Upgrade a Dell e6420

deceit

I bought an E6420 yesterday for a good price as I needed a laptop for work.
The problem is the cpu is a bit weak, its a dual core i5 and it has 4gb ram. I was wondering has anyone that has one of these managed to get them running with 16gb ram and has anyone changed cpu's in these as I want to put an i7 2760qm into it.

Jaafa

You can put 16GB of ram in it, but that'd be excessive. 8GB is more than enough unless you're doing some real heavy duty work. The CPU, as with the majority of laptops is non-upgradeable.

Mezamo

Max Memory is 8GB

deceit

Jaafa wrote: »

You can put 16GB of ram in it, but that'd be excessive. 8GB is more than enough unless you're doing some real heavy duty work. The CPU, as with the majority of laptops is non-upgradeable.

I know the cpu can be taken out and upgraded just not sure if this cpu is compatible with it as i'm not 100% on laptop chipset types.
Yes I would be needing 16gb for work purposes and would be fully utilized (at the moment I have to remote into a machine with 32gb ram) but would be handier to carry this around with me even if might take slightly longer to complete.
Quick look on youtube shows how easy it is to replace and a few people have upgraded just not to this particular cpu.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS-xpxt_eTo
I have seen a few people manage to get 16gb ram in them but have only seen on spec of it so far (specific cosair ram that I cant find to buy in ireland/uk/germany) I'm sure most other ram would work but would prefer to buy some that I know would work.

deceit

Mezamo wrote: »

Max Memory is 8GB

This is the max officially supported but with most motherboards they usually except well beyond what is officially supported.
My p6x58d-e motheboard has 48gb ram in it at the moment with only 24gb ram being officially supported.

justsomebloke

this thread on another forum suggests that one of the models may have come with a 2720QM which seems to have the same socket support as the 2760QM so iy 'may' be upgradeable.

deceit

justsomebloke wrote: »

this thread on another forum suggests that one of the models may have come with a 2720QM which seems to have the same socket support as the 2760QM so iy 'may' be upgradeable.

Cool, thanks will have a read

Jaafa

deceit wrote: »

I know the cpu can be taken out and upgraded just not sure if this cpu is compatible with it as i'm not 100% on laptop chipset types.
Yes I would be needing 16gb for work purposes and would be fully utilized (at the moment I have to remote into a machine with 32gb ram) but would be handier to carry this around with me even if might take slightly longer to complete.
Quick look on youtube shows how easy it is to replace and a few people have upgraded just not to this particular cpu.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS-xpxt_eTo
I have seen a few people manage to get 16gb ram in them but have only seen on spec of it so far (specific cosair ram that I cant find to buy in ireland/uk/germany) I'm sure most other ram would work but would prefer to buy some that I know would work.

I stand corrected.

deceit

Jaafa wrote: »

I stand corrected.

Just got a comment back from an ebay store thats selling them that the cpu is compatible with the laptop .
I was noticing there are two different heatsinks, one for dual core and another for quad core, I will have to replace my single pipe heatsink with a dual pipe one to deal with the quad cores extra heat output

smileyj1987

Having upgraded my own laptop awhile ago . It's an alienware M17 X R2 but it's made by dell . My advice would be .
1). Upgrade to the very latest bios for hardware compatability .
2). Check can your power brick handle the extra power needed to power your upgrades .
3). Expensive thermal paste is a must for a laptop / good quality
4). Get a service manual from the intertnet so you can reference it as you disassemble the laptop and put it back together .

Follow these steps and it should be a has free upgrade for you .

deceit

Just to follow up on this I managed to pick up 16gb ram and it worked perfect, now to get onto doing the cpu and heatsink

smileyj1987

deceit wrote: »

Just to follow up on this I managed to pick up 16gb ram and it worked perfect, now to get onto doing the cpu and heatsink

Ah cool let us all know how you get on