AW14 attempting to upgrade gpu

I have an alienware 14r1 with a 765m. Its been a great little laptop and honestly is still able to do everything i ask of it. I got this crazy idea to remove and reball the gpu from an aw15r1 and put it in place of the 765m. The gpu is a 965m and also uses 2gb of vram like the 765m. Of course it is rwo generations newer but this is for science. I know that i likely will end up with 2 dead motherboards but i am curious as to what would happen. I am having a company do the work for me and i will report back. More than likely it wont even turn on and if it does the bios for both the motherboard and the video card will likely not play nice with each other but hey nothing ventured. Wish mes luck my dudes. I already have the 15r1 board and will be shipping both out tomorrw.

 

Wow! Good luck! For science!

 

I think this would have been capable of the chipsets were from the same generation. The layout probably changed between Kepler and Maxwell so I really advise against killing two good boards. A case mod to stuff the 15r1 board into the 14 is probably more feasible

 

If this works.... Wow. That will be an avalanche of good news. I feel though that this is impossible. There may be way to many internal conflicts between the Kepler structure and the Maxwell. Pins on the BGA layout may not even be the same anymore. Pin # 47 may now be a data transfer line as opposed to a 5V line or something similar to that.

The variables are too great. You would need to compare the PCB schematics side by side and ensure that both BGA arrays were the same. And chances of Dell giving you those schematics are as likely as you running a GTX 1080 on a Nintendo.

I wish you luck though, and if it works I will personally paypal you 50$, cus ya know that would be awsome.

 

Any progress on this project? I like the science

 

I have all the parts I am just waiting to send them in to have them desoldered and put in place. It seems very unlikely to work but I just want to see if it's possible. I spoke to the tech and they are going to make sure the memory is compatible which I think it is. They are also going to swap the bios over for the gpu. This is a dumb idea and I am 99.9% sure it will fail. I've spent $250 on a spare 14 board with a 765m and $250 on a 15r1 board with a 965m and it will be $300 to have the work done. I shelved it a bit as I have been working on a 1080 in the 17r1 again.

 

My Ranger just died, but always fun to watch your developments

Thanks for the update!

 

Oh man. What happened?

 

780m died so I replaced with the m6100/8950 but I couldnt boot PEG, at first I was able to switch from SG to PEG but then upon reboot PEG would fail to POST. The GPU would would cause a system hang every 20-30min, reinstalled windows and behavior would persist so I tried cleaning the MXM port and MXM connection on the GPU. No system hangs for a day, letting the system loop Unigine Valley for a few hours. Played some 6x resolution Onimusha: Warlords on pcsx2 last night and continued this morning.

System hanged and 7x beeps, reset CMOS and still 7 beeps.

The motherboard always had issues, you might recall I had issues overclocking due to VRM overheating. I think the motherboard was on a slow decline since I got it, and the blown AC Adapter when I got it probably started that decline.

Ranger is shelved for now, but ill get it fixed.

 

I have a spare r1 board with the unlocked bios set up for ahci and full uefi if you need one.

 

Ill contact you if I sell some other things, thanks for the heads up.

 

did u ever finish this or get it to work

 

This upgrade won't work as the 965m has a different pinout than the 765m. If you want to do an upgrade that is compatible go with the 960m. Same pinout so it should actually work. Just be careful.