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Upgrading your gaming laptop is a great way to increase performance and make

it last longer - but you don’t want to make a mistake, cause damage, and waste time or money.

There’s a lot to consider - so I’ve broken down everything that you need

to know into these categories so that your upgrade goes smoothly.

Alright, we need a quick disclaimer about how upgrades may affect your warranty.

In many regions like the US and Canada, you can upgrade your laptop without

voiding your warranty as long as you don’t cause damage. And you don’t have

to worry about those stupid stickers sometimes found over the screw holes.

Most of the upgrades that we’re going to cover can be undone as well, so if you need to send

your laptop in for repair later under warranty, just undo the upgrades and put it back to stock.

Unfortunately things like warranty are going to depend on your country and the

brand you bought the laptop from, so if in doubt make sure you check

with them first to find out what you can safely do under warranty.

Ok, first things first, all of the upgrades we’re going to go through need you to open up

the laptop and get inside. And this can vary a bit depending on the model of laptop you’ve got.

Most laptops open up from underneath. You need to take out all of the screws. Some screws

might not come out, and instead help lift the bottom panel so you can open it easier. While

others might have screws hidden under annoying rubber covers that you have to pry off first.

I really hate it when they do that, because if you accidentally miss one of the screws and try

to pull off the bottom panel you can easily damage the laptop - I’ve done it before. And

this is why my laptop reviews always mention how many screws there are and where they’re all found.

Some screws might be longer than others too, so you have to keep track of which screw goes where

as you take them out. The last thing you want to do is put a long screw into a short hole.

But seriously, the screw can go too far and cause damage.

Phillips head screws are most common, and chances are you’ve already got a screwdriver for that.

But Torx screws, which is this six pointed shape, are also fairly common too,

so check if your screwdriver kit has the correct bit and size that fits into your laptop screws.

If not, then I highly recommend a toolkit from iFixit. Not sponsored,

I bought them myself and have been using them for years. They’ve got pretty much any bit

you could need and come with pry tools, which are important for the next step.

After removing all screws you might be able to take off the bottom panel with only your hands,

but in most cases you’ll need to run along the edges with a pry

tool. A guitar pick or old plastic card works too, just don’t use your

current credit card or something because you might damage it. You want to try to

find or make a gap and slide it around the edges until the panel gets loose.

Note that some laptops like ASUS’s Scar series prior to 2024 also have ribbon

cables attaching the RGB lighting on the bottom panel to the motherboard,

which have to be carefully disconnected.

I’m guilty of breaking some of those cables on an ASUS Scar 17 because I pulled off the

bottom panel and forgot that it had those cables connected to the motherboard. It’s a crap design,

but ASUS have fixed it in newer models. So just something to be aware of in some

laptops. And just reverse that process when putting your laptop back together.

And note that some brands like ASUS won’t power on after taking the bottom panel off,

so don’t panic. You just have to connect the charger first.

Once inside, most laptops have the battery down the front,

RAM near the middle, and SSD and Wi-Fi towards the sides.

We’ll start with the battery, because even if you’re not upgrading the actual battery itself,

you still need to unplug it before doing any of the other upgrades. Even if the laptop is powered

off, the battery is still supplying power to the machine. If you’re unscrewing a screw and it

accidentally drops down onto the motherboard, it is possible that you could short the motherboard

and kill the laptop. That’s bad, by the way. So yeah, make sure that you unplug the battery.

All you need to do is unplug the cable running from the battery to the motherboard from the

sides. Of course that’s easier said than done, sometimes they’re in there super tight,

and you want to avoid pulling on the cable itself as that can easily damage it.

Now if you’re not upgrading the battery you can stop here and safely skip ahead to one

of the other upgrades that we’ve covered. But if you are after a battery upgrade,

unfortunately most laptops don’t actually have upgrade paths for the battery. In most

cases it depends whether or not the laptop was actually ever sold with different battery sizes.

Lenovo’s Legion 5 gaming laptops are a great example,

as they were sold with either a smaller and cheaper 60Wh battery,

or a larger but more expensive 80Wh battery option. Mine had the smaller 60Wh battery,

and I was able to buy the larger 80Wh battery later and swap it with no problems at all.

Fortunately, Lenovo publishes a parts list for their laptops, detailing supported

components such as batteries. But most other brands don’t really offer anything similar,

so it might be more of a challenge to figure out which batteries your

laptop can support. In that case, the best you can do is Google search your

laptop model and find out if anyone has had any success with a battery upgrade.

To change the battery, all you have to do is take the screws out holding

the battery into the laptop, pull out the previously disconnected battery,

screw the new battery in and reconnect the cable.

Doing this increased battery life in my Legion 5 by 35% when watching videos on YouTube,

or 30% when gaming. Which is about what’s expected considering the newer battery was 33% larger.

Of course you can still upgrade the battery with a newer one of the exact same size and

model. The fact is, batteries do not last for ever. If you’ve been using your battery

for years and it doesn’t hold a charge anymore then you might want to upgrade to a newer one.

