D630 Owners Thread

I thought about upgrading to T9300 from T7500, but for the $$$ on the upgrades i'd be better off just getting a new laptop! I already have a 850 evo SSD and HD decoder card. The machine runs smoothly for everyday use and i'm not sure if the T9300 is worth it.

 

I did the T7500 to T9300 upgrade on my D830. Its fabulous and significantly improved its capabilities, improved battery life, and reduced the amount the fan runs.

Probably the T8100/T8300 would get similar (or even better) results on the thermal side of things, as its a 45nm chip like the T9300. Which are both nice upgrades over the 65nm T7500/T7700.

 

I went with the T8300 + a new fan with different blades and lower power consumption

NEW D630 Fan by SecnaK posted Mar 28, 2015 at 2:28 PM

 

Does anybody still see a point in upgrading their D630?

Mine has the Nvidia graphics card, Vista 32-bit, and a 500GB 5400 RPM drive with the following upgrades:
4GB RAM
T9300

It runs exceptionally cool as I have AS5 thermal paste and a copper ship on the GPU. I still use it for basic 720p video editing and am starting to find that it struggles on longer videos. It stutters too much when editing video so I'm guessing when the video and audio syncs up.

I'm thinking of getting 8GB RAM, an SSD, and Windows 7 64-bit. Do you guys think it would be worth it at this point to upgrade, or should I just wait until this machine dies and just get a new laptop (6th gen Skylake goodness)?

 

First question: are you comfortable with 2nd-hand RAM? New DDR2 SO-DIMMs are too old to be cost-effective these days; you can buy a much newer used machine for what the RAM would cost new.

Second question: are you comfortable reinstalling the OS yourself? You'd need to reinstall with 64-bit whether Vista or 7 to see any advantage from 8gb, and since an inexpensive SSD would probably be smaller than your current HDD, that would also be easiest with a reinstall. (your existing Vista license IS good for either 32-bit or 64-bit, although you might need to track down 64-bit media if you don't already have it.)

Third question: do you have a license to a newer version of Windows you can use? (7 ran really nicely on my D630; I haven't tried 8.x or 10.) Not obligatory, but if not the value of getting a newer OS with a new machine would encourage getting a newer machine instead.

Last question: how much space do you need? I wouldn't consider putting a $200 ~480-512gb SSD in that machine, but if you can live with 120-128gb, a $40 120-128gb drive might make sense.

Last thought: A refurbished E6420 (Sandy Bridge being the oldest machine I'd personally want to keep running) starts at $219 from Newegg; I'm not suggesting you buy one, but it's a benchmark for how much you are spending. My own personal bar would probably be about half or a third of the cheapest used machine I could live with, which would be of that generation.

 

Hey guys,

I get with this laptop 15-30 fps on cs go with low settings.

Would the fps be consistent with 4gb ram?
And would it be worth it to upgrade to a better cpu?
Is it even possible to use a egpu with this laptop?

Thx

 

Someone who knows Counterstrike better will need to comment. Pretty much all I ever played on my D630 was Civ 4.

(Oops! Thought you and MINIz were the same person) If you were comfortable repasting and doing the copper mod, the work is easy.

It totally depends on how comfortable you are gutting the machine and reinstalling the cooler, and what kind of price you'll get for a better CPU. Also, which CPU do you have?

Personally, if it were me, I'd be looking at wanting a easy(ish)-on-the-battery-and-cool P9600 or P9700, rather than something a lot faster, but the speed bump for any of the processors of that generation is incremental rather than dramatic.

Just keep in mind that Sandy Bridge machines are really cheap used now, so the amount to spend on upgrading a D-series box should be limited... unless you've got a major sentimental attachment.

Yes, but not a modern one.

If you can find a half-height PCI (yes, plain old PCI, not PCI-E) graphics card that doesn't take too much power, you could use it in the D-Dock (you can get both used on ebay.) I think that would be unlikely to perform even as well as the built-on NVidia chip, but you could use it to (for example) have a 4-monitor setup if you were day trading or something like that. Ancient discussion of it on the Dell Forums : http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/958095 (I don't know if it supports 66mhz PCI 2.1 but it is definitely not AGP or PCI-X)

I've never seen someone build a cardbus to PCI bridge, but that would also be possible if you knew a good enough electrical engineer. You'd still be limited to 33mhz/32-bit PCI for the connection, which would be awfully slow (there's a reason AGP came around back in 1996 or so!)

 

Good points mr_handy!

I bought this D630 3-4 years ago as I needed a serial port laptop to work with my automotive diagnostic cables. It was only $200 for it, and I spent maybe $40 upgrading the RAM, CPU and adding copper shims. Best $240 laptop decision of my life as this is still good enough to surf the web and do 80% of my required tasks. Vista is showing its age, the battery only charges to 70%, and it struggles editing 720p video, so that is why I want a little bump in speed. It doesn't really make sense to upgrade, though. I can do 90% of my automotive diagnostics with newer software, and use a Expresscard adapter for the serial port.

I think I'm just going to ride out this laptop and replace when the battery completely dies. I've been meaning to upgrade the desktop I built 8-9 years ago, just hesitant since my $200 laptop has lasted me so long and is my primary computer (next to my Macbook Air while I solely use for school work).

 

I recently built a entry level gaming desktop to become my primary computer.

I had a conundrum. My D630 is still usable, it needs a new battery and a new keyboard. It's just not as fast with Windows 7 anymore as I'd like.

So I ended up installing the CloudReady distro to let it run Chromium OS.

So far, so good. I only ever surfed the web on it anyway and the performance seems to be better than 7, particularly when it comes to video.

Next steps is to find a decent battery that's legit yet not uber expensive.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Who's still rocking one of these? I retired this machine about 4-5 years back, gave it to my dad who used it for 3 years, broke the LCD screen and gave it back to me. I picked up a display on ebay for less than 20 bucks and about to put it back into service w/ a SSD. It's basically going to play my workout videos in the workout area, hah. Selling off all my other laptops while they are actually still worth something.

Anyone have experience using Windows 10 on it?
Any possibility of upgrading this to 8GB of RAM? Is there a chipset limitation? I can't remember. and 8GB of DDR2 isn't cheap anymore, and probably worth more than the value of this machine.