Gateway FX laptop Series Thread *mods and upgrades*

[Snowsurfer]

Ok ran PCMark05 and scored

[shifty22123]

I got me a 2nd 7200rpm hard drive aswell

Will install it with Vista X64 in the next couple of days

[Gynn]

I bought one of these from BB had to get the floor model as these soldout like instantly when they went on sale. I had to have my dad buy one for me back in michigan and ship it out to Hawaii.

What should be the first thing I should do to upgrade this if anything is needed? Looks like the processor speed stock is slow @ 1.67. I see people getting T9300, how much would that run me and is it worth doing? The hard drive is only 5400 rpm's and my desktop is 10k rpm's do they make 10k for laptops or should I just look for a 7200?

Never upgraded a laptop before only desktop's, but I will be going on deployment here in march so if I need to upgrade stuff I need to do it soon.

Thanks,
Sean

[Snowsurfer]

Originally Posted by Gynn

I bought one of these from BB had to get the floor model as these soldout like instantly when they went on sale. I had to have my dad buy one for me back in michigan and ship it out to Hawaii.

What should be the first thing I should do to upgrade this if anything is needed? Looks like the processor speed stock is slow @ 1.67. I see people getting T9300, how much would that run me and is it worth doing? The hard drive is only 5400 rpm's and my desktop is 10k rpm's do they make 10k for laptops or should I just look for a 7200?

Never upgraded a laptop before only desktop's, but I will be going on deployment here in march so if I need to upgrade stuff I need to do it soon.

Thanks,
Sean

The T9300 is nice but the stock cpu does well in gaming, T9300 is around $340, get a 2nd HDD to put in the empty drive bay, a WD250gb scorpio to match the stock drive and set them up in RAID 0, then get a 2gb ram stick to replace the lone 1gb stick. Do a clean Vista install with the provided disk, burn a driver disk first through the Gateway recovery center and last up grade the gpu driver, http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ and you should have a smoking machine!

[shifty22123]

Originally Posted by Gynn

I bought one of these from BB had to get the floor model as these soldout like instantly when they went on sale. I had to have my dad buy one for me back in michigan and ship it out to Hawaii.

What should be the first thing I should do to upgrade this if anything is needed? Looks like the processor speed stock is slow @ 1.67. I see people getting T9300, how much would that run me and is it worth doing? The hard drive is only 5400 rpm's and my desktop is 10k rpm's do they make 10k for laptops or should I just look for a 7200?

Never upgraded a laptop before only desktop's, but I will be going on deployment here in march so if I need to upgrade stuff I need to do it soon.

Thanks,
Sean

The best and most worth it upgrade would be upgrading the cpu. People buy the T9300 because it's new technology but they are way overpriced atm. I would get a T7500 or T7700 as they tend to go a lot less and give you real good performance.

As for a hard drive...there is no 10K rpm drives for laptops but dual 7200rpm drives in raid0 would perform just as fast. I have 2 x 5400rpm drives and they do me just fine

Another thing you might want to consider is getting a second 2GB ram stick to replace the 1GB stick with as it increases the ram's performance to have 2 sticks of the same size.

Edit...Snowsurfer neat me to it

[BxAlbo1]

YES I JUST ORDERED IT!!! Picking it up tomorrow at Bestbuy!

[BxAlbo1]

Also i thought i'd share this.

Some guy took his FX apart and took pictures of the mainboard.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gall....php?photo=502
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gall....php?photo=503

The 8800m GTS is soldered in.

[shifty22123]

Originally Posted by BxAlbo1

Also i thought i'd share this.

Some guy took his FX apart and took pictures of the mainboard.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gall....php?photo=502
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gall....php?photo=503

The 8800m GTS is soldered in.

Congratulations on the buy. The 8800GTS is integrated and no upgrade options...probably why it so much less then others. You still won't need a upgrade for a long time though

[shifty22123]

Oh yeah...I just installed 2 x 200GB 7200rpm 16mb cache Hitachi hard drives and Vista X64. Will see how it compares

[BxAlbo1]

Originally Posted by shifty22123

Oh yeah...I just installed 2 x 200GB 7200rpm 16mb cache Hitachi hard drives and Vista X64. Will see how it compares

Awesome, be sure to tell me how it runs on x64!