The model of the battery is usually printed on it, or you can find it with software like hardware

info. Then just Google search for that model and try to find a store that stocks replacements.

It’s very rare, but some laptops, particularly those from the Clevo brand,

actually have removable batteries. So in theory if you’re able to buy

a replacement battery you could quickly shut down and stick a fresh battery in

without taking out any screws. But again, that’s super uncommon. I’m talking like 2

or 3 laptops out of almost 300 laptops that I’ve reviewed had that feature.

Alright next up is storage, which is one of the most common upgrades, because everyone

needs more space to install the latest COD update. It’s not really funny when it’s true…

Most modern gaming laptops have M.2 slots for installing SSDs,

and it’s quite common for there to be a spare M.2 slot available for adding an extra drive.

But this mostly depends on the size of your laptop. Smaller 14 inch laptops

might only have room for one M.2 slot, while a larger 18 inch laptop may have

room for as many as four M.2 drives. But two M.2 slots are most common in my experience.

Unfortunately the spec sheet doesn’t always tell you how many M.2 slots that a laptop has,

so it’s usually just to have a look inside and see what you’re dealing with.

The larger 2280 size is most common, and these size slots usually but not always have support for

the smaller 2230 size as well. Smaller dedicated 2230 M.2 slots are far less common, but do exist

in some laptops like Alienware’s m18 R2, so you can only fit physically smaller sized SSDs here.

Right now, larger 2280 SSDs go up to 8TB in capacity, while the smaller 2230s max out at 2TB,

as there’s just less physical space on them to fit more memory chips. When you

get to those larger capacities, you start getting chips on both sides of the drive,

which takes up more room. Double sided SSDs will not fit in some laptop’s M.2 slots due to space

constraints. At least not without bending the drive, which is not recommended for long term use.

Unfortunately this is not something that I’ve ever seen listed on a laptop spec sheet,

which is why I always mention if it’s a limit in my laptop reviews. Because it would really suck

to buy an 8TB drive only to find that it doesn’t physically fit into your machine. If I haven’t

yet reviewed your specific gaming laptop, then the best you can do is take a look inside and kind of

eyeball it and see if there’s anything that looks like it would be in the way. Oh, and this problem

goes both ways too. Because most of the time when you go to actually buy an SSD it doesn’t say

whether it has the chips on one side or two. You don’t find out until you get it. So the best thing

you can do is try to look up reviews of it and see if there’s any photos or video that will show you.

And absolutely forget about using any M.2 drives designed for desktop motherboards with large

coolers. You can probably take the cooler off and still use the drive. But if a giant cooler

is needed for full performance, then the SSD may throttle under heavy load and perform slower.

Now M.2 is just the name of the physical connector that’s used

to connect the SSD to the laptop’s motherboard.

It’s possible for an M.2 connector in your laptop to support the older and slower SATA interface,

or newer and faster PCIe. So if your laptop only supports SATA M.2 drives

then you’re wasting your money spending more on a more expensive PCIe drive.

You might also see NVMe mentioned when shopping for an SSD, but in most cases,

for all intents and purposes you can just replace that with PCIe.

Sometimes the physical M.2 slot inside the laptop might have text printed on or

near it saying if it supports PCIe, SATA, or both. But again, that’s not always the case

and you might have to check the spec sheet. Though even then there’s still no guarantee.

Many spec sheets only list the storage the laptop comes with rather

than what the spare M.2 slot actually supports, it can be a bit messy. This

Lenovo Legion 7i just mentions it comes with a 1TB PCIe SSD. We have

to dive into their dedicated PDF specs to see that both M.2 slots support PCIe Gen 4.

But not every brand publishes that much information. I feel like I’m repeating myself

when I say that, it really is the common trend throughout this video. Take this Acer product

page for example, they just say that storage supports PCIe - but what version? Who knows.

Which leads us into the differences between PCIe Gen 3.0 and PCIe Gen 4.0. Well, 4.0 is newer and

faster, because higher number equals more better. Alright, thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Ok, but seriously, PCIe Gen 4 is newer and faster. A good Gen 4 SSDs can max out at around 7000MB/s,

while good Gen 3 SSDs can max out at around 3500MB/s, or half of Gen 4. And that’s much

faster compared to a SATA based SSD, which will max out at around 600MB/s.

And PCIe Gen 5 drives can go even faster. But as of right now in mid 2024 there are

very few gaming laptops that actually support that. And it’s not something

you can upgrade to. Unfortunately there’s no software download to upgrade from PCIe Gen 4

to 5 in the future. It’s just something that you have to buy the laptop with.

Oh and just because an SSD is PCIe Gen 4 doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s

actually going to perform better than one that’s Gen 3. A Gen 4 drive could still

have speeds close to a Gen 3 drive, if not worse. There are just other factors at play,

like the storage controller, cache and NAND chips, to name a few. So it’s worth

checking out benchmarks and reviews of a particular SSD before you buy.

