Proud new owner of a AW17R3 w/ Upgrade questions

So I ordered a AW17R3 with the UHD & GTX 980m 4GB. I want to install a few upgrades before I leave Sunday. I should have it tomorrow so I'm excited. I want to do a few small upgrades to the System before I leave home to go back out on the road. My last Dell experience left a bad taste in my mouth but I'm willing to give it a fresh start with this system. I want to bump the Ram up to 32G and add a 950 Pro M.2 drive along with my 1TB 950 Evo drive. These are the easiest to do. But I'm wondering if a re-paste is really worth it. I want to keep temps down since I'm not always is a stable room air temp. I'm thinking MX-4 should be plenty. I also plan on using VMs and other small tasks, but the most small tasked will be left to my MBA. This system will be primarily for gaming and video editing using GoPro cameras. I run the occasional VMs from time to time to try out misc software so I don't mess up my main OS, new plug ins to all kinds of strange stuff. I would go all out on the Thermal Paste but I don't think I really need to run anything major. I do plan on a mild OC to bump the system, and even maybe use Prema vBIOS for the GPU.

 

Is your question should you re-paste? If so unless your going to do something like liquid metal I would worry about it right away as the dell stock paste is decent. Just try mild Overclock and see where the temps go. I would trying running world record oc's without anything but liquid metal of some kind. If your temps are decent with mild overclocks don't worry about it right now.

 

Hi LilBoy_SM,

Check my previous posts and you will find my posts on the HyperX 32GB RAM 2400 CL14, further back you'll see my posts covering my 2 x 950 PRO in RAID 0 setup.

 

pathfindercod, thanks. I haven't been able to find if the stock paste was any good or not.

JerseyBoy, I'll go look now. But is the second M.2 slot only 2x verse the first slot being 4x?

 

Yes, but check the speeds I'm getting, write speed is double that of a single drive. Depends if you'll be handling a lot of data, I'll be processing large blocks of astrophotography images.

The other benefit is a single 950 PRO is guaranteed for 400TB of writes, put two in RAID 0 and your up to 800TB of writes to the volume, so realistically it should never fail.

 

JerseyBoy, Your getting this on two 950 Pros? Wow, that's nice. I got a 950 Pro sitting on my shelf that I bought while it was on sale a month or two ago. I could order another one now but I'm streching my wallet a bit. I also have a 850 Evo 1TB drive. Both of them are going in tonight. The factory PM951 is a 256 GB model and I was just going to move it over to the second slot and use it for extra storage. Oh, I got my AW17R3 in today. UPS left it at my door. So much for signature required. LOL. Lucky I live in a remote area.

Ram will be here tomorrow. Only issue now is getting used to Windows 10. Been a Mac user since 2008. Can't wait to get a few games installed. Got Starwars Battlefront installing now. I then have to figure out how to do a clean install and fresh drivers. Any info as to which drivers I should get? are older versions better then new or should I get the newest drivers and not worry about it?

 

I could not find your post on setting up RAID 0, could you point me to it? Thanks!