Ah, thanks for the input. As long as it's worth it and increases performance, I'm good. To be honest, I had no idea there were 32mb buffer drives but I've only seen 16MB for laptops anyway.
What's weird is that I always hear how higher resolution slows performance but in Doom 3, I changed the resolution to 1440x900 through the console. The default in-game only goes to 1024x768. Now the average frame rate I'd get through the test was 43 FPS in that resolution. Once I changed it to 1440x900, it went up to 64 FPS. It's a lot smoother. However, if I change the anti-aliasing from x4 to x8, the FPS drops to 21. It wasn't a that big a leap in lower resolutions.
One last thing, can I use a SATA 3GB or must I get the 1.5GB model?