asus x501a upgrading components

[steezgav]

hello, i have a asus x501a with 4gb of ddr3 ram. Intel Core i3 2350M (sandy bridge). running at 2.3ghz
I have had this laptop for about a year now, and i was wondering if you can change the CPU to a core i5 , bump the ram up to 8gb and swap the hdd with a ssd.

Instead of getting a new laptop. will this work? i have the money for the parts, but not a new laptop. thank you.

 

[Azn Cracker]

You can easily change the ram. All you have to do it unscrew a panel on the back and insert more if there is a slot available. For the Hard drive, you will have to open the laptop up and replace it.

For the cpu, you may or may not replace it depending on if the cpu is part of the motherboard or not. If you want that, you will literally have to take your whole laptop apart.

I wouldn't touch anything personally because 4gb of ram is enough, SSD's are expensive per GB,and the cpu upgrade is just a pain in the ass and not worth it

 

[atomicWAR]

depends on you mother board if you can upgrade your cpu...but honestly its way more hassle then it worth o a laptop. as for the ram its easy. should have a plate on the bottom of your lap top with a couple screws covering your ram. remove and then install. very easy.

 

[atomicWAR]

oops missed the hdd to ssd....yeah its more involved as azn cracker said....you have to tear into the laptop case and risk damaging components.

 

[Travis McQuater]

Hello! I have the same laptop. Late reply but hopefully it can be used in the future. The maximum memory is 4GB (mine came with 1600MHz Memory, no real reason to upgrade), it only supports Intel Core-i3 Processors, (Sandy-Bridge or Ivy-Bridge, mine came with Sandy-Bridge, you can upgrade to Ivy-Bridge). You can upgrade the hard drive to a different size or to a Solid State Disk. The interface is SATA III (6.0GB/s). Other than that, there's nothing else you can do with this laptop. The motherboard does not support more than 4GB of RAM and the power delivery cannot sustain the power required by a Core-i5 or i7, let alone heat issues. It's a nice laptop, but you can't do much, sadly.

 

[guncha550]

I have the same Laptop as well, I have upgraded it to it's limits, and yeah my opinion about original Win8 64bit is pointless, cause the laptopt came to my house brand new, in the beginning it had only Intel Celeron CPU 1.8Ghz and 2GB DDR3 of RAM I've upgraded it to Core i3 + 4GB DDR3 RAM, and now I have to use Cooling pad more lately to cool it down even when I am browsing trough Chrome, my guess is that original CPU cooler with radiator is build for Intel Celeron, but that's not a problem for me, about the RAM my friend has the same as well, and he is an crazy for bigger RAM space, the thing is this laptop can handle 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz of RAM, even if in tech support is written 4GB max, that's not true, I tried to apply 8GB on mine and it worked perfectly, but since I have 32bit Win7U 8GB is pointless and too much for me.

 

[jettblob]

I have the same laptop. With an intel core i3 dual core at 2.3 ghz and win 8 64 bit os. Recently I upgraded to 8gigs of 1600 mhz ram and have encountered no problems exept on occasions the cooling fan really starts to speed up.

 

[guncha550]

That is caused by amount of Random Access Memory installed, when you had 4 gigs of RAM CPU had much less work of space to mange and work with, since you installed 8 gigs it gave to CPU a lot more work to do managing space working on.