In a past life I was a certified HP repair tech, They are very easy to work on. TBH, the primary feature I was looking for was the additional drive bays and graphics card, I don't actually do much gaming on the laptop. With 2 open slots for SSD/HDDs I was able to add a 128GB shared drive and a 1 TB os drive for my linux install. (Which is where I spend most of my time)