Alienware M15X Upgrade

Nvidia parts are not cheap. The 980M will be 600 quid easily. The 970M around 450-500 quid minimum. M295X (Amd tonga) which will rival 970M in raw horsepower probably will be priced lower again as usual.
These prices might be outrageous however if you intend to upgrade to 680M now then again in a year's time you may as well take the plunge. Maxwell also is incredibly power efficient which means great thermals. About tonga for mobile almost nothing concrete is known so we have to wait.

 

True but then again the M15x cooling capacity cannot cope with more than 100W. If you push the power limits you will likely reach the thermal limits first anyway.

 

I will wait and keep a close eye on the rumours. As i am not gaming at the moment, i will wait and watch thanks for saving me money

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

 

Yeah coax a little more life out of that 260M. Repaste it and keep it cool and wait it out.

I am replaying WC3 right now haha. Hard work for the 680M . Waiting for FC4 and GTA5 to release.....

Also I recommend keeping the 260M as a backup card. Might come in handy someday as the 920xm has no igpu.

 

I really abused this 260M since early 2010 ... From Crysis to WoW. I stopped gaming last year January. I may come back for the new WoW expansion. I didnt like the MoP expansion, i played little and quit. I am a heavy raider and literally abused the 260M in all ways while raiding. Haha ! WC3 is classic ! The entire WC lore and story line is magical. Can't wait for the movie to release

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I never played WoW. I am more a RTS kind of guy and feel let down by Blizzard. They really ought to release WC4 instead of a movie IMHO.
I played through parts of WC2 beyond the dark portal before WC3. Now that is old school haha. Battlenet edition is now freeware and works on Win 7.

 

WC3 and its expansion is one of the best games of all time, from game play to story line ! Amazing ! I was looking forward for a WC4 back then. But Blizz released WoW vanilla back then.

I ordered the connector. Ordered 2 just in case thanks alot KOI for the link ebay link

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No problem. Good night.

 

What's WC3?

Sent from my One S

 

Warcraft 3 and its expansion. 2002-2003 game.

Sent from my Galaxy S4 CyanogenMod 11

 

I still play those custom games every week <3

 

gtx 780m is it plug and play in m15x/?

 

No it is not. You need to disable integrated sound from bios in order to be able to boot windows. You also need need to mod the nvidia driver inf file to be able to install the drivers. Then you have to boot/reboot safemode to disable the sound from the video card so that you can re-enable sound from bios afterwards....it's a hassle but in the end it works. However you will still have overheating problems.

Edit: you also have to flash the card with svl7's vbios to reach stock clocks.

 

so i have a m15x from a friend with damaged 5850m so if i install gtx 780m in it now will i at least get the display to go in the bios first?

 

Yes, it will work fine. Display will work to go into bios, then disable integrated audio to boot windows.

 

hi guys,

i have an Alienware M15x obviously why i'm on this thread..........

i have Windows 8.1 Pro 64x

Intel Core i7 740QM
8 Gb's of DDR3 Ram
1024MB (1GB) GDDR5 ATI Radeon HD 5850M

now can i upgrade my CPU you an Extreme Processor top of the line for the 1st Gen CPU's
Also can i upgrade my graphics card with an Nvidia GPU? if so what's the best to go with or if not what would be the best to go with for an AMD i was thinking 7970 but kinda out of my price range at the moment
and i can upgrade my ram to 16GB but really unnecessary

 

What is your price range? For both components?

920xm will set you back a good 200+ dollars but it worth it over the other qm chips.
GPU price varies hugely but you can put anything inside the M15x and it will run. So far anything from a lowly 240M GT to the 880M GTX has worked as far as NVidia is concerned. I expect Maxwell to work too!.

 

My price range would probably be $350-400 as i need to upgrade my Desktop graphics card since it's using an APU lol

and with the 920XM would it increase gaming performance alot or just programs like adobe base or unity as i will be using this for probably intense 3d animations but hardly extreme


------------------------ EDITED

my main upgrade would be GPU as CPU is a quad core and seems fairly reasonable at the moment

 

If you hunt around you should be able to find a 920xm and 7970M/680M for that money. Very reasonable performance for the money.

The 740qm will definitely bottleneck in modern games due to it's low clockspeeds. The 920xm can easily be set to 3.2ghz across all cores and forgotten about. You can't even run 2ghz all cores on the 740qm. Huge performance increase. Or do the crazy and voltmod and stick it at over 3.7ghz all cores like me. Some though are lucky. Gotmilk a forum member here manages 3.6ghz stock voltage!

Another thing I might add is that Maxwell cards (970M,980M) are going to release soon. I expect this to bring the going price for the 680M/780M down. You might want to wait a few more weeks to see the effects on prices.

 

Wow thanks King of Interns,

Thanks for the new insight and i will wait a few months to upgrade as i only got it about a 1 to 2 weeks ago and i am highly impressed as whole since its a late 2011 model

Would ebay be my best bet for those parts or is it possible to buy them of say Dell or Intel directly?
Cheers and thanks heap for your help

 

Actually this machine came out late 2009! It has indeed lasted a long time. With a 980m there is no reason to upgrade for years still!

Equally impressive is that the 920xm is based on tech a good 6 years old and when pushed ultra hard with a volt mod it can still reach haswell quad core performance!

