Got a Clevo or Alienware laptop with an MXM video card slot(s)? Canadian Clevo system builder Eurocom now sells MXM upgrade kits: eurocom.com/ec/vgas%281%29ec
New MXM cards have always been hard to find. There's finally a major Clevo vendor (and I believe Eurocom is Canada's largest Clevo reseller) selling these cards so it's finally possible to upgrade these laptops.
The size and cooling requirements of a gaming laptop simply means it's not portable enough to be optimal for school/work.
@DragonLord Thing is, though, if you have the space and don't mind swapping between two machines for different uses, it would actually be cheaper to get two specialised machines.
A 980M by itself costs close to $1k. A 960 is $250. Plus a i7-4970k, and other supporting components, and you end up with a $1k desktop. Better if you don't go for the maxed out CPU.
If the funds can be procured, I might be able to select a GTX 980 Ti or R9 Fury X.
... and there you have it. A build that will easily outperform my laptop (by 2x or more under gaming workloads) for less than half the cost of this laptop and aftermarket upgrades.
Then again, this machine is 18 months old.
(Either of the above cards would add about $500 to the build, after accounting for the larger power supply required.)
@MichaelFrank my secondary/shared system is a c2d. Amusingly I built my current box cause I was fed up with getting kicked off that PC.... And nearly no one uses it now.
In all seriousness - if you only use your computer for basic office tasks (checking emails, stuff with Excel, light web browsing, etc.), a c2d is perfectly fine.
It would be about equivalent to a modern Celeron or Pentium - the modern one would use less power, sure, but that won't necessarily offset the cost of the new machine ($300-$400?)
If they told me they wanted to play games on it, then... yea, I'd say they need to upgrade
but the question was more "hey I just got this video card for free, is it worth swapping in?" and "I just use MS Office"
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