Upgrading a Sager NP5797

Hello all,

So I know very little about the grand world of computers, and it was actually my tech-savvy friends that convinced me to get a Sager, but that was nearly five years ago, and my machine is undoubtedly outdated. Thus, I come here with a simple question for you wise folk:

What are really good upgrades I can get for my Sager NP5797? I'm thinking a new CPU, graphics card, perhaps a new sound card as well. Can anyone suggest some good pieces? And would I need to upgrade my cooling and other things like that to support such upgrades? And let's put a budget at close to $1200.

 

5 years old?

Time for a new platform.

What you will spend on upgrades will get you a ready to go unit with the latest O/S, a current platform and cpu, ram and gpu performance that will put to shame anything you can upgrade your current system to.

Not to mention warranty too.

Good luck.

 

What specs do your current machine have? With that high of a budget, you may be able to get a new machine that would outperform your current one even after upgrades.

EDIT: tilleroftheearth beat me to it, but yep, same point.

 

Let's see, I have the following:

Intel Core 2 Duo [email protected]
2 GB RAM
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M

Not sure what else I can say...

 

Can't be 5 (or even 4) years old, as my laptop has the same CPU. Personally, I'd say your laptop is powerful enough for most modern games, but if you feel that it's insufficient, there's not too much you can do. You could upgrade your CPU to a Core 2 Quad and add more RAM for relatively little money, but usually that's not the bottleneck. I'm not sure what GPU upgrades are possible, although the 280M was top-of-the-line at the time.

 

While his cpu was officially launched on Q4 2008 (3 yrs ago), the platform is from 2006.

No Turbo, no HyperThreading and at a 25W TDP rating, no performance comparison to a modern platform (of which I highly recommend a quad core version of...).

In PassMark 'scores' it has much less than 3x the performance of a quad core, entry level SNB i7 2670QM 'platform'.

See:
PassMark CPU Lookup

See:
PassMark - Intel Core i7-2670QM @ 2.20GHz - Price performance comparison

6768 vs. 1790 PM 'scores' (or 3.78x faster).

Dual core to Quad Core is highly recommended going into 2012 - as is 8GB RAM (or more) on an SNB (Sandy Bridge) platform.

The only thing the current platform has going for it is Win7x64.

Here is where his gpu is at now:

See:
PassMark - GeForce GTX 280M - Price performance comparison

Note that an GTX 580M is more than double that performance.

See:
PassMark Software - Video Card Benchmarks - Video Card Look Up

Even an entry level card like a 6770M is almost 60% faster than his gpu.

See:
PassMark - Radeon HD 6770M - Price performance comparison


And he can get that in a system like this (within his budget too):

See:
HP Pavilion dv7-6197ca Entertainment Notebook PC (LY068UA) specifications - HP Home & Home Office Products


Which will also get him a dual drive bay system that he can upgrade to an 'optimum' SSD + HDD setup and even 16GB RAM (2x 8GB SoDimms) if he so chooses.

I'm sure that there are other, better, gaming systems (sorry, but I don't game...) that could be recommended, but this is just an example along with my reasoning of why upgrading his current ~5 yr old platform is not cost effective in the least.

Taledonia, if you could find DDR2 memory modules to upgrade your current system to 8GB RAM, I'm sure you will appreciate the extra performance in all aspects of your current notebook's performance. However, it will still pale in comparision to a modern SNB based platform with at least 8GB RAM.

Why 8GB RAM or more?

See:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/memory/2008/07/08/is-more-memory-better/5


And the above link shows why you will notice/appreciate more RAM in your current platform too.

Hope some of this helps - good luck.

 

I think you're better off with a new platform with that much money in the bank.
DDR2 sodimm is actually quite expensive and really isnt it worth it in my opinion.
If you were going to drop $300-$400 to buy you some time before your next major upgrade then that would be much different.
Should you decide to wait another year for the next major tick\tock, I'd upgrade to an SSD, and pickup another 2 GB of ram (roughly $300 for both).

With my current system below, I'm going to wait as well.

 

I think I'd like to keep my current machine for at least another year or so. I'm sentimental that way, and it has a pretty orange stripe. Anyways, thanks for the info tilleroftheearth.

I guess now my main question is, could you recommend actual pieces that would be compatible with my laptop. Am I actually able to upgrade to a quad core? Am I able to put a better graphics card in it? I'm assuming it would be easy enough to get more memory in it. Let me sum it up:

What is the best compatible CPU I could upgrade to?
What is the best compatible graphics card I could upgrade to?
What is the most memory I could add?
And most importantly, with these upgrades, will I be able to play Skyrim on full power, or must I simply get a new laptop?

 

As the recommended spec's are a quadcore cpu solution and a (desktop) GTX 260 (almost double your gpu's performance) - I would say that you are looking to buy a new system.

You can still keep your old system for less demanding things, but nothing you can upgrade your current system to will remotely get you to a 'full power' level on Skyrim.

See:
Bethesda Reveals PC Requirements for Skyrim

See:
PassMark - GeForce GTX 280M - Price performance comparison

See:
PassMark - GeForce GTX 260 - Price performance comparison


Happy shopping!