for 20 bucks?   Or should i just stick with one of the 2 free options?  And which free option is better? 

   

  Thanks everybody for your help.

  The difference that one thermal compound makes relative to another is basically a rounding error.  A bigger, better heatsink can make a big difference, but the laptop form factor basically doesn't allow that.

  7200 RPM is 7200 RPM, and the capacity doesn't matter much to performance unless you're going to mostly fill it up.  If you're actually going to put 700 GB of data on the drive, then you want the 1 TB drive.  But 750 GB is plenty of space if you're only ever going to use 300 GB.  If it were upgrading from 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM, on the other hand, that would be very worthwhile.
• flguy147 Member UncommonPosts: 507

  January 2014

  Thanks for the replies. 
• jdnewell Member UncommonPosts: 2,237

  January 2014

  If you have the money to spend an SSD as your primary drive would be very nice. I have a 7200 HDD in my laptop and really wish I would have gotten an SSD. Its not a deal breaker, but my next laptop purchase will have an SSD in the budget for sure.