Alienware M15x Upgrade Help 2009-2014

Trying to upgrade to maximize gaming potential but haven't seen anything on similar specs. But i have read reviews on help and assistance and i look forward to outstanding feedback and comments to update to current maximized gaming potential. Such as WoW at max graphics 25man raiding, COD Ghosts, Far Cry, TOES Skyrim, and other steam Games.
Average fps in games with settings low varies from 30-80 but in congested high end scenarios 1-15 which is total poop with 150mbps internet connection.

Alienware M15x
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601)
BIOS: Ver A09 1.00
Processesor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU Q740 @1.73GHz (8 CPUs),~1.7GHz
Istalled MEmory (RAM): 8GB
Memory: 8192 RAM
System Type: 64-bit Operating System
Graphics Card: AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5000
Approx total memory: 4095 MB
Current Display Mode: 1920x1080 (32bit) (60Hz)
Page File: 3025 MB used , 13333 MB Available
Direct X Version: DirectX 11
DxDiag 6.0.7601.17514 32Bit Unicode Copyright (c) 1998-2006 Microsoft Corporation

Can i get away with just Graphics Card Upgrade or does it need a partial or full upgrade?
Thanks for reading and look foward to assistance and feedback.

 

920xm and 7970M would be the next step up. 400-500 dollars required.

 

You can do this or you can also wait for the 900 series.

 

We dont know if 900 series will be compatible, so the best way for now is 7970M and this will be awesome!

 

Or 680m or 780m equally and potentially more awesome and more expensive too haha

 

That's true, but waiting will help the OP to figure out if it'll be or not.

 

The M15x supports all vanilla MXM 3.0 cards. Every single vanilla MXM 3,0 card has worked and will work until they phase out the current MXM standard.

Maxwell isn't releasing on a different standard which means there will be vanilla versions of this card. It will work.

A voltmodded 920xm to 3.6-4ghz
980M
8GB CAS 7 1333mhz ddr3 ram

This config is the dream. Costly though. In this guise the M15x can fight a few more years and not bottleneck for quite some time.

 

Shadow of Mordor really struggles on 2GB VRAM Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Benchmarked - NotebookCheck.net Reviews
8970M with 4GB VRAM now looking more attractive than 7970M or GTX 680M. I wonder how the GTX 960M will be, and with how much VRAM/bus width.

Also 980M is rumoured to be 125W TDP and 970M is rumoured to be 95W. This is based on speculation by notebookcheck website (I think), as Nvidia haven't released any official values for TDP for these cards yet.
Therefore GTX 980M might run a bit hot in M15x unless undervolted? Can probably afford to undervolt and underclock to lose a bit of performance on this card which is suppose to have 80% of the performance of a desktop GTX 980!!!

 

To be honest, I think 980M might be overkill for the M15x. My 780M rarely goes above 80% GPU usage while gaming because of the cpu bottleneck(at max settings, max AA). The only game I've seen it go above 90% usage was on wolfenstein, which I think has a very optimised cpu usage.
With poorly optimised games, or ones that do not support multi core(like World Of Tanks) my gpu usage is less then 70% and the cpu is working it's a*s off to keep up...
Bare in mind, my 920xm is overclocked as high as I can take it without an overvolt. Maybe the 920xm I have is of a little poorer quality than some other guys have, as I have seen my scores are always a bit lower than all of you, but the CPU is the clear bottle neck in this machine with any gpu >= gtx 780M.

 

The gtx 970 and 980 desktop but have been on 28nm 970 performance is excellent. I do not quite understand what kind of technology is Maxwell, a transistor is a very basic design and from what I've read the new cards offer excellent efficiencies where nvidia wants to distinguish and take the lead.

I've always thought that the advantage of manufacturing in tiny is to face the heat and put more transistors achieving a less consumption and more power. Apparently these cards are the same size and makes something go further.

If the two sides to a new transistor design, driver nvidia or whatever it invented with reduced size, portable equipment can catch up with desktop computers meet.

It may be that the new cards ever work better if the m15x nvidia decides to take the path of performance per watt. Those are my feelings.

Finally we must also be aware of where you want directx 12 executing instructions to release the gpu processor workloads.

These three things together can be a giant step in our laptop. Less nanometers, maxwell design and directx 12.