RAM is nice to upgrade, for sure. As well as an SSD, but CPUs are still a must. I would even suggest upgradeable GPUs but I don't think the money is there for the manufacturers. Why allow you to upgrade when you can buy a whole new laptop?
RAM/Storage are great upgrades because 5 years from now you can pop in 4x the capacity at a bargain since it's the "old slow type". CPUs don't really get the same growth in a socket's lifespan.
The technical differences between sockets aren't usually huge. Upgrade the memory standard here, add or remove PCIe lanes there. Using new cores with an older memory controller may or may not be doable, but it's quite simple to not connect all the PCIe lanes the die supports.
The RAM/SSD sure - a 2 TB consumer SSD wasn't even a possible thing to buy until a year after that laptop would have come out and you can get that for <$100 new now. It won't be the highest performing modern drive but it'll still max out the bus and be many times larger than the original drive. Swap equipment 3 years from now and that's also still a great usable drive rather than a museum piece. Upgrading to a CPU that you could have gotten around the time the laptop came out? Sure, it has twice as many cores... but it still has pretty bad multi core performance and a god awful perf/wattage ratio to be investing new money on a laptop for. It's also a bit of a dead end, in 3 years you'll now have 2 CPUs so ancient you can't really do much with them.
- Every time a new ToTL GPU comes out for a new family, buy it at retail price as soon as it launches (so, the first-available ToTL models that were big gains in perf: GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 3090, RTX 4090)
- Every other release cycle, upgrade CPU to the ToTL consumer chip (eg on a 12900KS right now, HEDT like ThreadRipper is super expensive and not usually better for gaming or normal dev stuff). I was with Ryzen since 1800x -> 3950x -> 5950x but Intel is better for the particular game I play 90% of the time.
- Every time you upgrade, sell the stuff you've upgraded ASAP. If you do this right and never pay above MSRP for parts, you can usually keep running very high-end hardware for minimal TCO.
- Buy a great case, ToTL >1000w PSU (Seasonic or be quiet!), and ToTL cooling system (currently on half a dozen 140mm Noctua fans and a Corsair 420mm AIO). This should last at least 3 generations of upgrading the other stuff.
- Storage moves more slowly than the rest, and I've had cycles where I've re-used RAM as well, so again here go for the good stuff to maximize perf, but older SSDs work great for home servers or whatever else.
- Monitor and other peripherals are outside of the scope of this but should hopefully last at least 3 upgrade generations. I bit when OLED TVs supported 4K 120hz G-Sync, so I've got a 55" LG G1 that I'm still quite happy with and not wanting to immediately upgrade, though I do wish they made it in a 42" size, and 16:10 would be just perfect.Because you can't swap the motherboard, your options for CPUs are going to be quite limited. Generally, only higher-tier CPUs of that same generation - which draw more power and require more cooling.
Generally a laptop is built designed to provide a specific budget of power to the CPU and has a limited amount of cooling.
Even if you could swap out the CPU, it wouldn't work properly if the laptop couldn't provide the necessary power or cooling.
And the good thing about mobile CPUs is that they have almost the same TDP across the various dual-quad versions(or whatever is the norm today).
IMO the switch to an SSD would have been the biggest boost.
> Because you can't swap the motherboard,
https://frame.work/ has entered the chat.
If we can convince the companies to actually try for compatibility, then a revival of MXM is probably a significantly better option.
In framework's case, the cooling is integrated in the gpu module, and both it's size, cooling and power deliver can be adjusted depending on the gpu power.
A friend of mine was betrayed on this by MSI, where laptops with GTX 900 series GPUs were promised upgrades and then when the 1000 series came out they didn't offer any. I think they did make weak excuses about power use, but a 1060 would have fit within the power budget fine and been an enormous upgrade. A few people have even gotten 1060 modules to work with BIOS edits, so it wasn't some other incompatibility. It seems like they saw they couldn't offer a 1080 and threw out the entire project and promise, and then offered a mild discount on a brand new laptop, no other recourse.
In a way I don't mind having non-replaceable ram in the framework ecosystem as an option. Put simply because the motherboard itself is modular and needs to be upgraded for the CPU. At that point though I would prefer on integrated ram CPU/GPU.
Looks like the best card they have out with MXM right now is a Quadro RTX 5000 Mobile which seem to be going for ~$1000 on eBay.
This way, you could keep power consumption low and be able to upgrade cpu to a new generation
And soldering stuff to the board is the default way to make something when upgradeability isn't a feature.