Keep it running

 

GTX 970M and GTX 980M have seriously impressive performance. I'd be interested to see TDP of these cards (GTX 970M @75W....drool) but I can see these cards being seriously expensive, unlike their desktop counterparts.

 

I must say that even though I have never owned an Alienware I am really digging this thread. I really like the idea of hardware that is truly upgradable and in that regard the M15X surely takes the crown.

 

It would be awesome if somehow the 900M series would work on the M15X.

 

If the 970M is truly a 75w TDP card, I think it will be a perfect upgrade for the M15x.


Speaking of m15x, I'm getting mine back and will be apart of the m15x club again. :thumbsup:

 

I'm worried the GTX 970M will be too perfect for the M15x and make me have to upgrade despite having no budget for such things.
Hopefully svl7 will, as always, pioneer these things and be the first person to get a maxwell card working in the M15x.

 

I think Maxwell will a stipulated percentage yield.
And then come the refried, as we are already accustomed. It can be a major for which we continue with the incombustible 260m step.

GTX 260 consumes 65w would be nice to update a 60 series for those seeking stability, without sacrificing adapter 150w for a larger one. And for those looking for raw power use x80 with undervolted and specialized vbios.

I feel there is a great public looking for a upgrade where everything works as does the 260m with more power but without complications and without compromising the laptop.

If the GTX 960m appears with a yield equal to or greater than the GTX 680m and operates DisplayPort, audio, etc with maxwell architecture and TDP 65W or less, would be a very good opportunity and my ideal candidate.

 

Easily I think! 970m will run cooling than the 260m as for power and compromising the laptop the m15x is much tougher than you know! I run 3.8ghz 24/7 oc on my overvolted 920xm. Yes some cooling modifications were necessary but I didn't compromise the portability of the machine.

 

Surely the first version of Maxwell will best fit the m15x. Then come oc versions where nt increase. (refried)

Notice that the 680 is the first 28nm, then 780 and 880 do not work as well due to "oc nvidia" which is difficult to maintain stability and good temps.

If we look at the trend:
960m can give about 6000/6500 in 3dmark11gpu.
970m - 8000/8500.
980m - 9000/9500.

This assumptions are mine, playing the fortune teller.

Create a table where all this is observed.



PD1: King of interns, this winter can reach 4Ghz
PD2: Svl7 you think about Maxwell? this motivated? XD

 

4ghz! I will try but I think I need more volts...may not be possible.

980M gets 10000 I think or even more.

 

hopefully be more than 10k, but when moved from 40nm to 28nm beast I expected and looks very table, it was disappointing. Now they are just 8nm difference.

Sorry for translations

 

Hello guys,

Its been a while ... was wondering if anyone got 980m/970m working on our lovely M15x yet ? I tried googling it but no information regarding it ...

 

Silly comment really. 40nm to 28nm is a 30% increase in transistors. 28nm to 20nm is a 28.5% increase. Pretty much the same.....besides following moore's law is hardly the only way to improve performance generation to generation.

Yes SVL 7 tested the 970M and 980M in the M15x and they work. Seemingly he hasn't shown any benchmark scores yet though. Personally I am more excited for AMD. Possible 20nm and HBM vram makes it true next gen IMHO

 

I got 980M in my m15x, it worked on first try. I got 359.00 latest drivers (modded inf) no problem. But performance is about 1/3 of what i would expect - i get around 2800 in 3D Mark, low fps in games. Anyone encountered anything similar? Tested with both 150w stock power brick and with 180w from another AW notebook, no difference

 

King of interns


I had not read this comment in his day, but I answer like:

The most stupid comment, was his.

The cheapest and possibly the only way to introduce performance is down the scale.
This allows:

-combat thermodynamics
-increase the bus
-controladores faster memory
-put more transistors and cores

Otherwise it would scale down stuck on the hardware side.
Transistors have been redesigned and a thousand other things, but follow the same principles as is the only way forward.
Polish software, is tedious and not always an improvement is achieved.

When down the scale it is when you can make big improvements. If it were not so they would not fall.
The performance can come from many places, as I said can be redesigned any section, but this development is stagnating again.

So the more down the scale, rejoice.

 

They do infact work you need the unlocked bios I think.
http://www.mediafire.com/?45mul5qq8n29srh

(according to this thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/unlocked-m15x-bios.593926/)
((should have been made sticky, but for some reason no one thinks these posts are worthwhile meantime google says people search for this information constantly))

Now, the question is about drivers, which driver is best to use, do we keep using the latest drivers (Which are only for windows 8 and windows 10 now, as win7 is obsolete last year)

 

Anyone have a link to a driver we can try, that one of you are using ?
will see if we can get some scores up or something.

 

the ICD24 or diamond paste while thick can be tedious to use, and can scratch your die on the CPU or GPU, so be careful. Also the 330W PSU while it can only use 240W for the M15X will provide cleaner power and less vdroop and spiking as it will be more efficient when maxed out. Small difference, but thats what people want to know.

 

For those needing driver : https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rlah3fqohyqbnls/AABJj7_T-n9DDQZ13XHwHXsia?dl=0

Disable DSE and install via administrative prompt.

It's a 352.XX driver but works. Windows 8/ windows 10