GT72 Upgrade Questions/Advice

Hello to whom it may concern,

I have purchased an GT72 2QD-850AU Model about 2 months ago and I'm quite amazed how far laptop gaming has come these past years. The model I have purchased comes with the

-GTX970M Graphics module (Which I'm not looking at upgrading)

-8GB DDR3 Ram (Looking at upgrading to 16gb @ 1600Mhz)

-1TB 7200rpm HDD (Looking to upgrade to RAID 0 "SSD/M2" perhaps 2 M2's at 128gb EA in Raid 0


Could someone price up an upgrade for me on www.pccasegear.com

And how I can upgrade it please much appreciated im new to these m2 hard drives and never upgraded ram in
a laptop before.

 

The physical aspect of opening the laptop and replacing the ram to 16gb and replacing a hdd in the socket should be easy enough as they are mostly plug and play (remember to take out the old modules at the 45degree insertion angle, as well as put in the new sticks at the 45degree angle before pushing down the ram to clip it in).
The harddrive upgrade is mostly just activating the raid options in the bios which isnt hard either (if you want to recreate msi's superraid feature just put the m.2 ssd's in the harddrive caddy they give you for the m.2).

Pricing can vary, depending on the models you get but i feel most of the performance gains (if any) are negligible between the brands through most day to day tasks and even in gaming so just pick the cheapest but reliable ones. I'm sure though if you are hard-out transfering gigabytes of data constantly youll feel the differences but overall they should be negligible for day to day and gaming needs.

 

Go for the samsung 850 evo for the SSD and any 1600mhz CL11 1.35V 8GB stick will match your current one.

 

I have a fair idea on the memory upgrade now. Thanks

But now I'm thinking about how to go about doing this.

Install 2x M.2 ssd into the machine but I want to copy the OS and everything from the current ssd inside the lapto. Set up the new m. 2 drives as raid 0 and format old sdd for a storage drive.

Only concern I'm thinking is losing the OS since Ibought the notebook from factory and it ddidn't come with a disk or a cd key I think.

I'm thinking I have to copy the current ssd to another computer then install the new drives in raid 0 then upload old ssd data to the new ones then change the boot sequence to run on the new raid sset up then after that re format the old drive for storage.

If anyone can shed some light on how I could go about this would be appreciated. And yeah I just never done anything like this before clone wise and yeah please help me

 

The windows 8.1 code is built into the bios, but create restore disks and you should be able to "recover" to your new array.

 

Okay thanks I will get the code. I've watched a couple of videos recently to get a better understanding. This is how I think I'll do the upgrade now.
But please correct me if I'm wrong.

Install 2 (m.2 128gb Intel ssd) into the laptop. Restart computer go into bios/uefi sset up screen set up the 2 new drives in raid 0 format.

Restart log into Windows. Use Intel software to clone the main OS hdd to the new raid ssd's.

Restart into bios/uefi and change boot sequence to the new raid set up.

Restart into Windows, call up Microsoft to tell them that I changed hdd not computer??

Reformat old hdd for storage device. And Bob your uncle. That's the way I understand it.

Can anyone tell me if I'm on the right path? Thankyou

 

It may not even need re-activation.

Be aware if you are in AHCI mode now, with the controller in RAID mode the system wont boot.