Upgradeable Laptop

tniemuth95

Honorable
Dec 6, 2012
9
0
10,510
Hey guys I'm going to college soon and my parents are buying me a laptop. They're looking to spend around $700. The problem is that I know you can't get that much laptop for $700 so I plan to upgrade it after a couple months. Looking for a laptop in this price range that can support a lot of ram (atleast 10-12gb, as high as 16gb), and can support a high capacity SSD. HD screen is preferred, atleast 720P, but I don't think i'll be able to get 1080P in this price range. Would like to use it for some gaming, but nothing intense, mostly WoW and Counter Strike.

TL;DR- $700 Laptop that can support good upgrades.

P.S. If there are any good laptop websites to compare models (tom's doesn't do to much with laptops) please post them.
 
What kind of upgrades do you want to do.

GPU? Forget it. Only possible with specific gaming laptop models and generally they start at $1,500.

CPU? Generally possible as long as the BIOS can recognize the new CPU. Must be same socket. You need to research if the CPU is merely inserted into the socket or it it is soldered into it. If soldered, then no way to upgrade short of un-soldering the CPU.

HDD to SSD? Generally possible.

RAM? Yep easily done for the most part. Laptops usually have just 2 RAM slots so max is 16GB.

 

tniemuth95

Honorable
Dec 6, 2012
9
0
10,510
I'm definitely not interested in upgrading the CPU/GPU, too much money/work. But I am looking to go from an HDD to SDD, and upgrade the RAM. Basically I'm looking for a laptop with good a graphics card and CPU, but can have crappy RAM and hard drive. Anyone know of any laptops where the CPU will greatly benefit off having more RAM Another problem is that I've read that certain laptops only support 8GB of memeory even though you can fit 16 gigs in it.
 
The CPU does not benefit from more RAM. The operating system can though depending on what you are doing.

The average user only needs 4GB of RAM. When playing a game on my laptop and have Firefox with 12 tabs open (and some other minor background programs) I am only using around 3.1GB of RAM at most. If you do Photoshop, then yeah, you really want more than just 4GB of RAM.