Mythlogic P150HM Upgrade from NVIDIA 485m to 680m Experience

Background
Well, after carefully following the release of the AMD 7970m and NVIDIA 680m, I decided that I could not resist the opportunity to bring my beloved P150HM with its NVIDIA 485m back into bleeding edge performance. From what I gathered either card was feasible in the P150HM, so I settled on the 680m and figured that I would contact Mythlogic about the upgrade and chronicle my experience here.

I had originally bought my P150HM from Mythlogic because they stood apart from the crowd in my eyes with respect to customization and personal attention to detail. They were the ones who led the charge in getting the high gamut matte screens, and just struck me as a company that loves what it does and they gave me a lot of confidence in making things right for the customer. I was not let down. They were wonderful throughout the purchase and support of my product.

Every customer of Mythlogic has privileged access to their Phoenix Upgrade Plan. Essentially this means you get very reasonable prices on your upgrades. It was something that I remember "being nice" when I purchased the laptop, but honestly, after owning gaming laptops for a decade it was not something that I pinned my hopes on. I have rarely had the opportunity to upgrade something so well performing as a NVIDIA 485m, which at its release was a major step change in performance. With the birth of the 680m and its compatibility with the P150HM, am I ever glad for the Phoenix Upgrade Plan! I contacted Mythlogic to find out the price for the 680m and was quoted $685. Wow, that was $115 cheaper than the cheapest price I had seen so far! What's more, the card is covered by the remainder of your warranty or 1 year, whichever is longer. How great is that? Decision made!


The Process

I started by asking a few questions about compatibility. I had a rough idea from reading around here, but I figured that I would rely on Mythlogic's own experience and service to give me the final word on it. I asked if I would need any special drivers or such in order for the card to work. I was told that as long as I had the latest BIOS, it would be plug and play. So I checked my BIOS version and it was indeed out of date. They sent me a ZIP file with the latest BIOS and the batch file to do the upgrade. I made a bootable USB stick and did the BIOS upgrade with no sweat. Sweet, I'm on my way!

Mythlogic received my order late Tuesday afternoon (US EST) and shipped it out the same day. Yay! The card arrived already by Friday, well packaged, and with a tube of IC Diamond that I purchased for $15. It was the big size, so cheaper than I saw on Amazon. It had the heat sink, heat pipes, and new screws along with the card. Time to plug and play!


The Install

Well, perhaps not exactly plug and play. This is where we had a few hiccups. I asked my sales contact exactly which NVIDIA driver they recommended and was told that the current version (306) of the drivers would be fine. I looked all over for a 306 version and could not find it. Friday morning I used the live chat support and found out that was a mistake and should just use the latest beta version of the mobile drivers. Ah, good, that makes sense. I downloaded them in advance and got ready for the card to arrive. It did so around noon.

I carefully installed the card, added my pea sized drop of thermal paste to the GPU, and added the heat sink and pipes after cleaning the stock stuff. The only difficulty was that the new screws securing the heat pipe were not exactly like the original screws. I had trouble getting them to work, so I just re-used the originals. I powered it on and entered the setup screen. I got a bit nervous when I saw the VGA adapter described as "Empty". Hmm. Well, let's boot and see what happens. I try to install the beta drivers and it doesn't detect any compatible graphics card. *Gulp*. Now I am thinking that despite the simple process of replacing my own graphics card, I did something stupid and messed it up. Did I short something, crack something and bobble it like an idiot? I called Mythlogic and reached their tech support. I told them what was going on and they asked me about my BIOS, which I read to them and was verified as correct. They asked if one of their tech support guys could call me back. Sure thing I said, "but sooner than later please." "Of course", was the reply. I waited 30 minutes. I decided to reseat the card again, even though there really is no way you can screw it down if it is not fully connected. At least I could look it over and make sure nothing looked burnt, broken, or strange. Everything looked good. Put it back together. I've waited an hour now. Then two hours. No call. Hrmf, let me check Notebook forums again because I'm pretty sure they got this working in the P170HM.

I was able to dig up LaptopNut's thread where he got this working. I downloaded his modded INF driver and bingo, up comes my 680m! Okay, so Mythlogic misinformed me a bit on the driver issue and it makes me a little nervous that my card is not recognized by the BIOS, but hey, I have a 680m! I'll just tell Mythlogic about it when they call ...

Well, it's Saturday morning now and I never received that call back from Mythlogic. *shrug* It's quite unlike them to drop the ball like that, and while it doesn't change my impression of their otherwise impeccable service to date, it did make me a little sad that I could not come here and rave about their perfection in all things (*gasp*, they're human!). There were some clouded channels of communication here. I don't know if they figure that a customer doing a bleeding edge upgrade is going to be more self-directed anyway, if they have a bunch of people on vacation, or they simply had a tough day, but I was hoping for a little better closure than that. I'm sure they would have gotten me up and running eventually, and probably sooner had I called back again. They did all of the critically important things well, so I'm still a loyal customer and this has not changed that.


The Results

The card has been running great! I fired up The Witcher 2 as one of the tougher demanding games installed on my drive. With my 485m, I used to get around 30FPS with most graphics set to their highest, and it would run around 82+ degrees. With the 680m, I was getting 45-60FPS and the temperature topped out 74C. I cranked up the remaining shadows from high to ultra and it scoffed at it without any performance difference. Impressive! I've also been playing a lot of SW:TOR lately. The 485m already maxed the game out, but it would often hit about 80 degrees Celcius in a room where the ambient temp was about 80F. The 680m topped out around 67C after several hours of playing. Nice!

 

You are a braver man than I. I likely would have shipped my lappy back to them and let the pro's do the work.

 

Well, I've replaced enough graphics cards that I wasn't too worried about that part. Sending in the laptop would have meant being entirely without it for over a week, and a lot more expensive with the shipping. In this case, worst case scenario was to put the old 485m back. Thankfully that wasn't necessary.

 

That is true. The Asus I have now is not the friendliest machine to take apart.

 

Hey

Yea the BIOS thing that says Empty, Clevo hard codes the strings into the BIOS's for what to call the cards, so unless we got a BIOS update for the HM series it'll always show empty, but its more of a "If I don't know what the card is show Empty" kind of thing. For a while if you had an old BIOS it would show the 6990m as a 6970m because their string detection was IF AMD then 6970m

For the drivers, yea I apologize for that one I'm actually the one that makes the custom drivers, and I got the request and then got slammed so if you still want them no biggie just shoot me a PM, but otherwise a modded INF will work just fine =)

thanks again!

 

No biggie, thanks for the reply. Eventually I figured that the card was being picked up on the PCI bus by virtue of the fact that the VBIOS of the card was being reported even though the VGA adapter said empty. That's what led me to give the modded driver a shot. I've been a happy camper ever since. Have a good weekend - what's left!

 

Glad to see this thread. Ive read plenty about the Phoenix plan but never really know what it boils down to since there isnt much details. I already wanted to go with Myth based on other things so figure it was just gravy if I ever needed it but nice to see it in action with some discounting going on. Now I Just need my laptop