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Dell M6700 Video Card Upgrade


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I'm new, and I thought I'd share an experience, since I can't find the equivalent anywhere...

So, how do you upgrade your video card in a Dell M6700? It's simple, but time consuming, and you need to pay attention to details. I bet most everyone here knows how, but I didn't, so I'm sure there are some that don't! There's a good video on opening up the M6700 here:

Precision M6700: Palmrest disassembly | Dell

The thing you really want to get to popping the palmrest off the machine. The video starts assuming you've done a few things, and I'll tell you what they are below...

Step 1. Unplug your computer!

Step 2. Open the bottom of the computer. You do this by popping out the battery and taking out the two screws on either side of the battery compartment that hold the bottom to the computer. There is one on each side of the battery compartment on little tabs off the bottom cover.

Step 3. Once the battery is out and you've made sure your laptop is UNPLUGGED, and the bottom cover is off, you need to remove the optical drive and any hard drives from the two hard drive bays. The optical drive comes out with one screw holding it in by the tab on the back of it, then it just slides out. The hard drives have screws holding them in. The one that slides out the side (primary) has two screws near the edge of the laptop, labeled "H" in a circle. You may also have to remove a screw on the little lever in the battery compartment as well. Once you've done this, you can move the lever down towards the front edge of the laptop and the drive will pop out the side. It is SPRING LOADED! The secondary drive, if you have one and it's installed properly, will have three screws holding it in. The last screw is one of the screws that holds the bottom cover on, so that should already be empty. Once the screws are out, just slide the drive towards the front edge of the lap top and carefully tip it up. You'll have to do just a little careful maneuvering here... Once it's out, proceed.

Step 4. Pop the tab on the cable under the plastic shield (it swings up like on a hinge) and pull the blue tab on the ribbon cable to remove it from the connector. If you need more help with this one, watch the video at the link above.

Step 5. You'll see a whole lot of screws marked with a "P" in a circle. Every screw that has a "P" next to it needs to come out. Search around and get them all! There's a bunch under the optical drive and second hard drive, so you better take them out now, if you haven't already!

Continued in a second...

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Ok... more than a second. Wish I had had a camera when doing this!

Step 5, continued... Just to make sure, you also need to remove the primary HDD. That thing gets in the way of something (and I forgot what it was). Just take it out and be safe.

Man... I hope you're keeping control of the little screws. Note that the screws holding in the HDDs are DIFFERENT than the ones you're pulling from the "P" positions!

Step 6. You've got all the "P" screws out on the bottom now, and you've popped the ribbon cable. Flip the unit over and open it up. First off comes the keyboard bezel. This isn't shown in the video. To do this, stick your fingernails under the edge of the bezel above like, the 7 key. Pull up (yeah, this takes guts) and it should pop up. There are little flexible clip things on the bottom of the bezel. Now just work your way around the bezel. You should kind of go evenly around it, left and right. Be careful around the arrows/number pad area where it gets thin, and it may take just a little more force to pull it up on the left and right. This is easy, but you have to do it with "feeling". If it doesn't feel like it's going, don't pull like crazy, move it around while pulling gently until it pops. Don't pull too hard at any one place. Move around and try everywhere and something will pop, and then you can keep going.

Step 7. Take all the little screws out on the bottom edge of the keyboard. There are 5, I believe. One on the left, two on fingers in the middle around the pad buttons, and then two more on the right.

Step 8. Look carefully at the left and right of the keyboard. See those little plastic clips on each side? There's two on each side holding the keyboard in. What you want to do is gently use the flexibility of the keyboard to pop one side out of the clips, then the other. The keyboard has tabs at the top, so it will swing up and towards you to come out.

Step 9. Remove the keyboard ribbon cable from the main board by taking a flat tool (flat screwdriver, carefully...) and gently prying up the white bracket holding the ribbon cable in. Pry one side a little, then the other, until you get it up a couple mm and it feels relatively loose. The ribbon cable should come right out now. Leave the bracket in the open position.

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Man, I wish I had taken pictures... wait I said that already!

So, now the keyboard should be out. We're now in sync with the video again.

