RAM and M.2 PCIe NVMe upgrade

[MichaelJones]

Back in September 2016 I bought a Cosmos laptop from PCS. It cost £700 and runs Linux Mint. It's been great. Occasionally it gets a bit hot and fan gets loud. But otherwise, it's fine. I now use it for personal email, web browsing, iPlayer, Amazon Prime movies, and once a week I run an awk script (on-line game... it's a long story).

I try not to use it for work (Remmina does not like connecting to our work servers), and I'm an Android phone and tablet user (SWGOH).

Brief specs:
Cosmos Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Intel® CoreTM i7 Quad Core Processor 6700HQ (2.6GHz, 3.5GHz Turbo)
128GB SAMSUNG SM951 M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 2000MB/R, 650MB/W)
8GB HyperX IMPACT 2133MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 8GB)
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 950M - 2.0GB DDR3 Video RAM - DirectX® 12

I added an extra 250Gb SSD for my /home partition, and swapped out the DVD for another 250GB SSD for backup, music and picture storage.

Sadly I had to swap out the 128Gb M.2 PCIe to put into an old Win10 Dell XPS13 which I use for working from home (it's own M.2 PCIe failed), so now I use one of the Cosmos SSDs as my primary OS disk. Space is a little tight, but not unusable.

I am thinking of buying a new M.2 PCIe (maybe 250gb @ £35) for the Comos, and while the wallet is open, upgrade the RAM with another 8GB (~£40, but not sure this is a necessary upgrade).

Questions:
Anyone got suggestions for a good M.2 PCIe drive?
Should I look for exactly the same brand of RAM? Or will generic 'value' 2133MHz RAM be good enough? Or can I mix with 2400Mhz (looks slightly cheaper)?
Is there any (easy?) way to add a backlit keyboard?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[SpyderTracks]

For an M2 drive, for Gen 3 all out performance, the Samsung Evo 970 is the one to go for hands down.

But if you want to keep the budget lower, the PCS M2 drives are very good value.

Your current M2 was pretty high performance for it's day so I think you'd likely prefer the Evo 970

Suggestion though, don't buy what you think you can get away with size wise, otherwise you'll find you want to increase it's capacity quite quickly. Buy oversized, and that way it will last a lot longer. File sizes are growing exponentially at the moment, even music formats are all moving from crappy compressed MP3's up to decent high res files which uses about 10 times the space. Similarly with video, we're quite quickly heading into 4k file sizes which are exponentially larger than 1080p standards of today.

Look at the long term, not the short term and you'll end up paying less.

For the RAM, if you install CPU-z and go on the SPD tab, it will tell you the Part Number of the RAM you currently have installed, then just google that part number and that will get you exactly the same RAM specs. It's important to pair RAM suitably for stability.

CPU-Z | Softwares | CPUID

CPU-Z for Windows® x86/x64 is a freeware that gathers information on some of the main devices of your system : Processor name and number, codename, process, package, cache levels. Mainboard and chipset. Memory type, size, timings, and module specifications (SPD). Real time...

www.cpuid.com

The keyboard is specific to the chassis, it's not modular so you can't plug in a different part that has RGB unfortunately, stuck with that one model for the chassis.

 

[MichaelJones]

Thanks for the reply. You are rigtht about always the need for more capacity. I think I'll got with a 250 or 500GB Samsung 970 M2 (£60-£80)

The RAM reports as below, and I'm not sure what would be a suitable 8Gb 2nd module --- I googled on the part number and will explore further

# dmidecode 3.1
Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs.
SMBIOS 3.0.0 present.

Handle 0x0019, DMI type 17, 40 bytes
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0018
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Total Width: 64 bits
Data Width: 64 bits
Size: 8192 MB
Form Factor: SODIMM
Set: None
Locator: ChannelA-DIMM0
Bank Locator: BANK 0
Type: DDR4
Type Detail: Synchronous
Speed: 2133 MT/s
Manufacturer: Kingston
Serial Number: 19461218
Asset Tag: 9876543210
Part Number: KHX2133C13S4/8G
Rank: 2
Configured Clock Speed: 2133 MT/s
Minimum Voltage: Unknown
Maximum Voltage: Unknown
Configured Voltage: 1.2 V