Now you can use a PCIe Gen 4 SSD in a Gen 3 slot. It’s just that the Gen 4 drive will be

limited to Gen 3 drives at best. So it is at least backwards compatible. And you can also

use a Gen 3 drive in a Gen 4 slot, but that Gen 4 slot won’t magically make the Gen 3 drive faster.

Alright, so when picking a new SSD for your gaming laptop you need to consider its physical size,

is it actually going to fit in the laptop. You need to consider the connector,

which in most cases is M.2. You need to consider the interface,

so SATA versus PCIe, and then you can pick the capacity and how fast you want it to be.

So then, how much capacity do you actually need from your SSD? Cheaper laptops tend to

come with 512gb SSDs, but there are still some that sell with 256gb drives. Which

is barely enough for Windows and a few programs these days. Now it depends on

how much data you actually plan on storing, but personally I think that 512gb is honestly

the minimum. It’s just a bit small, even 1TB is a bit cramped for me. But again,

this depends on you and how much data you plan on storing. For me, I would at least want 2TB,

but you might be different. All you can really do is take a guess based on how much stuff

you’ve currently got and try to extrapolate it into the future and take a guess at how much

space you’re going to use. And then buy with that in mind, that’s all you can really do.

To install a new drive, you need to remove the included screw, insert the M.2 drive on a bit

of a diagonal angle and push it in. It will only fit one way due to the way it’s keyed,

so you ca not put it in wrong. Then put the screw back in to hold it in place,

but don’t tighten it too much and crush the drive.

Some laptops might have thermal pads included to help cool the drive,

so just leave them in place if they fit. If you’ve got a thicker double sided drive

you might need to remove the cooling pad or cut it up a bit for a cozy fit.

Now if you’ve installed the new SSD in addition to an existing drive, you might need to go to

Computer Management in Windows and set up the drive by formatting and giving it a drive letter.

But then on the other hand, if you’re replacing the SSD that’s already installed in the laptop,

keep in mind that has your Windows installation and all your files. So you’ll either need to use

another machine where you can put both the old SSD and the new SSD in to clone it over,

or otherwise do a fresh installation of Windows onto the new SSD and reinstall all your programs.

Oh, and just a quick rant, it’s worth noting that most Windows 11 laptops have Bitlocker enabled by

default these days, which is Microsoft’s full disk encryption. And that’s there for security,

but if you take out the Windows operating system drive, insert a different drive and

then for whatever reason you take that out and put the original Windows drive back in,

Bitlocker is going to detect a hardware change and lock you out of the drive. At that point the

only way to access it is by entering in the Bitlocker recovery key. But the problem is,

unless you’ve been logging into Windows with a Microsoft account

then you won’t have this and you’ll lose access to all your files forever.

Now this might just be an issue for us local Windows account die-hards out there, because

if you use a Microsoft account Windows will automatically back up the Bitlocker recovery key

to your Windows account. If you’re using a local account and Bitlocker automatically set itself up,

you’re not going to have the recovery key. Unless you set Bitlocker up yourself and

saved the recovery key. And even if you do have your Bitlocker recovery key available in your

Windows account online in the cloud somewhere, if the laptop you’re currently upgrading is the only

device you have with Internet connectivity then you’re not going to be able to use it

to go and grab the bitlocker recovery key once you’ve started this process.

So you’ll have to make sure that you’ve got the bitlocker recovery key in advance just in case.

So just to play it safe, I think that it's worth either suspending Bitlocker while you

work on hardware changes through Windows, or even completely disable it altogether. And don’t forget

to turn it back on when you’re done though, as full disk encryption is useful for security.

Cheaper budget gaming laptops may still have older 2.5” drive bays,

so you can either install a SATA based SSD or some spinning rust, AKA a hard drive,

if you like pain. But loading any files from a hard drive or even just booting the operating

system takes a long time compared to an SSD. And budget SSDs have become so cheap these

days that I honestly think there’s no excuse. In 2024 you should not be buying a 2.5” hard

drive for your laptop. Just get a 2.5” SATA SSD instead and save yourself the headache.

It depends on the design of your laptop, but usually there will be a drive caddy you screw

the drive into, and then you just connect it to the SATA port. Then go through the same

computer management process covered earlier to format the drive and assign it a drive letter.

Alright let’s get into RAM upgrades next.

Most gaming laptops have two slots for random access memory sticks, aka RAM, aka memory, but up

to 4 is possible in much larger laptops like MSI’s Titan series. Some thinner laptops might have just

one memory slot, with the rest soldered to the motherboard, while some other smaller laptops

like ASUS’s 2024 version of the Zephyrus G14 offer zero room for memory upgrades. In those cases,

you just have to buy it with enough memory from the start, because you can never change it.

Even the cheapest budget friendly gaming laptops ship with at least 8 gigs of RAM

installed these days. Which I don’t think is really enough for a gaming laptop,

unless you’re doing just the most basic of tasks.