Step 10. You need to pop two cables off in the front left center of the area under the keyboard. Leftmost is a flat cable with a blue tab on it underneath some clear plastic. Lift up the hinged bracket with a flat-head screwdriver and the flat cable should come out easily. The one to the right of it is a twisted wire cable that ends in a connector, and is also under plastic. Just get under there and gently pull (while rocking back and forth) away from the connector and it should pop off without a lot of force.

Step 11. If you have Bluetooth, you need to disconnect the Bluetooth module, located to the right of the keyboard area. To do this, pull up on the hard clear plastic tab in the hole above the Bluetooth module. The Bluetooth module is a thin long circuit board with a cable attached to the left top side of it. The cable snakes upward and then down through a hole in the plastic cover.

Step 12. Under the DDR modules, there is another flat cable under plastic. Lift the plastic and use a flat-head screw driver to alternately (and gently) pry the edges of the bracket holding the cable towards the right side of the machine. You'll see it start to rock. You can try pushing gently in the center as well once you have it loose. It only moves about 2 mm. If it is out far enough, the flat cable will come right out.

Step 13. Right next to the Bluetooth module, there's a connector for the GPU fan (the fan is on the right side, up near the hinge). The connector is white, and you can trace the short twisted wire down from the fan. Just gently pull this one out of its socket.

So, now you have all of the cables disconnected. When the palm rest comes off, nothing cable-like should hold it back. Do yourself a favor and watch the video to make sure you've got it all!!!

Step 14. Just like on the bottom side, you now want to take out all the "P" screws. There's a whole bunch, but note that three of the ones from the center area under the keyboard are SMALLER!!! Keep those separate and remember which holes they come from. If you get lost later, you can always look at the handy screw size that they've printed next to each screw!

Step 15. This is the scary/tricky part... You need to pull off the palm rest just like you did the keyboard bezel. WARNING! The palm rest should come off EASILY!!! If you find yourself bending it more than just a little before something pops, STOP! You probably missed a screw! Just so you know, I missed TWO screws. One up near the hinge on the bottom side, and another down from the hinge on the left looking at the bottom. If it's not coming off, look around! If you didn't take out the primary hard drive, the springs in the hard drive slot will prevent you from easily pulling off the palm rest!

OK, enough said... Take a small-blade flat head screwdriver and insert it into the lower (more towards the front edge) slot located on the right side of the computer near the fan. This slot is in the keyboard area and there are two of them right near each other and they look the same! Don't go shoving the screwdriver deep in there, just put it in enough to be able to gently pry up while pulling up the palm rest until it pops. When it pops, the whole side will come up. Once this happens, work your way around, pulling up on it until it comes off, just like the keyboard bezel.

I'm going to say it again... if you're bending it, or using enough force that something's going to snap, STOP and go searching for screws!!! You missed something!!!

If all went well, you should now have a palm rest in your hand. Put it somewhere safe and anti-static, without messing with it!

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Now you should be looking at a processor with a heat sink on it, and a GPU with a heat sink on it. The Processor is in the upper middle of the notebook, and the GPU is in the upper right. The CPU heat pipes travel over to the left back edge of the machine. You can see a fan there. The end of the pipe has a whole lot of delicate veins on it that the fan air passes through to transfer the heat from the heat pipe. If you have one of the faster quad core processors, you will see a PAIR of heat pipes coming from the processor.

The GPU has a heat pipe going to the upper left and a pair of heat pipes snaking off to the right. The left pipe shares the cooling fan of the CPU. The right pipe is for a dedicated GPU fan.

You may also see some black wires snaking over the top of the left pipes from the hinge of the notebook. I believe I have an IPS screen, so this may be specific to mine. These black wires are double-stick taped to the heat sink pipes.

So how do you get this all out without breaking something? You can't without further dis-assembly. DO NOT TRY to remove the GPU heat sink without taking a few more steps!

Step 16. Remove the GPU fan. I flipped the machine on its edge to access the GPU fan screws. There are two. Undo the fan plug from the backside (you can see the twisted wires that go to the fan. Unplug the little plug by gently pulling it out) and then unscrew the screws and carefully remove the fan. I believe it sort of slides in at an angle so lift the back out first then take it out. You want to be careful because the fan is right up against the heat sink, and the thin aluminum fins are VERY easy to damage!

