Monday, September 22, 2008

Upgraded my Asus Nova P20 RAM

Updated on 25/1/2012 - Finally after 3.5 years, I'd upgraded the CPU to C2D E6420 and it is running fine, paid £28 from ebay.

Asus Nova P20 has no upgrade option as the reseller in Singapore told me. In UK, there is no P20 model but PX24, P244 Black and P22. The initial look inside the box was very complicated but not impossible. It took me 5 hours to reach the RAM, but probably 1 hour if I would to redo again. Most of the UK models comes with 2GB ram, the maximum for the board, but if you do like to upgrade the processor or HDD, it is possible.

My unit comes with 120GB SATA hdd and a low end Intel Core 2 Duo E2160 processor. I was thinking of putting a new 320GB SATA2 HDD and any of the higher processor such as E6550 as I already gone thru the hassle of opening the box. In the end, I only replaced the RAM with a new 2GB Kingston DDR2 PC5300 667Mhz ram into it. Processor and HDD will be my next upgrade, perhaps early next year when the price comes down 20%.

It is now performed way better than before, for my WMP, Teamviewer and some graphic tools. This made it a better HTPC.

First look inside the box

HDD and holder bracket, without dvd drive

motherboard without the hdd & dvd drive bracket

Intel E2160 Desktop processor

the other side of the motherboard, and most importantly, the 1GB RAM

Asus Nova P20 Components & Tools I used

8 comments:

johnybravo said...

looks like one of my previous projects, kekeke.

Brian Lim said...

oh yeah, i remember that one :) will you work on another project soon? :)

johnybravo said...

no inspiration lately.... wanted to mod my WII console a while ago but then too precious to hack it, hahaha

Unknown said...

Hi there Brian,

I'm from Australia and have just bought an ASUS P20.

Is it possible for you to tell me your idle and load temperatures for the CPU using a program like Coretemp?

Mine seems to be running quite hot - and nobody can give me a definite answer whether it's normal or not. I've reseated the heatsinks to no avail (with new thermal paste).

Idle temp: ~68 C
Load temp: ~80 C

Ambient temp is ~24 C

Cheers mate.

Brian Lim said...

My P20 has not been reboot for 1 day and it is running loads of software now. Using CPU Temp, both my the E2160 Core 2 processor are running at 56-57C at room temp of 10C I suppose. Sorry I can't record an idle temperature as I'm doing this remotely.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the reply mate. Turned out to be something with the latest version of Ubuntu Linux.

I've put Hardy Heron (8.04) on and it shows my idle temps as 52 C and up to about 62 C at load =)

These seem much more reasonable and in-line with your temps. Thanks.

Cheers.

Brian Lim said...

Hi Menthu,

Glad you managed to identify your problem. I'm using the preinstalled Vista Home 32bit and happy with the performance. Do plan to use Ubuntu one day though.

Cheers.

Graduate Dissertation Writing Concerns said...

Asus Nova P20 has no upgrade option as the reseller in Singapore told me. In UK, there is no P20 model but PX24, P244 Black and P22 and the details of initial book is really interesting to read.

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