16 gigs on the other hand has been a solid mid-range option for a number of years now,

and while I think that it’s still enough to get the job done in plenty of modern games,

I think we’re starting to get to the point where I wouldn’t consider 16 gigs to be an upgrade.

Honestly 16 gigs is more of a baseline and a nice upgrade would look more like going to 32 gigs.

And then if you need more than that, well you’re probably someone that knows about it like you’re

a content creator or programmer, something like that. In which case you might be looking at 64

gigs or even 128 gigs. Or I think right now we can go up to 192 gigs with the 4 slots in

MSI’s Titan series with the new 48 gig memory sticks. Though that does have the downside of

running at slower speeds in order to get that higher capacity, so there’s trade offs there.

Now memory capacity or its total size is probably what most of you think of when it comes to RAM,

so like 8 gigs, 16 gigs, 32 gigs and so on. And that’s because it determines how

much stuff you can have open at once. But as you’ll see soon, there’s way more to RAM than

just that. The capacity is usually one of the few things that’s actually listed on a laptop’s spec

sheet.A quick and dirty way to see if you would benefit from more memory capacity is to check the

Windows task manager. You can get a rough idea of how much memory you’re using for different

tasks. If you run out of memory space, it’s going to start swapping to disk, which means your SSD

acts as an overflow. But as fast as modern SSDs may be, they don’t come close to RAM.

In other words, laptop performance gets worse if you run out of RAM space. But again,

there’s way more to RAM upgrades than just total capacity. For one thing,

you also need to know whether your laptop uses DDR4 memory or DDR5 memory. Because the sticks

are not physically compatible. It’s not possible to install DDR4 memory into a DDR5 laptop,

or vice versa. You can not upgrade from DDR4 to DDR5, but based on my testing,

a DDR5 laptop doesn’t really perform that much better than a DDR4 one anyway. Granted

that was when DDR5 came out and there is faster DDR5 memory sticks now. So you don’t have to worry

about installing the wrong memory in your laptop, but you do have to worry about buying the correct

memory for it. And fortunately the laptop spec sheet will probably list whether it’s DDR4 or

DDR5. But that’s not always the case, and some Intel 12th, 13th or 14th gen laptops may have a

DDR4 version or a DDR5 version. Take the Gigabyte Aorus for example, I believe they sell the exact

same laptop but there’s one that takes DDR4 memory and then there’s another one that takes DDR5. So

if you’ve got the DDR5 version of the laptop, you need to buy DDR5 memory. But then when you

go and look at the spec sheets you might be like there’s DDR4 and 5, which one do I get?

The easiest way to know for sure is just to check what memory you’re currently running,

and task manager will show how fast your RAM is running. A speed of 4800 or higher is probably

DDR5, while 3200 or lower is probably DDR4. Or you can just look at the labels on the

sticks inside your laptop, that’ll usually clear things up. If in doubt, Google search the model.

And that speed of the memory will affect performance, so upgrading to memory with a higher

speed is generally beneficial. But again, it’s not quite that simple because some memory will

need overclocking or XMP profiles in order to hit higher speeds, which 99% or so of gaming laptops

don’t actually support. So you can only go as high as the memory controller on the processor allows.

So for say a laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor, the maximum is DDR4-3200 according

to the spec sheet for that CPU. Meanwhile a newer laptop with Intel Core i9-13900HX

may also support that, or DDR5-5600. While a lower tier i7-13700H from the same processor

generation only goes up to DDR5-5200. You could install DDR5-5600 RAM no problem,

it’ll just run at the lower 5200 speed, as that’s the limit of the processor’s memory controller.

Now if you’ve got DDR4 memory, it’s absolutely critical that you run with 2 sticks installed,

known as dual channel. I’ve done videos about this in the past,

but long story short, you can get a really nice performance boost in games by running

in dual channel. So use 2 sticks instead of 1 with DDR4. That would be a nice upgrade.

That’s less important with the newer DDR5 though, because with DDR5 one stick kind of runs in its

own fake dual channel, to oversimplify things. So you can still get a little improvement by

using 2 sticks of DDR5 instead of 1, but it’s going to be way smaller compared to DDR4.

Now we move into parts of memory that are rarely specified on any spec sheets.

Another thing to consider with DDR4 is whether the memory is x8 or x16. Long story short,

this refers to the memory banks, and x8 memory is faster than x16 memory. There

is still some difference for DDR5 memory, but it’s nowhere near as much compared to DDR4.

Then there are also ranks to consider. Dual rank memory performs better than single rank memory,

but it costs more too. And this is usually specified on the stick by 1R for single rank,

or 2R for dual rank. Again, this isn’t something you’ll find listed on your laptop’s specs,

and even many RAM listings don’t tell you. This is especially true for memory timings,

which also affect performance. Lower timings are typically better,

but cost more money as only higher quality memory can manage it.

