Upgrading MSI G Series GX70 3BE-007US

Hi guys,

I purchased this laptop due to money issues, being best bang for buck as per my research at the time.

I find it slow and was wondering what I could do to speed it up. I use it mostly for gaming BF3 and BF4

My specs are:
AMD A10-5750M Processor (2.5 - 3.5 GHz, 4M Cache)
8 GB DDR3 RAM 1600Mhz
750 GB 7200 rpm Hard Drive
AMD Radeon HD 8970M

 

It's your cpu holding you back (it's at i3 levels).

Is there anything specific you want to address? Or just the gaming side of the equation?

 

What is the computer slow at?

 

Probably gaming 'cause OP says "I use it mostly for gaming BF3 and BF4."

Has Mantle been gotten to work on notebooks? Should make a big difference in BF4 for this kind of CPU-bottlenecked setup.

 

ya it's gaming, BF3 and BF4, the new drivers from ATI support Mantle for BF4 but there is a glitch and the game crashes when you enable Mantle.

I was thinking of upgrading my memory stock seems to suck

can you help me decide between these two? I don't know if the CL9 or Cl10 would be better becasue the CL9 is 1600Mhz and the CL10 is 1866 the laptop is 1600Mhz and I have no way to change the front side bus from bios which is locked.

G.Skill Ripjaws Series Laptop Memory F3-1600C9D-16GRSL 16GB (2 x 8G) DDR3 SO-DIMM 1.35v Dual-channel

16GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1866MHz SO-DIMM laptop memory dual channel kit (2x 8GB) CL10

I haven't been overclocking anything since I was doing it with AMD2600M mobile chips way back, so pardon me if I'm talking crap

I used bar edit to stop the throtling of the CPU less than 3.2Ghz that helps a bit but my system gets a bit unstable doing it and I don't want to keep doing it
there seems to be no way to overclock this 8970m.

I swore I will never get a desktop again when my expensive desktop died on me over and over again. I bought my self a asus rog 7 years back and ever since have been geming on lappy without looking back. and no headaches

I'm just so hooked on BF3 and BF4 I started playing last month, I'm now wondering if I should get a desktop if this lappy cant do it proper my wallet is already hurting help

 

RAM upgrade won't do squat for your gaming performance. 1600 MHz CL9 and 1866 MHz CL10 will perform the same as the higher CAS latency will completely negate the higher clock speed.

Keep the CPU clocked as high as it can. Every last bit counts with this machine.

You can OC the GPU using MSI Afterburner.

If all else fails, sell it for $1K and get a laptop with i7+GTX 860M or better yet build a desktop with i5 and GTX 760.

 

The main issue with his laptop is the damm CPU... I can't believe how these AMD CPU's are now for mobile.. For Desktop, they're pretty good for the price but for mobile, good as useless... Probably the only thing he can do is trying to OC the CPU and buying a newer CPU when its released...

 

Can't OC the CPU and there's nothing better on that socket he can upgrade to. Either do as much as you can to deal with it or toss the whole thing out and get a more balanced system.

 

slair76116,

take this with a grain of salt with regards to improving your gaming, but it will cost very little to try:

1) Short stroke your HDD - 75GB-125GB will be the sweet spot for your HDD's capacity. The smaller you can make that partition, the more responsive the system (and hopefully the game). Also; the next partition you create for your game installs make as small as possible too - the rest of the capacity just store static files there. I would also recommend PerfectDisk Professional 13 to make the most of your mechanical drive. Turn off Optiwrite to ensure the fastest storage subsystem performance possible.

2) If you have a single stick of RAM - get another - in Dual Channel the system will be noticeably faster. Also; if you can push your system to 16GB RAM and are able to disable the pagefile, hibernation, turn off System Restore and Error Reporting, you'll gain all those cpu cycles towards your game play too. Don't try it with less than 16GB RAM though (or if you do; expect the system to crash, if it will with your work load on it).

3) If you haven't done a clean install of your O/S (Win 8.1 x64 Pro highly recommended), with all the bloatware not only removed but never there; this may also help get you over a threshold where the gameplay may become acceptable.


