I recently went on vacation and had the opportunity to bring my gaming laptop. I got his as a present from my wife for my 50th birthday during the height of the pandemic. I don’t use it much but this was an opportunity that forced me into a situation where I had to if I wanted to game. I thought about getting a Steam Deck but I’m still on the fence about getting one. But being I already had the Laptop I decided to stick with it. It is a MSI GE75 Raider, one of those you always see pallets of at Costco. Nothing Ground breaking but very capable with some obvious caveats. The 16 gigs of ram and mechanical hard disk would prove to be the things that were frustrating. Playing Cyberpunk 77 at medium settings gave me a solid 70fps and it actually looked really good. Games like Forza looked great on high with about the same FPS. But loading times for games were horrendous. Click the icon, walk away boil some water, and make some coffee kind of bad. Now that I look back I think this was a reason I didn’t use this machine as much as I should have. I was use to such a snappy response on my desktop it was more of a pleasure to use.
So I bit the bullet and ordered 32 gigs of ram, a 2 terabyte NVME, and a one gig SATA SSD. The brands I picked were for nothing else other than the convenience of getting the same day delivery off of Amazon. But TEAMGROUP, Crucial, and PNY are solid brands so I had confidence in ordering them.
Out with the old and in with the new.
I usually hate working on laptops, but taking the back cover off the MSI was quick and easy. For the most part it used the same screws all around with the exception of 2 of them, and the back cover easily snapped off. I knew there was an empty NVME slot and planned to one day to fill it. But being that I was going to take it apart I figured I might as well upgrade everything while I was there. Replacing all the old components with the new ones turned out to be a breeze. I then put everything back together, turned on the machine, and formatted the new drives.
Now I don’t do any science based testing. My perceived experience is worth more than numbers on a spread sheet. I want to click on an icon and have the program open instantaneously. I didn’t have that feeling before the upgrades, now I do. It doesn’t even feel like the same machine, it feels like something new. Programs load fast and stutter in games is gone. It really is a pleasure to use now.
I wish this is something I could have done sooner but to be honest would have been out of my price range at the time. The total cost of the upgrades was just over $200.00 Three years ago a 2 Terabyte NVME would have been well over $300.00 on it’s own. The initial cost of the laptop was $1,500.00, as it is now would been over $2,200.00 with the upgrades. Like I mentioned before not only do I like gaming but building and upgrading computers is also part of the fun. This turned out to be a project in which not only was it fun, it also brought a capable machine into a great gaming machine.