It’s really annoying how difficult it is to try and get the full picture on RAM that you want

to spend your money on. And also annoying that laptop spec sheets don’t list all the details

of the memory that it comes with. In most cases you’ve got no idea until you’ve actually bought

the laptop and run some software to get all the detailed specs yourself. And it matters

because these things clearly affect game performance, as I’ve shown just before.

Ok, so for most people a solid memory upgrade would be the jump from 1 to 2 memory sticks.

Or a jump from 8 or 16 gigs up to 32 gigs of total capacity. x8 sticks are preferable over

x16 sticks, and dual rank with lower timings is an extra luxury if you’ve got more money. And ideally

if possible you want both memory sticks to be the same sized capacity. So say 8 gigs and 8 gigs,

or 16 gigs and 16 gigs. You can definitely run an 8 and 16 configuration, it just won’t be quite as

good as having them both the same size. At least based on my testing. It doesn’t seem to matter

too much when the difference isn’t that big, but if the difference starts getting big like

you’ve got an 8 gig stick and a 32 gig stick, then it can start causing negative performance.

Clear as mud? Alright, good.

As for actually performing the RAM upgrade, it’s as simple as pulling the metal tabs of the old

memory out and taking out the sticks. Then you put the new sticks in on a bit of an angle and

push them down until they click into place. The memory sticks are keyed so that they can only

fit in one way, it’s not possible to put them in backwards. Some laptops might have some sort of

cover over the memory, so just take that off first and put it back in place after.

Alright, Wi-Fi is up next. Have you ever tried to download “movies” and wondered why

your Wi-Fi is so slow? Well, it could be due to a number of reasons that I covered here,

like your Internet service provider sucking or your router being super old.

But you could be limited by your laptop’s Wi-Fi. Luckily it’s only a $20-30 upgrade! And

it may also give you a newer bluetooth version too, which means better device connectivity.

The best way to check what Wi-Fi you’ve currently got is to go into device manager and look under

network adapters. Or you can check in task manager if you’re already connected to a Wi-Fi network.

If you’ve got Wi-Fi 5 for example,

then a nice upgrade might be Wi-Fi 6, 6E or the latest Wi-Fi 7.

But keep in mind that if your wireless router runs at say Wi-Fi 5 then upgrading your laptop

to Wi-Fi 6 isn’t going to get you a speed boost, because the laptop is going to have to downgrade

to the older connection to support the older router. Both sides of the connection need to

be speaking the same language. Though an upgrade to your laptop would still be useful if you take

your laptop out and about and connect it to other networks, as chances are some of

those networks might be newer than yours. So still a beneficial upgrade in that case.

Here’s what an installed Wi-Fi card looks like. It’s a small M.2 2230 chip, easily identifiable

by the two antenna cables that connect to it. But before you just buy a faster Wi-Fi card,

you need to take a look inside your laptop and find out what it supports.

M.2 wireless cards come with different keys, which is this bit on the end that

you plug into the M.2 socket on your laptop. Basically they have different bits cut out to

prevent you plugging the wrong thing in, so you have to get in there and take a look at

what you’ve got. The “E” key is most common in my experience, and is printed on the Wi-Fi card.

Popular Wi-Fi cards like Intel’s AX210 for Wi-Fi 6E have both A and E keys, while the newer BE200

for Wi-Fi 7 only has the E key, so if your M.2 slot only supports the A key then you’re out of

luck with that card. Unfortunately the type of key doesn’t seem to be listed on the spec sheet,

so your best bet is doing a Google image search for the card you plan on buying.

But wait, of course it gets even more confusing…

Take Intel’s AX210 and AX211 Wi-Fi cards as an example. They both support Wi-Fi 6E and

most of the specs between them are the same. Except the 211

version lists CNVio2 for its interface type, while the 210 version lists PCIe.

CNVio2 is an Intel proprietary standard and can only be used with an Intel 10th

gen or newer processor, while the older CNVio needs an Intel 8th or

9th gen processor. And of course CNVio2 is not backwards compatible with CNVio…

The reason Intel does this is they move some of the stuff from the Wi-Fi card and

instead includes it within the processor itself, simplifying their Wi-Fi modules.

So although the M.2 slot and key might look the same, this means that you can’t

use a CNVio Wi-Fi card with a laptop that has an AMD processor, or even older Intel

processor. But you should be able to use a Wi-Fi card that supports PCIe in a CNVio slot.

And apparently AMD doesn't like their partners using Intel Wi-Fi in their laptops. So OEMs like

MSI, ASUS, and everyone else for that matter who sell gaming laptops with an AMD processor,

they use alternative Wi-Fi cards like Realtek, Mediatek or Qualcomm. So just to be clear,

you can upgrade a laptop with an AMD processor to an Intel Wi-Fi card. The Intel Wi-Fi card

just has to be the PCIe version, so AX210. And not the CNVio2 version, so AX211 in this case.

