M15X looking to purchase, apparently games lag on it READ

[xPhantam]

Okay, so my little brother wants an upgrade from my old laptop which he is now using as I went desktop

Atm it's an old Toshiba by old I mean like 6/7 years old. Dated and can't play games that well any more no matter what I try to do to it.

Anywho, his friend is selling an Alienware M15x for around £200/£250. First off I'd like to know if that's worth it, I've searched on ebay etc and they still sell for around £300 so I figured sure why not.



Before I carry on any further, I don't know the whole shabang of the setup I know it's got
Intel Core i7-720QM
GeForce GTX 260M

I also don't have it on me although apparently his friend is bringing it around tomorrow for me to have a look at.

Now Main part, first his friend said it could play Bf3 etc etc

Now he's saying that you can play a game like Minecraft for say 10/20 minutes then the fps starts to lower and I believe he said the screen goes like purple/green? So I asked if he meant artifacts but he wasn't 100% sure. He also said that some games run slower now than they used to etc

As of the present moment I don't know if it's ever been sent off for repair, if it's had thermal paste reapplied etc etc cleaned out you guys know

So, I'm here asking you guys cos I'm in need of some help here, is the GPU gone or is it perhaps a driver/cooling problem? I'm only asking for speculation as like I mentioned I don't have hands on with it. So if any of you could perhaps give me some tips on what to look out for, what to test and most of all what this could possibly mean. My first reaction was a faulty GPU, then I thought the drivers, then I was like maybe it's just the cooling but I'm not really that tech smart so I can't tell you guys the definitives sorry I'd really really appreciate help as I'm not the best with hardware but I'm pretty up to date so don't worry about linking in depth stuff etc I can usually get my head around it ^^

If anything sticks out to me or a fix one of you lot mentions works I'll surely update.

Many thanks..
Chris

 

[amateurhour89]

at that price i would say totally worth it. my m15x i feel is wonderful. many people will tell you to upgrade to the 940xm, which, yes is a beast... but very expensive even now ($350+ usd) my i7 740qm works fine, with my gpu being the bottleneck. i get 25-30fps in battles in planetside 2 which is insanely hard on CPUs. i play at medium (5730m being the reason) which is also the reason for the low fps. i overclocked my card 195Mhz and now play at 30+ all the time fps. gta 4 plays almost maxed out, crysis 1/2 plays very well depending on area (30+ fps usually in highly graphically intensive areas). skyrim just about maxed with mild enb + mods like weather packs and mild texture packs.

also, it sounds like the graphics card is overheating. when i got mine from craigslist, i had to take it apart and clean the vents (very plugged and dirty) once cleaned temps dropped 10-15*c on both card and cpu maxes. the vents are super easy to clean, the disasemble is made so simple, pop the backplate off and undo the screw for the vent shield and take out the fan. you don't have to remove keyboards or something pain in the butt'ish. i also repasted with arctic silver 5 on both cpu and gpu. if worse comes to worse and your card is shot, the 6770m is a very nice card (screams past my cards performance and has a gddr5 advantage vs my gddr3) and in the states i can grab one for $50 ebay, so maybe £40 for you?

all in all, i still find my m15x viable even with the i7 740qm, its my mobile game station. not nearly as powerful as my desktop, but surprisingly powerful for its age. if he wants to play things on maxed out settings at 1490p or w/e. not for him. but if he is wanting a solid set up which can be upgraded to modern cards and play newer games at high/medium this is a nice buy.