With a short stroked, defragged (PD, now at v13 is the only defragger that has provided benefits for me consistently over the years - nothing else comes close) maxed RAM and disabled Hibernation, System Restore, Swapfile, Error Reporting and O/S 'effects' on a clean installed system - this will cost you less than $100 (for the RAM) to try.

On a client's setup with WOW, an SSD not only made the 2008 machine current again - but it also visibly increased the FPS in WOW even to me (I don't game at all). Of course; this is easily another $300 to try... and if you don't do all of the above, including maxing out the RAM and doing a clean Win8.1 install, it may not even be worthwhile.


Anyway, these are the options you have before you can consider a new system from my point of view. Let us know if anything worked for you.

I would also recommend a desktop over a notebook if performance per $$ is the goal.

 

I second selling the laptop and starting over again. With that i3 level CPU any kind of upgrade is just going to be a waste.

 

Actually due to lack of cache the amd chip does like faster ram so tweaking can gain another 5% or so.

Also the holy grail of these machines are the unlocked engineering samples but good luck finding one.

 

i would love to have your laptop .
i plan to buy one soon .have done all the reading up on it and have been in to pc from the 486 dx 2 66mhz
i second the going to faster ram with better timings the amd apus take very well to faster ram

 

Thank you for all your help guys,

I did do a fresh install of win 8.1, and deleted all the bloatware

I did install afterburner but as I remember it wouldnt even let me oclock the VGA

the cpu is a no go for an overclock it's locked, all I could do was reduce the p states using bar edit and lock it at 3.2GHz but i found that my system was getting more and more unstable that way, some time when I restart after that the system would hang, so i don't want to do that anymore.

I will buy the 16gigs of cl9 ripjaws at 1600 mhz becasue its cheaper and you guys said the 1866Mhz cl10 would perform the same

I will buy a Samsung Evo840 1gig because I've never used a SSD before and I'm curious as to how it would perform and it seems like the best bang per back at the moment.

I don't want to partition the harddisk for less than 125 gb because that would be just well too many partitions,

I did test on my memory speeds and it seems the MSI memory onbaord really suck bad, I can't remember the brand but it performed very badly.

And I've also taken your advise and decided that my main build for gaming should be a desktop, Will save up about $2500 which will take me about 8 months and another $800 for a good monitor like the new asus ROg 144hz, 1ms 1440p 27inch(yet to be release)

Having said all of that, I still do think that this laptop is the best bang per back gamer PC in the market, only wish it had come with an intel i5

Thanks a bunch please do let me know if you have more ideas, and I will keep you posted of any performance gains with the upgrades on the lappy I mentioned above.

 

It's not even close to a sandy i3 actually. Benches show that it barely matches a Westmere (first generation) mobile i5. I know this because my old i5-460M scored around 8500 in Vantage and the A10 scores right on par with that, maybe a smidgen higher.

It's sad when you know that the top mobile AMD CPU can't even match Intel's top FIRST generation i7. Yes. You heard right. The A10 can't even match the i7-920XM. o_o

 

good luck with your upgrades .i think going to the duel faster ram is the best idea get any little bit you can. saying that i am a amd guy have been from my first 486 cpu .i have had my share of p4 and core 2 duo .i try to buy amd as much as i can dont know how old you all are but the days when intel was the only game in town the prices where nuts .i fear the day amd stop making cpus .intel will charge 3x what they do now and no one to race in the cpu speed wars we be paying top $$$$ for same speed stuff . amd needs to get there buts in gear .

 

Fixed it for ya.

I would know, I used to own one.

 

DO NOT buy the 1600 CL9 ram. Even 1866 CL11 is faster than 1600 CL9. I would know because I went 1600 CL9 --> 1866 CL11 and it was improvement in every way.

Bandwidth appears to be far more important than timings for Haswell; frequency is king. See this article

And I quote: "Increasing the memory frequency by 266 MHz turns out to be far more effective than lowering all timings by 3 to 4 cycles. Even when it comes to real-life latency, which is heavily influenced by timings, DDR3-1867 with rather high timings of 10-10-10-29 turns out to be better than DDR3-1600 with aggressive timings of 7-7-7-21."