Based on my testing, from a pure raw performance standpoint,

in many cases the newer Mediatek cards perform quite well on Wi-Fi 6. Though people seem to

report more issues with them like slow speeds, high latency and drops, leading them to swap to an

Intel Wi-Fi card. Intel options are competitive, still fast, and destroy the older Realtek and

Mediatek options. Intel is also way easier to buy and find the latest drivers for in my experience.

So then, which Wi-Fi card should you get? Honestly, for most people,

I think you’d be looking for an Intel Wi-Fi card with PCIe support,

like AX210 for Wi-Fi 6E. Because that works on both AMD and Intel laptops and it works

in Intel laptops whether they support CNVio2 or not. No proprietary garbage.

If you’re using Windows 10, then you’ll need an extra manual update to use the

6GHz band with Wi-Fi 6E, as that’s only supported by Windows 11 out of the box.

For the newer Wi-Fi 7, Intel’s BE200 cards seem to be the only option right now in mid 2024.

And so far some people report it not working properly with AMD laptops, while others say

it worked ok for them after a BIOS update. So tread carefully, Wi-Fi 7 is still extremely new.

Anyway, to remove the Wi-Fi card you need to pull off the antenna cables,

taking note of which cable goes where, as you need to put them back in the right

spot. The cables come off fairly easily with your fingers and might be covered by

some tape to keep them in place. Take out the screw, pull out the old card,

insert your new card, screw it in, and put the antenna cables back in the correct spot.

Once that’s done, boot into Windows and get the latest drivers for your card. In most cases that

just comes from Windows update. But for Intel I like to use their automatic driver update tool,

which identifies your hardware and downloads the latest version.

For whatever reason I’ve had a really tough time trying to find downloads for Realtek and Mediatek

Wi-Fi. I don’t know if they’re just hidden, maybe they’ve changed things in the last 6-12 months,

but in my experience Intel is so much easier to update. It’s also worth mentioning that in

some cases after you put the new Wi-Fi in it won’t work without an update,

so you might get stuck. So in order to avoid that you would want to try and download the

drivers for your new Wi-Fi card before you swap it out so that you still have Internet

connectivity to get those files. It shouldn’t be a problem in a lot of cases because the laptop

will have some basic older driver that it will be able to use, but it depends on

the Wi-Fi cards you’re using. So yeah, try to download driver files beforehand if possible.

Unfortunately some laptops come with a smaller Wi-Fi chip soldered to the motherboard like this,

which unfortunately cannot be upgraded. But don’t worry,

there’s still hope! You just have to use a USB to Wi-Fi dongle instead.

These can be very small and unobtrusive, though they still waste a USB slot,

or they can be bigger with large antennas that may perform better as the antenna’s are

external from the laptop. And you know what they say, bigger antenna means bigger …. Bandwidth.

But those bigger antenna may get in the way depending on the design and where the

USB ports are on your laptop. Although you can’t really upgrade ethernet on a laptop,

you can do the same thing and use a USB dongle to easily go from gigabit

to 2.5 gigabit ethernet - just check your laptop’s version of USB is fast enough.

Alright let’s get into some cooling upgrades next. These are quite common

as many gaming laptops run hot. That’s just what happens when you cram so much power into

a smaller space. And if temperatures get too high, then thermal throttling happens,

which means less performance in addition to the laptop feeling uncomfortable.

The most common cooling upgrade is to replace the thermal paste of the CPU and

GPU. Laptop makers tend to cut corners on their cheaper laptop designs and use cheaper thermal

paste. That’s the stuff that sits between our CPU and GPU and cooler sandwich. It

helps transfer the heat between those heat generating components out to the cooler.

Changing the thermal paste can significantly lower CPU and GPU temperatures. Unfortunately

most laptop brands don’t actually tell you what paste they’re using in their laptop - which

probably means that it’s crap. Sometimes they do tell you but only if it’s a well known high

quality version, as that is a good selling point. But even if the paste is good, it can still dry

out over time and might start performing worse. So swapping it out could still help. Again, it

depends on the paste but personally I don’t think I would bother changing the paste in my laptop

more than once every year or two years. Even with heavy use. But that’s me, I know some people do

it every 6 months or so. Yeah it depends on the paste and I suppose if you’re paranoid about it

you can monitor the temps before the change and after the change and then over time see if the

temps start degrading, and if they do then maybe you might want to look at changing the paste.

In most cases all you can really do is try and buy a high quality paste and see if it helps. Worst

case if you buy a good quality paste and change it and your laptop already had good quality paste,

it should perform about the same, no harm done. Actually I guess the real worst case

would be you apply your new quality paste and the temperatures get worse. But in that case

you might have just applied it incorrectly, so you could always open it up again and try and reapply.

