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Posting to share success on doing a replacement of the original 460M discrete to a 765M discrete purchased from Ebay. And to make sure I didn't skip any important steps, and maybe find out the best way to keep an eye on the health of the new card in case I did a lousy job with the thermal pads or damaged something. Process Installed unlocked A12 BIOS after restart: uninstalled IDT audio package from control panel->programs->uninstall Rebooted Shut down, went to bios, disabled integrated HD audio. Set video from SG to PEG to disable integrated HD3000. Convinced Win8.1 to reboot to safe mode (charm, Settings, change pc settings, update and recovery, recover, advanced startup, clicked restart now) When it came up, did advanced, change startup settings. When the menu came up, selected safe mode. Used "Display Driver Uninstall" v12.4 to fully remove Nvidia drivers and shut down (third option). Disassembled laptop, removed old card. removed heatsink from old card, cleaned up the old thermal paste, replaced pads that were falling off, added a pad or two to places that looked like they needed coverage. On the new card, it didn't have the weird metal backplate over some of the video ram (that Dell helpfully hides a pad under). Put a pad on the new card's exposed vram, but left the new backplate/spreader (lacking the dell plate) on it instead of trying to remove the old one from the old card. applied a bit of new paste to the new processor, put the heatsink back on (having to remove the captured screws that worked with the new card. Fortunately the person I bought the new card included mounting screws, pads of varying thickness, etc). installed the new card, buttoned up the machine. Booted cleanly to bios, making me feel very very happy. Immediately shot myself in the foot by reenabling the internal HD audio (too soon!), which caused the first windows boot to freeze on a white screen. Went back to bios, turned the HD audio back off, booted to windows. Status: Up, on windows basic display drivers. Yay! Extracted the 334.89 whql drivers I'd pulled from Nvidia. Used the inf modding guide (Nvidia INF driver modding (Guide) - Guru3D.com Forums) to make the following changes in the nv_dispi.inf in the display driver folder. Added to the last section: NVIDIA_DEV.11E1 = "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M" NVIDIA_DEV.11E2 = "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M" Added to the NTamd64.6.3 section (and the 64.6.2 and 64.6.1 sections, in case I had to roll back to Win8 or Win7): %NVIDIA_DEV.11E1% = Section102, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_11E1 %NVIDIA_DEV.11E2% = Section102, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_11E2 Ran the driver install, which failed with a vague error message. Remember the excellent advice from here to turn testsigning on. From admin cmd prompt, did bcdedit /set {current} testsigning on rebooted Tried running the nvidia setup again. This time it completed successfully. Rebooted. Turned testsigning off (bcdedit /set {current} testsigning off) rebooted Status: System now working on nvidia drivers, appears to be set! Now to turn the audio back on. Shut down, went to bios, enabled HD audio. booted into windows...white screen again. Shut down, disabled HD audio, booted into windows. Tried to install Dell provided IDT. It balked. Tried to install IDT from Realtek. It took. When system restarted, went in to bios before windows finished rebooting, enabled HD audio, saved and finished the boot. 8.1 splash screen showed, login showed, I started typing in my password thinking I was finally done, when the screen went black and did not recover. Sighed. Hard power off. Boot to bios, turn HD audio back on. Status: System seems happy with the video card, but I failed to get around the white screen lockup fully. With the HD audio enabled, I get to the login screen but lose all video within a few seconds. With it shut down, clean boots. Audio shut down pending me figuring out what I did wrong. So the video card went without any major hitches, barring me doing something dumb with pads or goo. The audio is still disabled, but I'm going to go browsing for the posts on how to do that RIGHT and see where I went wrong. What else do I need to do? What is the best way to monitor video card (and cpu) specifics (like temp) even if I'm not going into the advanced menus to overclock yet? I used to have some widgets to watch that, but 8/8.1 seems to have killed that concept, so what's the best low resource but workable thing to use on an older Alienware? Much thanks to @J95, svl7, and everyone else who posts problems and solutions for others to research! -- Kephra M17xR3, Nvidia 765M (2GB, video BIOS 80.06.51.00.32), 8GB RAM, i7 (2630@2GHz), Toshiba 256GB ssd boot, WD 1TB data drive, purchased 2011,

Using Dell/Alienware OEM nvdmi.inf (1028) makes it even easier, CTRL+H -> Find What: 05AE Replace With: 0490 -> Replace All -> done (Windows all versions). Audio try this http://forum.techinferno.com/alienware-m17x-aw-17/4829-780m-gtx-m17xr3-integrated-soundcard-working-again-no-more-usb-soundcard.html Monitoring tools HWiNFO64 HWiNFO, HWiNFO32/64 - Download Download TechPowerUp GPU-Z v0.7.7 | techPowerUp