What is your laptop like? I'm stuck between a triton 500 and the y540/740 but it seems that upgrading the RAM in the Triton is an absolute nightmare?? Specs wise they're nearly identical on both machines it would simply be more if an aesthetics thing and cooling/portability.
I'd be up for OC some of the components in both is it relatively easy to do?
The mainboard on the Triton is upside down, so to upgrade any components, you need to totally remove the mainboard. Honestly, aslong as you're careful with the cables it's really not that hard, it's just not a case of removing the back of the case and dropping in the upgrades. As for build quality, I'm very happy with it, nothing like the last acer laptop I had years ago It feels like a quality product, it's rigid with very little flex... although it is a finger print magnet due to the paint finish. It's not quite up to the build quality of my 2015 macbook, but I'd take the slightly reduced build quality over all the other nonsense that goes along with having a macbook. I find it to be quite subtle compared to many gaming laptops (and I covered the logo on the top of the laptop with some vinyl). Keep in mind the RGB isn't per key if that matters to you, it has 3 zones (the wasd and up, down, left, right keys are tinted to make them stand out)
You can't OC the processor but you can undervolt it, I use throttlestop for this and guides on how to do it are easy to find online. This means it's less likely to overheat or hit any power limits... it can hit higher boost clocks for longer as a result. Overclocking the graphics card is a bit of a pain with the switchable graphics though, msi afterburner keeps waking up the GPU, not a problem plugged in, but using the battery it really, really eats into battery life. (Think 6-7 hours down to 3). I ended up altering some settings in the predatorsense settings folder and skipping on afterburner. In terms of reflashing the 80w bios to a 90w bios, that's a little bit more involved and it depends on what card you go for anyway. I'd see if you're happy with performance before you reflash. Reflashing is always a risk and going outside of the laptops thermal design limits isn't necessarily a good idea.
Here are a couple of links for what I did to overclock the GPU and upgrade memory etc.
GPU Overclock (Just the first part of the video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN6i_H-sj1k
Memory Upgrade (Removing mainboard).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-PmEaytJOA
(With this one, my laptop didn't have the large black covering over the motherboard to remove before taking screws out, not sure why!)
If you choose to redo the thermal paste, keep in mind there is also thermal paste on some VRMs, particularly around the GPU. This thermal paste was quite hard, once you remove the heatsink installation you can't really put it back without replacing all of that paste, at least in my opinion. Make sure you have enough!
And just to add, the predatorsense app seems to cause high dpc latency when undervolting (audio crackles etc) on battery in particular. Easy enough to fix, just change any settings you want in the program then close it. Only open it when you need to!
Generally (well, for 15" or smaller laptops), you don't overclock, you leave at stock but undervolt, as the majority of the smaller/slimmer laptops can't handle full stock temps anyway and throttle.
I honestly believe the cooling in the Triton 500 copes well with the 8300h and 2060. The fans don't ramp up to maximum and there would be enough thermal headroom for overclocking if I could over ride the power limits! Obviously the laptop would be significantly noisier as a result, the 180w power brick would be a limitation as well.
I think the 8750/9750 would suffer a lot more from thermal and power throttling though.
Seems like GPUs and CPUs are starting to hit the point where the smaller cooling solutions in laptops can cope with genuinely quite powerful parts (in terms of performance). If you don't start chucking silly numbers of cores in.
