About the Nvidia 400 Gtx series.

Does anyone know if these cards will fit in the M15x when available? I see that RJtech has the GTx 480m in but it dosnt show what type of slot it willl fit.

 

the problem is the power requirements (as well as heat issues).
the gtx480 will not work to my knowledge. The 460 is up in the air. if it's under 65watts, there's no reason why it shouldn't (they're all mxm IIIb) . however something niggling in my head is telling me it isn't.

btw the 260m is rated at 75 watts and works (granted it throttles a lot) however dells one is rated at 65 not sure if they modded anything.

 

Do you know what the M17X Card Watt limit is?

 

not sure sorry. however i'm sure it's much higher. they can support sli setups after all.

with a 260m and an i7 720qm, i can push 138watts from the psu. it's rated at 150 (wow so is my post count, go figure)...

and i'm getting a 920xm oh boy.

 

Is there a way to upgrade the psu or anything to expand the watt limit?

Edit: Also I read the M17x manual which says that it supports up to 75 Watts for a video card, so how does it support the crossfire 5870 which is 120 Watts.

 

well a larger adapter is possible, however i'm not sure if that would increase the watttage available for the video card, this might be a motherboard limitation. i wish i knew more about this sort of stuff.

i'm guessing that in the event that a larger adapter would work, you'd still have issues running on battery. the 9cell is what? 85 watts? stressing psu's to the max is always a bad thing, i'm not sure what it does to batteries. probably the laptop would need to run at a throttled back mode in order to confirm to the battery ratings.

so a new adapter + bios + acpi drivers = highly unlikely
the way the IT business works usually means requiring a whole system upgrade (or in this case a new laptop)

judging by the first looks (and desktop comparisons) it looks like it's performing rather like a 5870. i'm holding out till proper reviews and if its similar to the 5870 i'll get that and use virtualization for linux support (i'll miss 3d tho )

btw another thing to consider is heat. lets just say we could mod it to support the 480m gtx. that card runs at 100watts... i can guarrenty you'll need a much better cooling setup than the current heatsinks. reason being, it's not designed for that thermal load.

 

I wonder if anyone has tried that yet.
What about the edited part of my last post?

edit: So what is the next card to M15x community is hoping for? Has there been any announced. Ive seen some talk about the 460M hoping that its watt usage is low.

 

i'm only guessing from desktop setups which i've built using sli/xfire. but you can have multiple rails with a max load on each, so for intstance i can have 2 x 75watt rails. this also helps with the battery issue, just disable power to one port completely when running on battery (effectively disabling sli).

see, if the motherboard was DESIGNED that way for the max of 75 watts, then i'm going to assume we are out of luck (for the 480 at least). unless this can be changed through the bios, it might actually be a physical chip (regulator) in which case.... yeh, i'm not good at soldering.

 

Larger PSU has been tried and that doesnt fix the throttling. Its probably an internal limitation of some sort

 

75 watts per SINGLE video card, of which it can fit 2. Crossfire 5870s are two seperate video cards, 60 watts each.

 

I've heard that if this card does become available, that it will require a fully fledged desktop optimized CPU... could be speculation, but to prevent throttleing issues I don;t see why not.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

yeh, i wish dell didn't lock down the bios so damn hard.
couldn't even use the bios editor >.<

what do you mean by that?
in order to reduce the cpu bottleneck?
as it stands, the gpu is the bottleneck atm, especially if you're looking at the top end 920/940xm
but with those cpu's people have found more throttling due to higher power requirements... i can't even begin to imagine desktop cpu's which require at least double the power.