GPU upgrade 260M to 485M

Hello all,

I was wondering if I could upgrade the graphics card in my M15x from the 260M to the 485M?

There are a couple on ebay and I was looking to upgrade the card in my laptop. From what I can find, both the 260m and the 485m use the same interface, mxm3. My only concern is the power consumption of the 260m is rated at 75w and the 485m is 100w.

Has anyone done this and if so does it work?

 

This card does not work as far as I know. Bios doesn't support it. A member claimed to get it to work but he never supplied any proof when asked about it.

 

No, nobody ever tried the 485m afaik... the user you're talking about claimed having a 480m in his system.

Anyway, the 485m is about 1000$... the 6970m seems to work and is half the price while having almost the same performance, so this is probably a better option. However you may want to wait a couple of weeks until there are some reports about how the card performs in a M15x.

A 5850 is also a great upgrade for a 260m. It's officially available for your system and performs very well.

The Dell 260m is actually rated 65W TDP.

 

Ill check out the other cards suggested. I thought it might be too much of a drain, but 35w is one hell of an increase.

Ill wait and see on the reports, but you think I should be able to swap in a 6970m?

Wasnt the 5850m around the sametime as the 260m?

I know that laptops aren't really upgradeable, but I also know that its much easier to swap out graphics cards in machines like my Alienware and I was just seeing if there was a cheaper alternative to upgrading the whole laptop. I was looking to upgrade the gpu and the ram.

My current rig is -
Alienware M15x
Windows 7 SP1
I7 2.67ghz
4gb DDR3 1333
Windows 7 64bit
Nvidia GeForce GTX260M 1gb DDR
250gb HD

 

I mean it would be great testing it... but $1000 is outrageously imo, especially when there's the 6970m that seems to work. (Mine is on the way, hope it arrives next week )

The 5850 is great when you look at the price/performance ratio, and you can get it from Dell including warranty.

I forgot, the Nvidia 460m is an option as well in case you're more the Nvidia guy. A fine card as well, costs a bit more than the 5850 though, but available from Dell as well.

Edit: The M15x is actually highly upgradeable The 260m did cost more than the 5850, yes, but it performs a lot better. I just recently upgraded from the 260m to the 5850 and the difference is fantastic. The 5850 is a DX11 card, has GDDR5 memory and a superb overclockability which brings the card to 5870 levels and above.

 

Let me know how the 6970m works out for you then I can look into comparing that to the 460m.

Either one would be a fantastic improvement over my 260m.

 

And here comes a dumb question - Do we know that upgrading from a 260m to a 460m definitely works?

 

Yes, it definitely works. Even with a 460m from Clevo instead of Dell.

 

Cheers buddy. I assume that's a straight swap out (i.e follow teardown instructions, no bios tinkering needed)?

Have you/are you going to set up a thread for your 6970m swap out?

 

No, all you need is at least BIOS A08 or A09, can't remember which introduced the 460m... but you should have A09 anyway as it is the most recent version.

I'll definitely post my experiences with the card as soon as it is in my system.

 

Is the 460 actually much better than the 260? From what I've been looking at, it's not really. I mean you get DX11 support, so that's great, but otherwise I don't think it'd be worth the money.

 

It is better. You get another half a gig of ram and upgrade from GDDR3 to GDDR5

 

GTX 260M - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M - Notebookcheck.net Tech

GTX 460M - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M - Notebookcheck.net Tech

It should also be noted that the GTX 460M has 1536MB of GDDR5 RAM, whereas the GTX 260M has 1024MB of GDDR3.

Overall, I don't think it's worth upgrading from a GTX 260M to a GTX 460M. It is an upgrade, but the clocks are pretty similar despite the different memory used. So are the benchmarks.

The only real upgrades would be a Mobility 5850 or a Radeon 6970M in my opinion, now that Inap's shown that it's possible.

 

That's not entirely true. I upgraded from a 260m to a 460m and things got much quicker. I had a vantage GPU of around 6k and now almost 9k. Remember things aren't just about clock speeds but also the amount of shaders and bandwidth. The 260m has 112 pipelines whereas the 460m has 192 (the same amount as a 260 desktop or a 450 GTS) with GDDR5 instead of GDDR3. But yeah a 6970 will be a better step up.

 

you can probably OC the 460m way more than the 260 anyways. It's a newer, better, DX11 card. But, for gaming, I recommend a ATI option like 6970 or a 5850/5870 as they are a little bit better performance.

 

^^ What he said. I am bound to nvidia for some of the stuff I work on but I'd jump on that 6970 at any moment.