Help with upgrades

I've had my M18X for about 3 years now and I am considering doing some upgrades. I am specifically looking at upgrades geared toward better streaming capabilities. Here are my current specs:

Alienware M18xR1 A05

Windows 7 Professional (x64)
2.50 gigahertz Intel Core i7-2860QM
ST95005620AS [Hard drive] (500 GB)
16 GB Memory
AMD Radeon HD 6900M Series [Display adapter] (2x)

I've never upgraded a laptop but have a good amount of experience building/upgrading desktops. I've just been out of the loop for the last several years on the hardware side of things, so any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

Hi Dakcenturi, I´m in similar situation, want upgrade my m18x R-1 GPU. Can I use your post to avoid duplicating similar topics?
We can benefit both from the great experience of other users...

 

Sure thing, just hope we can get some helpful advice!

 

I would advice you to upgrade both graphics cards to Dual 7970M or Dual 780m. If you upgrade to Dual 7970m then you can use your old cards heatsink and Xfire cable, with Dual 780m you will need to buy New Heatsink and SLI cable. There is no point to upgrade processor at this stage. Well you can throw in SSD. If i were you, i would get rid of M18x and get R2. It will be cheaper compare to upgrade.

 

Just upgrade the motherboard to the M18xR2 i did it in mine

 

Dakcenturi... in post -"M18x - NVIDIA SLI (Driver Questions, Performance, Problems) Discussion Thread"- Mr, Fox said that best option to upgrade graphic card is GTX780, other models like GTX880 not work perfectly and cause problems.
I ask him what about AMD HD8970M, tha could be also a good choice by price. I am waiting reply to know more.

 

Awesome! Will check it out. I wonder would a processor upgrade help? What about moving up from 16 GB Ram?

 

Don't waste money on AMD GPUs. They are not keeping up in terms of performance and they have an abnormally high failure rate. Go with 4GB Clevo version of the 680M SLI or grab a couple of 780M. You're going to want a minimum of 4GB of vRAM. I'd recommend grabbing a 2920XM or 2960XM CPU on eBay as well. Buy 680M heat sinks and an SLI bridge cable. 880M is junk and 980M is probably not going to work at all because it seems to require pure UEFI boot, which the M18xR1 can't do.

 

I already bought the GTX 780M, now just wait for it and when arrive try to install!! XD

 

Can't the M18xR1 use Ivy Bridge CPUs? Or is mobile sockets locked to specific CPU lines unlike the desktop variants?

 

RAM will benefit you in streaming if you have 2133MHz or faster. If you could find a 2133MHz CL10 or CL9 RAM set, you'll be perfectly fine. It will be nice.

Processor is the main thing. I personally suggest, if grabbing the XM Sandy Bridge CPU, that you attempt to keep it somewhere around 4.2GHz or higher for your streaming. Especially if you have less bitrate to use, you will want to add more compression which will require better a faster CPU.

Next, if you are going the SLI route, be prepared to perform a lot of borderless windowed gaming with window capture. Fullscreen/game capture methods that do not involve using Dxtory or Playclaw 4 as a virtual webcam with SLI will result in only 1/2 the frames being grabbed. I.E. if you stream at 30fps, the viewers will see 15fps. It's a problem with OBS (and Xsplit has no game capture feature), and it may be fixed in the future but there's no ETA for it right now.

Of course, if you are planning to use it on capture cards for consoles, SLI will not bother you.

That should pretty much cover it.

 

The R1 can only use Sandy bridge CPU's however the R2 can use Sandy and Ivy Bridge CPU's...

 

Wow, that's weird.

 

Its the same thing with the 17x R3/R4... R3 uses only Sandy Bridge and R4 can use both..

 

A pair of 2TB HDDs would probably be good to store the video if you intend to upload it elsewhere like youtube.

 

I wonder if it would be worth completly gutting it and getting an R2 Mobo as well? Will the R2 mobo slots still work on the R1 alienware chasis?

 

For that, AFAIK, you will need the R2 Motherboard, Daughterboard, the ribbon cable that connects both (should be included with DB), and probably the R2 SATA Flex Cable.

 

Just FYI I'm selling my GTX680M SLI (moving to 980M). PM if you are interested.