Does my m17x R4 meet the 980M requirements?

[71hourahmed]

I'm looking at finally upgrading my m17x from its old 7970m to a 980m, but the person I contacted to buy the card from warned me that the 980m requires a 200W power supply, and win10 (I'm still on 7, but I can upgrade easily enough, so that shouldn't be too much of a problem).

 

I have read that the 7970m only required 100W, so I have no idea if my laptop would even be able to power the 980m or whether this would just be a waste of several hundred pounds. Can anyone clarify?

 

Also, I have read on here that installing a new card in an m17x require you to manually update the video drivers, but I'm afraid that I'm not quite sure what that means, exactly - would I need to rely on kindly users on here to keep uploading new modded versions of the video drivers in perpetuity, or is it just that I need to somehow tweak the installation on new drivers in future?

[Khenglish]

The 980m does draw more power than the 7970m, probably around 50% more. The 7970m draws no where near 100W, while a 980m really will draw 100W. Doesn't the m17x R4 already come with a 240W power supply? You should be fine as long as you don't raise the 980m's power limit.

Manually updating drivers means you need to change a setup file for the driver which says that installing a driver for your GPU/laptop combination is OK. Since your laptop was never released with the 980m Nvidia does not have it in the list of approved combinations. The modification is easy to do.

 

J95 wrote a guide on how to do the modification here:

 

 

[71hourahmed]

Excellent. Thank you so much -  I thought the whole "edit the inf file" thing would be a lot more intimidating than that. Do you happen to know if the heatsinks in an m17x would fit a 980m?