The SONY VAIO VGX-XL302 Hardware Upgrading Thread

[rsebre]

I have a SONY VAIO VGX-XL302...
I am looking to upgrade it to the max, and I'm sure others are too, so please lets all contribute to this thread and we all can save each other a lot of bother...

The VGX-XL302 uses SDRAM DIMM - 667Mhz DDR2...
Which memory is the best SDRAM DIMM - 667Mhz (DDR2) on the market at present, something with heat spreaders and the lowest latency times avaliable?
Also as Vista only uses 3GB of memory is there a way of assigning the spare 1GB of memory to the Graphics card and Sound card, I read it was possible to force Vista into allocating the memory to the cards, by tweaking some setting in the BIOS. Please if anybody knows, let us know.

The VGX-XL302 uses the nVidia GeForce 7600 GTL....
Which cards can you replace it with? - (anything using the G98 core yet?)
Something that uses passive cooling and runs silent and colder the better. And also has onboard HD/H246 decoding and a better in game proformance than the nVidia GeForce 7600 GTL, please let me know...

The VGX-XL302 uses the Intel Core Duo processor E6400....
Is this upgradeable?

And finally the Hard Drive the the VGX-XL302 uses is a 500 Gb (S-ATA) 2 x 250 Gb
(7.5 GB reserved - recovery space)...
Which is the fastest solid state drive that I can replace them with?

:smileygrin: So please contribute to this thread as I will be continualy be updaing it myself, and it will save us all a lot of bother searching the internet for information.
The VGX XL 302 is the best media center you can buy at present, and hopefully we can take it further, lokking forward to your replies.

Richardsebire@Hotmail.com

[Charlie_Springall]

I have just upgraded my 2 year old XL201 to:
E6600 running and at 2.4 I wanted to get a e6700 @ 2.66Ghz but got the e6600 for £28
9400GT graphics removed the fan and replaced with the old heatsink
Added the Bluray drive
Increased ram to 3gb
Added 3 x 1TB drives
Installed Windows 7

Runs like a dream. I am on the look out for a new dual tuner card that supports HD. Have a number of machines with SSD but I did not use it in here. SSD is useless for writing very very slow. Fast for reading, but on a media centre PC you don't do a lot reading where speed is important. I guess you could use it purley for the OS and put the swap file somewhere else, but this is not good as you will end up with only 2 HDD's and running the swap file on the disk with your media on it will slow things down. Really SSDs are for servers and laptops.

[C13UGG]

Hello,

I have XL302 with 3 gig of ram and 3 TB of storage Samsung F1 drives running in a RAID 5.

Have installed both vista 32 and 64 bit.

had a few issues with x64 such as fire wire and CD doesn't eject unless you use the OS.

Everything else seems fine.

[olistone4]

Nice thread,

I have been researching upgrades for the vgx-xl systems.

It seems the best possible tested upgrades at the moment are...

With official Bios

CPU: Core 2 Extreame X6800 2.83GHz 

Source (more info): http://www.vgx-xl.com/hardware-upgrades/processor-cpu

With unofficial upgraded bios

CPU: Core 2 Quad Q6600 - 'SLACR' (G0) TDP 95w.

Sill in development, but but beta testers have reported possitive feedback.

GPU: Radion HD 7750 but can also runs well with HD 6670 and HD 5450

Source (more info): http://www.vgx-xl.com/hardware-upgrades/graphics-cards-gpu

Hope this helps,

Oliver