Higher end laptops might come with liquid metal installed,

and this has a much higher thermal conductivity than thermal paste - it’s just more efficient

at transferring the heat out of the CPU and GPU up into the cooler. In that case,

I probably wouldn’t try to replace liquid metal because it’s just going to be a mess and too much

of a hassle. And realistically you’re probably not going to get that much of an improvement compared

to the stock liquid metal application. And you know at the start how I talked about warranty,

I think sometimes when you mess around with the liquid metal application that can affect it. So

yeah be careful. Liquid metal can just be straight up dangerous for your laptop because it’s metal,

it conducts electricity. You can easily kill your laptop if you get liquid metal where it

doesn’t belong. Again, you’ve got to be really careful with that stuff. It’s definitely not

something I would suggest if you’ve never changed thermal paste on your laptop,

as there’s much more preparation involved. I’m not going to go into liquid metal application here,

if you want that you’ll have to check out a dedicated guide on YouTube somewhere.

Now most laptops that have liquid metal installed will tell you about it on their product page,

because again it’s a pretty good selling point for them to advertise. Some brands

like ASUS make it easy and tell you exactly which models use liquid metal,

and whether it’s on the CPU, GPU, or both, but unfortunately most others don’t do that.

As for which thermal paste to use, in the past I’ve used thermal grizzly kryonaut or Noctua

NT-H2, as both are rated quite well and are fairly easy to buy. Honeywell PTM 7950 is quite

popular too, but until recently it was harder to buy legit stuff. You can buy pads of it

from lttstore.com now, not sponsored, but this is what I’d be choosing these days.

Alright so to change the paste, basically you want to unscrew

and remove the heatsink covering the CPU and GPU. Every laptop is different here,

so see if there’s any information for your specific model. For example with

some laptops you have to take the fans out first, but with others they might stay in.

Some brands like Lenovo publish detailed teardown guides, but most others don’t give you anything

unfortunately. So seeing if there’s a guide on YouTube for a teardown is probably your best bet.

Anyway you’ll want to clean off all the old paste from the cooler,

CPU and GPU dies. You can do this with 99% isopropyl alcohol,

but you can also get special liquids designed for removing thermal paste.

These definitely aren’t required and usually cost more, so just stick to isopropyl alcohol.

Some people use paper towel to wipe off the paste, but the hack seems to be to use

coffee filters because they’re lint free and don’t leave residue behind. I used a

cloth and cotton swabs, which were great for getting into the edges of the chips.

Once everything is clean you’re ready to apply the new thermal paste. The CPU is

usually a longer rectangle, so I cover that with a generous line.

The GPU tends to be more square, so I go for a more pea sized dab there.

As long as you’re using non-conductive paste it doesn’t really matter if there’s extra and it

goes over the die a bit. It’s more important to ensure that the whole die gets covered.

Seriously, this is just something I don’t get, I know someone is going to complain about my thermal

paste application in the comments because they always do. Everyone has different opinions, but I

just don’t get it. There are people who literally think if you put too much paste it’s going to

somehow prevent the cooler making proper contact. Like once you screw the cooler back into the

motherboard it’s going to have the same amount of space between the CPU and GPU dies no matter what.

That paste isn’t going to stop that pressure, it’s just going to slide out of the way. So yeah

don’t worry about that too much, as long as you’ve got enough to cover the dies you should be good.

Alternatively, if you’re using Honeywell PTM 7950,

then you cut the pad to the size of the die it’s covering.

You might also have thicker paste applied to VRMs, which I had. Regular thermal

paste doesn’t go too well there, it’s just too runny and not the right consistency,

so in those cases I used thermal pads instead which aren’t as messy.

And then you put the heatsink back on. Try to line it up right so you push it directly down

as that will help spread the paste evenly, then screw it back in. I try to tighten it

as much as I can without going overboard, as you want the heatsink to have a nice

connection to the CPU and GPU dies. Don’t start stripping the screws or anything.

Now the last time I went through a thermal paste change I didn’t actually

get any benefit to temperatures. So presumably there wasn’t any problem

with the paste that my laptop already had. Or the paste that I swapped it

with at the very least wasn’t worse. Other people have reported anywhere from 5, 10,

even 20 degree Celsius drops after changing thermal paste, so your mileage will vary.

But if you don’t want to risk any of that,

which is completely understandable, you could try a stand or cooling pad instead.

Most laptops bring cool air in through the bottom,

so just lifting the back up a bit can help quite a lot.

I tested thermals on 10 laptops, and just running them on a flat surface like a table

was the warmest. Using a basic stand was able to lower temps a few degrees, but the cooling

pads were best as they have a fan to help blow air into the laptop. The difference in temps

between the stand and cooling pad wasn’t much, but stands don’t have fans and are silent, and

can be much more portable like this fold up one I use. I’ll leave a link to it below the video.

Or if you’ve got a special laptop from XMG or Eluktronics then you can literally upgrade to

water cooling. But those laptops come with the necessary internal plumbing ready for

their optional liquid cooler, which gives you better performance and much less fan noise.