Step 17. Move any wires taped to the processor and GPU heat pipes on the left side. These are the video wires I was speaking about. Unplug the one closest to the front of the machine (towards you). This just unplugs, so take a flat head screwdriver and slowly pry up on either side until it is loose, then take it out. You want to carefully unstick the wires from the heat pipes by slowly peeling the double stick tape off the heat pipe. You can leave the tape stuck to the wires, so you can re-stick it. Move the wires out of the way towards the display.

Step 18. Loosen the screws on the processor heat sink. There are four screws with springs under them. Loosen them up until you hear light clicks when turning them. Once you have all four loose, you can lift the heat sink off the processor. To do this, lift it gently to break the thermally conductive paste on the processor, then watch the end of the heat pipe(s). What you want to do is loosen up the black tape over the block at the end of the heat pipes on the left side of the computer and then lift the assembly straight up, very carefully! If it does't go, it means you have not gotten all the tape loose. Note that the tape helps direct the fan air through the fins, so you want to keep it INTACT! once you have it all detached and out, place it gently somewhere and watch out for those fins!!!

Now you can see the CPU, and you can also see the fin block on the end of the GPU heat sink that is in front of the CPU one. Note also that you should be able to see the fin block on the GPU pipes going to the right side as well, since the GPU fan is out. If this is all true for you, proceed...

Step 19. Do the same for the GPU heat sink. Undo the four screws holding the heat sink in. Yes, there are only four! The four screws with the springs on them. In the front of the GPU card there is another screw with a spacer. Leave that one in for now. Once the heat sink screws are loose, lift up the heat sink to break the thermal seals and gently lift it out. Watch out for the black tape over the fin blocks, and make sure the edges of it are not stuck to anything. If they are, unstick it! The fin blocks on the ends of the heat pipes should clear things now, but you may still have to jiggle things, and keep those display wires out of the way. Put the GPU heat sink assembly down somewhere upside down so you can see the thermal materials. Note the paste square where the GPU chip was, and the thermal tape that contacts the GPU RAM and the GPU power supply components. You can see the indents in the tape. Keep this all clean, 'cause it'll match up with the next GPU you install. You will have to replace the thermal paste that mates the heat sink to the GPU chip itself.

Step 20. Now take out the screw with the spacer and the one black screw across from it on the GPU board. These screws hold the GPU board in its socket on the mainboard. Once these have been removed, the GPU can be lifted up at an angle (still plugged into the card-edge on the right) and then removed from the card-edge connector. And it's out!

Note that there is thermal tape on the bottom side of the GPU (if you have one that has GPU memory on the back side. This tape is kind of odd, since there's nothing really there to heat-sink to!

So there you go. It's all out!

To install, clean off the CPU gently with whatever you see fit. I used paper towel and my fingernail to get most of the heat sink compound off, then I polished the CPU chip itself with a cotton cloth until it was reflective. I then did the same for the GPU, but you need to be careful of the capacitors soldered around the GPU chip! Having these surfaces clean will assure that you have a nice thermal coupling to the heat sink when you re-install. You then need to get all of the thermal compound off of the heat sinks themselves where they contact the CPU chip and GPU chip. Leave the tape, and try not to damage it. You can also replace all the thermal tape, if you feel the need, but if it's clean, with no foreign stuff on it (dirt, dust) and in good condition, you don't need to.

To install, put thermal grease or a thermal pad on the CPU and GPU chips. I used thermal grease. Then re-install the new GPU board in the edge connector and install the black screw and the spacer screw. Then install the GPU heat sink first, making sure that you have all of the original thermal tape in place. Don't move things around to much. Set up, and then drop it right down and screw it on. If you're moving it around, you're spreading the heat sink compound around and possibly messing up the thermal tape! Remember to be careful of the fin blocks, and stick the black tape on them back where it was originally.

THEN install the CPU heat sink after the GPU heat sink. Same thing, just get ready, then put it down on the CPU, watching the fin block, and tighten it down. Don't TORQUE the screws, just get them snug!!!

Then reverse everything else... Get the black wires from the display panel back in place and plugged in, put the GPU fan back in, put all the screws back in, hook up the cables and ribbons, etc., and when the dust settles, you should have a new GPU in place and operating!

- Melifluonze

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