Struggling to play modern games on lenovo y510p, considering upgrades

[Samuel_82]

Hi Tom's hardware community, thanks for existing and reading this question:

Shall I sell this laptop: intel i5 4200m, gforce gtx 750m, 8g ram, no ssd, 1tb drive, for around 500-600€ and make a small loss on what i bought it for, and then buy something better with say a new 10xx gforce, 16g ram, i7, + ssd

Or shall i upgrade it? I think the only upgrades i can get for it are double ram (16g total) and an ssd.

I am currently struggling to play anything on even medium settings, or even low when it is for longer sessions.

Thanks for answering!

P.s, Price wise i was hoping no more than 1000€ ish, and the laptop to be viable for a good 3-4 years, the best would be if the gpu / cpu could be upgraded, but i know that usually can't be done.

 

[JeffDaemon]

If you are looking for better gaming then you want a new laptop with a better gpu. If you want a laptop viable for 3-4 years you are pretty much targeting a 1050 or 1060 based laptop which will probably poke you for more then 1000€

 

[Samuel_82]

If you are looking for better gaming then you want a new laptop with a better gpu. If you want a laptop viable for 3-4 years you are pretty much targeting a 1050 or 1060 based laptop which will probably poke you for more then 1000€

Thanks jeff, a few questions for you, incase you know about these things: Zen / ryzen (new amd cpu???), Vulkan vs. dx12 & their hardware ?

and, do you think upgrading my ssd and ram right now will make a significant fps boost? my cpu and ram seem to be at 100% load quite often, gpu and cpu not so much.

Are there any specific laptops you would recommend?

Thanks.

 

[jaguarskx]

Ryzen APUs for laptops are not expected to be released until the 2nd half of 2017 according to AMD.

The following video from LinusTechTips explains Vulkan & DX12; it assumes you have absolutely no idea what an API is.
https/www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0fgEVEgK_k

A SSD will not improve FPS as it does not affect GPU performance. A SSD can be viewed as an extremely fast hard drive. Your Window will launch faster, programs will load faster and textures will be loaded more quickly to the GPU's dedicated RAM (can eliminate texture popping issues).

When looking for a new laptop the general advice I can give is to at least consider one with a GTX 1050; I assume that should be within you budget. It is basically a bit more powerful than a GTX 965m GPU. A laptop with a GTX 1060 will likely be out of your budget; it is slightly better than a GTX 980m. However, a GTX 1050Ti may be within your budget. I speculate it should be about equal to the GTX 970m.

The GTX 750m in your laptop is basically equivalent to a nVidia 940mx (and the Intel Iris Pro 6200). Therefore, it is considered to be a mainstream GPU.


A recommendation could be the newly released Dell Inspiron 15 7567 which can be purchased with a quad Core i5-7300HQ and a GTX 1050 ($799 USD) or GTX 1050Ti ($899 USD). However, I cannot really make a solid recommendation for a laptop with nVidia's current "Pascal" generation GPU because I really have not done any research on them (because I bought a laptop with the GTX 960m about 2 months ago). The reason why the Dell Inspiron 15 7567 is not a solid recommendation is because of the screen.

The Dell Inspiron 15 7567 is the successor to the Dell Inspiron 15 7557 (the laptop I have). The downside to the 7567 is the IPS screen was dropped and instead has a TN screen (similar to what the Lenovo Y510p has). I personally prefer IPS screens over TN screens due to better viewing angles and a little better image quality. Therefore, I have absolutely no buyer's remorse with my purchase of the 7557 especially since I bought it on sale for about $700 USD.

 

[Samuel_82]

Ryzen APUs for laptops are not expected to be released until the 2nd half of 2017 according to AMD.

The following video from LinusTechTips explains Vulkan & DX12; it assumes you have absolutely no idea what an API is.
https/www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0fgEVEgK_k

A SSD will not improve FPS as it does not affect GPU performance. A SSD can be viewed as an extremely fast hard drive. Your Window will launch faster, programs will load faster and textures will be loaded more quickly to the GPU's dedicated RAM (can eliminate texture popping issues).

When looking for a new laptop the general advice I can give is to at least consider one with a GTX 1050....

Thanks Jaguar!

I went ahead and bought a m.2 ssd with 525gb, made by "crucial" for my laptop, the ram upgrade i held back on because that would be another 120€ / $, because i actually have to take out both of the current ram modules.

Installing the ssd now, will post with result

Edit: So it turns out i bought the "wrong" M.2, i didn't know there were different formats, just as with other HDD's; 2.5, 3.5 e.t.c,
I bought the 80mm instead of 42 "NGFF",

Luckily I discovered the laptop is only using 1 ram stick and it's an 8 gig, so i can double the ram today when i exchange the ssd,

the downside is the type of m.2 ssd i have is more expensive,
because it is smaller, so i will get a 256gig instead of 500, which i guess is still enough, as i have the 1tb drive for storage.

Apparently ssd in open world games, where textures and assets are constantly being loaded from the HDD, can aid fps/ over all performance, especially compared to 5400/7200 normal hdd's, because there's a bottleneck created by the assets not being able to be loaded quickly enough, which was what my intuition also told me; "check if the performance really doesn't go up, then think about getting a new laptop", well, I'll post the results tonight

 

[Samuel_82]

So i installed the 8gig ram and ssd (m.2 ngff 42 milimeter), and at first neither were recognized/ used;

The ssd had to be initialized ( i guess this is a standard procedure ? )

And the ram, i had to go to msconfig, then uncheck "maximummemory" because 10gigabytes of ram were being "reserved for bios/ hardware".

 

[jaguarskx]

Hmmm.... RAM usually becomes fully usable after being installed. Strange you had to go into msconfig.

Anytime you install a new SSD / HDD it must be initialized first before you use it. If you want to boot from it, then you need to clone the C Drive on to the SSD with cloning software like Macrium Reflect Free. After cloning is completed and you reboot, the laptop should recognize the SSD as the "new" Crive. Otherwise you will have to go into the BIOS to manually select it as the boot drive. The amount of data on the HDD C: drive must be less than the space available on the SSD otherwise you will not be able to clone the C: drive.

After the laptop boots you should no longer see the original C: drive on the HDD because the Windows cannot recognize two boot drives at the same time. You can go into disk management to delete that partition. That partition can be formatted and become the E: drive (or whatever). Or you can resize the D: drive to absorb the free space.