Can I upgrade the nVidia 630m on my HP Pavillion Sleekbook 15? Maybe even add an SSD?

salh

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The performance is decent, and I'm not touching a thing until warranty is there - but maybe a few years later - would I be able to upgrade to maybe a 640 or 650m? (I can't afford the highend stuff like 670m) I assume AMD is out of the question?
 

salh

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It's not upgradable becuase it's glued to the mobo or because no other will fit or some other reason?
upgrading as in replacing or adding extra? because i payed a bunch extra for the 1TB i have now, and i want a separate ssd not replace and waste my money
What about RAM and CPU?
 

synthaside

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No this is pretty much a terrible idea , any GPU or CPU is considered physically part of the laptops motherboard , unless you are exceptionally skilled with a soldiering iron this would not be possible or considered by most sane laptop owners , one mistake and you would trash the whole machine and even if you were successful the laptop would be crippled by the extra heat and power consumption.

As for the hard drive and ram any upgrade in a laptop is considered a replacement , there is " usually" only one bay for a hard disk on a laptop and very limited ram slots so unless your laptop is a special case and ive seen some examples which are built with this in mind , you will not be able to add an extra on top of your existing one
 

salh

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But I've seen bazillions of threads on this forum, the hp official forums, and elsewhere on the net where people happily upgrade their graphics cards?
Also I read somewhere that my laptop supports PCIe 2
Also, newer cards run cooler and lower powered so it shouldn't be a problem right?
 

k1114

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Hp uses bga for their sleekbooks as do most every company's ultrabooks. Bga are soldered on. As for the gpu, only 660m and higher have a mxm cards available. Laptops with mxm slots are $1200+. Next gen is only a little less power/heat and you won't get much of a difference in performance in the same power/heat. Those bazillions of threads are most likely pertaining to desktops.
 

bignastyid

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Looks like you should have done a bit more research on laptops before you bought it. The CPU and GPU are part of the motherboard and cant be replaced, and there is only room for 1 hard drive. While there are laptops that have an upgradable GPU and CPU, and have 2 slots for hard drives the system you bought doesn't offer any of this. There are also "bazillions" of threads of people wanting to upgrade their laptop and getting told the same thing we just told you. Just because its not what you wanted to hear doesn't make it wrong.
 

salh

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Not saying you're wrong or anything, but I'm just asking for reasons/explanations - i mean not knowing about a particular laptop doesn't mean I won't understand
 

salh

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Not saying you're wrong or anything, but I'm just asking for reasons/explanations - i mean not knowing about a particular laptop doesn't mean I won't understand
 

synthaside

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Ok , ill explain , if as mentioned previously the laptop in question uses a BGA type graphics card this is soldiered directly to the motherboard to replace a graphics card on this type of motherboard you need a special BGA Re- soldiering station capable of reaching 220 odd C or will need to find someone to pay for this some people have been known to build their own re-soldiering stations and buy all the equipment to do this but its just not viable for most people .

They will then strip the laptop down into its component parts and essentially rebuild the laptop melting away the old card's connection replacing it with a new one and rebuilding the laptop , price wise to do this after you have bought a suitable replacement card wont be far off from a brand new better laptop , however this may also require some software engineering as the systems bios may not accept the new card if it is too different from the old one .

So the rule of thumb is ... if you want a better graphics card in a laptop you can build your own EGPU setup this is a sort of external dock housing a dedicated graphics card and some clever software to mcguyver a better graphics system onto the side of the laptop .

If you want to find out about this read here but this is pretty technical stuff ( sorry for offsite link)
http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/graphics-cards/how-to-make-an-external-laptop-graphics-adaptor-915616

 

salh

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sounds interesting, but maybe i'll just stick to my custom desktop then
 

synthaside

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I was just chucking that in as additional explanation rather than a serious suggestion , after this comment here " but I'm just asking for reasons/explanations - i mean not knowing about a particular laptop doesn't mean I won't understand."

Perhaps helping explain some of the threads he has seen or the such like , the sleek books are " relatively" low on connect ability , I guess that's how they stay so ... Sleek
 

salh

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i shouldnt expect much from something with only three usb ports.
i mean it's good to look at (seriously) but options are limited