M15x Upgrade or Sell?

Hi everyone, I've got an alienware m15x i'm looking to upgrade or sell. Specs are: i7-940XM 16GB RAM 256GB Samsung 830 SSD Nvidia GTX 460m

Now I've got a couple of choices, should k sell it? If so how much could I get for it with its current spec?

In terms of upgrading the graphics card, from the searching and reading I've done so far there's a lot of viable choices, I've got my eyes on a GTX 660m for around £100 (GBP).

Is it worth going to all the trouble of modifying the .inf files etc for this card? Or am I likely to not see much of an improvement? Open to other suggestions of upgrade options too!

 

It highly depends what you goal is. Personally i'd shove a HD 8970M into it and be happy with it, but then again idk what you need it for.

 

It depends what kind of games you want to play and at what settings. Im planing on upgrading my M17X R2 soon as with a few improvements its going to be more than enough for the kind of games i'm playing. @Danishblunt gave me some advice on this so he may be able to help you.

 

Does the 8790M run hot? Ideally I want a card that runs rather cool

 

I suppose it depends on what you're doing and how you're implementing it. Again, it's really hard to give you any advice if you don't really tell us what you're doing with your notebook or rather want to do with your notebook.

 

I'd just be doing casual gaming on it, ideally I'd like to be able to run Witcher 3 and similar

 

Well if you're going for casual gaming then HD 8970M upgrade is not a bad idea at all. You can play witcher 3 on medium/ultra mixed settings with it. Just buy proper thermal compound like kryonaut when buying the card.

 

Is there any specific version of the card to look for? I can only see MSI versions

 

If you can afford, GTX 970M
If you need something on a budget, firepro m6100 aka Radeon 8950M

 

You can go for an MSI card, it should be plug and play.

 

MSI 8970M has only 2GB vRAM, Clevo/Dell variant has 4GB.

 

Doesn't matter, it's not like he will be playing any games beyond 1080p so more than 2GB Vram isn't really needed anyways.

 

gta v, farcry, shadow of morder, etc will easily go past 2gb @ 1080p so......

 

If you put settings that high, then the amount of memory is the least of your problems.

 

If you are on a tight budget then consider a second hand 7970m or a even cheaper firepro m6100, got myself another firepro m6100 this morning for only $60 shipped lol. Overall it works well in the m15x as it only needs 75w but the only thing I feel that it is holding the card back is the 2gb vram in some games. The firepro m6100 is roughly 75% of the performance of a 7970/8970/r9 m290x but cheaper.

The firepro m6100 can be unlocked for overclocking with a modded bios but it tops out at around 1.3ghz on the gpu. 7970m can be very disappointing as a lot of them struggle getting to 1ghz, 8970m and some R9 290x are stock clocked at 950mhz and overclock a little but not much more. If you got the cash to burn consider the R9 290x as they got 4GB vram. Quadro M3000M and M4000M are good choices as well but expensive.

 

I'd say sell it because the 1st gen i7 is already way past outdated now.

 

If you were thinking about a 660m, I'd spend just a tad more and get a 680m, the 4GB version.

If you want to play Witcher 3, best to go 970m without needing mods.

Also beyond your current 460m, you need the A09 Bios if I remember correctly.

Or maybe just sell it?! Maybe you will get $300-$400 for it as-is depending on condition.

 

Was the Firepro M6100 just plug and play for you, or did you have to switch out the x-bracket? I just received mine in the mail today and noticed that the m6100's x-bracket is noticeably shorter than the x-bracket from the Ati 5850m that I previously had installed. What driver should I install, the regular Radeon one or the specialized firepro drivers? Do you happen to know what the difference is between them?

 

By shorter, are you referring to the screw standoffs?

As for drivers, you should be using Radeon drivers, not Firepro. I am fairly sure that the Firepro drivers are available only from the laptop manufacturer for the specific model they were made for and are probably outdated by now. The Firepro drivers are certified to be used in graphics applications, but not specifically for gaming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_FirePro

 

Yes I am referring to the standoffs. Thank you for the information about the drivers.

 

How is the thermal paste spreading?

 

I wanted to wait for my K5 pro to arrive before re-pasting. So after taking off heatsink, the gpu had a nice even layer of thermal paste over it, but seemed a little too thick. After putting the K5 pro and re-pasting, my temperature problems so far have gone away. I went from idle 51C to 38C idle, browsing 58C to 43C, media playback 66C to 58C, and full load gaming from 90+C to 80ishC.

I'm not exactly sure why, but my guess is that the thermal pads I was using before were not properly compressing. My Alienware M15x originally had an ATI 5850m. The thickness of the original pads were 0.75mm. When I first switched out the thermal paste of that old GPU, I put 1mm thermal pads. Over the years, with various brands of paste/pads, I was never able to achieve the same thermals when compared to when the laptop was brand new. I wonder if maybe the thermal pads I used were not compressing enough and therefore causing the heatsink to not sit properly on the GPU.

On the AMD Firepro M6100, my guess is that the thermal pads needed with the Alienware M15x heatsink are 0.25mm pads. The 0.5mm pads I was using seem to be too thick. I also was unable to find any pads of that thickness. So far the K5 pro paste has been able to fill that gap perfectly. I am very happy with the results so far. The only worry I have is whether or not the K5 pro has any type of flow at 75 degrees Celsius. I generally like to keep my laptop on an incline, and therefore do not want the K5 pro paste to gradually flow off the VRAM and VRMs.

 

At this stage M15x is a nice hobby machine but nothing much more. Although xm chip plus 970M can still run any game. Just don't expect it to do so perfectly as the CPU is certainly a bottleneck even when ramped up to nearly 4ghz these days.