Upgradability for laptops

maxdest

New member
My background is a moderate gamer also running some office / techy bits. In the past I have gone down the desktop route building myself machines capable of low-medium settings and upgrading when performance was too slow. Due to needing the extra room, I must now convert over to a laptop.

I realize that generally beyond a new drive or some RAM laptops are not regarded as upgradable for a variety of reasons from permanent welds to chipset comparability issues... however seeing as here at PCS they are hand built I was thinking this may be less of an issue in regards to CPU / GPU upgrades.

Ideally what I am looking to do is opt for a good quality 17" chasis with a mid-range CPU/GPU (e.g. Dual Sandy / GT540M) and then in a year or two pop in something with a bit more oomph to prolong the shelf life to 3-4 years.

It seems that sandy/ivy will share LGA 1155, so at least fundamentally possible. However On the GPU side I really have no idea on how these work in laptops...

Could anyone fill me in on if my plan is possible? If so it would make a (yet another) unique selling point for PCS laptops that none of the main suppliers could match.
 

Finn

Enthusiast
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_PCI_Express_Module

In principle any MXM3.0 board will physically fit into the clevo chassis the vortex is based on (sorry I dont know about the others) however its also dependent on getting BIOS support for the particular card. So long as there is an official version of that chassis + board then it should be possible otherwise its tricky. Basically the vortex 3 is likely to be safe for all new GPUs for at least a year, maybe 2, but for instance the vortex 2 now being end of line may not have BIOS available for any new card. Its also easier if you stick to the same manufacturer (eg if you have nvidia upgrade to another nvidia) since I believe the heatsinks are of a slightly different design so you would also need to source a new heatsink.
 

PCS

Administrator
Staff member
To give you some indication, we recently tried to upgrade a GTX 285M to a GTX 560M in a very old chassis. The GTX 560M fitted in the port and we got a display on the screen however we could not get the drivers to work as they are often tied down to the chassis. The GPU on some chassis will be able to be upgraded but we will have to assess this on an "as is" basis. I can tell you that only the Vortex series and SkyFire use an MXM port, so GTX 555M and below cannot be upgraded whatsoever as they are soldered down.

RAM and CPU are easy to upgrade, as are HDD and ODD. If you order an Ivy Bridge chassis you will be able to add both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs. If you only order a Sandy bridge chassis you cannot add an Ivy Bridge CPU due to chipset limitations.
 
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