There are people who have done custom water cooled mods on their laptops,

but that’s not something I can recommend for most people as it’s so easy for something

to go wrong. Turns out water and electronics don’t mix too well.

Alright, so what about screen upgrades? Although screen upgrades are certainly possible,

they’ve become much less common in recent years. I think they’re harder compared to

all the other upgrades we’ve covered so far. Both because taking off the screen’s bezel safely can

be tricky depending on the laptop, and because there are just so many laptops and panel models

on the market that it can be hard to know what panel you need to buy to fit into your laptop.

There are standards for the cable that connects from the screen to the motherboard, like eDP or

embedded DisplayPort. But at the end of the day, the panel you buy needs to fit into the

lid of your existing laptop perfectly. And that space is just going to vary between each laptop.

Just because your laptop has a 16 inch screen doesn’t mean you can just buy any 16 inch panel.

Your best bet is to google search your laptop

model and see if there are any panels out there that can be used to upgrade.

This video from Linus Tech Tips back in 2018 was based on some guy in a forum who

had already bought a panel and tried to upgrade their specific Acer laptop. Now in their case,

the laptop they used was very easy to upgrade.

This panel listing on eBay specifies all the laptop models that the panel should work with,

for example. So that type of information is extremely useful when researching.

If your laptop was available with different screen options at the time of purchase,

say 1080p and 1440p and you got it with the 1080p, then yeah there’s a

higher chance that you can probably but the correct 1440p panel and install that later.

But honestly for most people, I think you’d be better off just using

that money and buying a bigger gaming monitor. And then when you’re at home

you just connect your laptop and you’ve got a much bigger screen ready to go.

Yeah you can’t exactly take it with you easily when you move the laptop, but a bigger screen just

looks far better to play games on and view content on. There are far more options in terms of size,

refresh rate, resolution, brightness, response time, color gamut and more.

Alright so all of those upgrades were kind of cute. But let’s be real, we all know that it’s

the CPU and GPU that are responsible for giving us more FPS in games, so how do we upgrade those?

Well, in more than 99% of cases unfortunately you cannot upgrade the CPU or GPU of a laptop.

Most gaming laptops just have the CPU and GPU soldered to the motherboard and they can never

be upgraded. The only way to change is by buying a whole new laptop. Well, technically you might

be able to purchase an entire motherboard that already has a better CPU and GPU on it that were

from some other laptop that’s the same model as yours and then take your motherboard out

and swap in the new one, but that’s super unlikely as brands don’t exactly sell their

motherboards for their laptops like that. You’d have to get one second hand from someone else,

at which point you might as well just buy their laptop and swap to it, save yourself the headache.

There are some older laptops like the Alienware 51m or Clevo X170 that have socketable processors

and MXM graphics, allowing you to change both the CPU and GPU. But upgrades are usually

limited to another chip from the same generation anyway. So you’re not getting a

gen on gen upgrade, maybe just a little nice boost, and that’s the best case. Plus these

sorts of upgradeable designs just haven’t been present in this current laptop generation from

2023 to 2024. At least I haven’t seen any, so only last gen hardware is going to be available.

Pretty much the only modern laptop that offers this sort of upgradeability is the Framework 16,

which goes above and beyond and lets you customize far more than any other laptop

on the market. You can pull out the discrete graphics and swap it,

granted in mid 2024 there aren’t yet any other higher end GPUs to swap it with.

Now there are actually some laptops that will be announced at Computex 2024. I can’t say too much,

but let’s just say upgradeable CPUs and GPUs might be making a bit of

a comeback. We’ll have to wait and see, and even if that does come out

that doesn’t help any of you who already have laptops that are looking to upgrade.

Now if your laptop has a Thunderbolt port then technically it is possible to connect external

graphics, and this is done with an external graphics enclosure, AKA eGPU. But I wouldn’t

recommend this for most people looking to play games though, as Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt

4 bandwidth severely limits performance. There’s just a lot of data that needs to get sent between

the laptop and the external graphics, and it’s just constantly going back and forth spitting

out all those frames from the GPU to your laptop. So if you buy an expensive desktop graphics card

you’ll only get a fraction of its performance this way. It’s just not very cost efficient or

practical. It might still end up better compared to your laptop’s old GPU, but I’ve had all sorts

of issues with Thunderbolt connectivity from random drop outs to applications just freezing and

crashing. Seriously, it’s just so much hassle it’s really not something I can recommend to anyone.

Thunderbolt 5 is just around the corner though, and promises to double if not triple bandwidth,

so things may change in the future. But unfortunately the only way to get

a laptop with Thunderbolt 5 support is to buy a laptop that has Thunderbolt 5,

it’s not something you can upgrade. So if your laptop has Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4,

you can’t get Thunderbolt 5. You’re stuck with what you’ve got.

Alright, now that you’ve invested time and money into laptop upgrades you want

your laptop to last longer, right? Well then check out this video where I go through my top

5 ways to make your gaming laptop last longer. I’ll see you in that one next!