jaredhello

Hey Prema;

I haven't spoken to you in a while, and was curious if you've managed to iron out the sound card problems with the V3A bios mod you gave me a while back for my laptop... I know you're very busy with everything, so I appreciate the time taken to respond.

Thanks.

I'm unfortunately going to have to go with the previous pessimistic people, and say that you probably won't see too great of an improvement of cooling.

The way heat pipes work inside of your laptop are EXTREMELY efficient.

To quote some numbers from wikipedia...

The effective thermal conductivity varies with heat pipe length, and can approach 100 kW/(m⋅K) for long heat pipes, in comparison with approximately 0.4 kW/(m⋅K) for copper.

While water has a thermal conductivity of 0.58 W/m·K.

Now.... that being said, that doesn't mean you should have to scrap your entire idea.

Water has an extremely high thermal CAPACITY, it just doesn't transfer heat very well in comparison to heat pipes. There's a reason why heat pipes aren't filled with water after all!

What you might want to try to do is to figure out some method to make it so you still use heat pipes, but then have the heat pipe dump it's heat into a water reservoir to hold it.

I don't know how well it would work for long gaming sessions, though and that's what would primarily worry me.

Just my thoughts.

Those should not be 12V. If they are 12V caps then that explains why they blew. Those caps have the power brick voltage, which is 19V, or 19.5V depending on your brick. 20V is cutting it close while 25V has room for error.

12 volt capacitors aren't even really a thing in the first place, though. Usually it's 6.3 volts, 10 volts, and then 16 volts on capacitor ratings.

Those caps were put in place by Nvidia... and I'm 99% sure they know what they're doing in regards to voltage and capacitor requirements. Asides that, the voltages that they deal with on cards are usually bucked down to lower voltages. That's what the inductors are there for, they're all part of the switching power supplies that are all over the card to help reduce the voltage down more.

The cap probably blew due to an overcurrent condition, it overheated, or it was just a premature failure. Sometimes that happens, since manufacturers can't make perfect components 100% of the time.

As long as you replace the cap with another capacitor of the same or greater capacitance, you'll be fine. The voltage also needs to be the same, or greater as well. Aka, 16 volts at 47 uF or greater. Looks to be like, 1210 package size.

I've found the best direct comparison would be to look at the benchmarks here:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M - NotebookCheck.net Tech

and

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680M - NotebookCheck.net Tech

Just compare the way games perform on each card and you'll get a rough idea of how much more powerful one card is over the other. It's what I did when I compared my 670M to my new 870M and found it gives roughly twice the FPS in all games.

Hey guys.

So I have a question.

Is it better to use thermal pads for the components on the GPU (the memory chips, V-regs and inductors) or thermal paste?

It's hard for me to tell if thermal paste would actually contact correctly between the components and the heatsink. If anyone could let me know what to do I'd really appreciate it.

Also, would better thermal contact for the components lower the overall heat of the card or is that something that only proper heatsinking to the actual core do?

Thanks!

Do you know what computer the radeon was pulled from?

It needs to be from a Clevo computer, otherwise the card's temp sensors can't be read properly and the notebook will reboot repeatedly like how you're experiencing.

Sadly that doesn't work as the Dell uses a different spectrum to report thermal values to the mobo...that is not regulated by the vBIOS but hardware as it'll have the same problem even without any vBIOS chip present.

Huh. That's kind of surprising. So there's no way to mod the card to behave like a clevo one, then eh?

Hm.

Prema, what's your honest take on this? Should I wait for the vbios/bios mod for the 800 series?

Or should I try and get an 900 series? I can get a 965M for pretty cheap considering and it's a pretty nice upgrade. Do you know if it would be a compatible card with my laptop or no?

Could you not flash the vbios to a clevo version, or would that be too difficult to do?

Hey all.

I know this thread type has probably already been done but I have a few specific questions to ask about upgrading my laptop.

I recently acquired a GTX 870M but upon further realization, it seems that this card is just straight up incompatible with my laptop's hardware. I got it for a really cheap price secondhand because the guy I got it from was having a hard time getting rid of it.

I've already done Prema's bios mod, and basically have my computer ready to upgrade to something but I'm unsure what to upgrade it to.

I've seen that Kenglish seems to have installed a 7970M into his laptop, would that be a relatively easy upgrade to do and worthwhile from a 670M card? The 7970M seems to be pretty cheap on eBay too!

Or, should I wait until Prema gets the mods done for the bios/vbios to allow the GTX 8 series to work in the EM series of laptops?

OR, should I try and just get a GTX 9 series card?

If I try to get another card though I'd need to get rid of the 870M I have, because otherwise it's basically useless to me and that's how I planned on getting the money to upgrade my laptop in the first place.

Ah, I gotcha... I had actually gotten the card secondhand from someone on craigslist for a really really good price, because he was having a hard time selling it I suppose. I was gonna try and PM you but it seems I lack the number of posts to do it!

It will always say empty even for many cards that work, but in your case the card is flat out incompatible. After installing a driver you will get error 43 in windows.

When you mean flat out incompatible, what do you mean specifically? Is it the bios not supporting it or is it something else?

Heya Prema;

I recently acquired a GTX 870m for my NP9130, however it seems that the bios isn't recognizing the VGA card. I've re-seated the card multiple times but it still says in the bios VGA Adapter - Empty.

Is this a bios related problem (i.e. the bios doesn't recognize the card because it cannot) or is the card bad?

Thank you so much.