GFX - Is it possible to upgrade my m17x r3 from a nVidia 660m to a 770m?

Hi everyone!
I'm thinking about upgrading my m17x r3's aging 660m to a 770m.
It's a whole lot cheaper than a new system, but I can't seem to find a definitive answer anywhere if my r3 will even support the 770m. It seems as if the 770m was made to support the r5, but I really don't understand nVidia's backwards compatability when it comes to this.
Any information, advice or good links will be SO appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Alex

 

Hi, I've worked with a couple of attempts to use the 770m in an R3 and both failed to work (don't recall the details).

As you have a 660m I guess you are familiar with modding the driver install? Unlocked bios?
The 680m and 780m both work with the above mods. IMO the 680m is by far the most robust GPU and easily out-clocks the 780m (with a little vbios work!).

You may also need a PSU and heatsink upgrade as the x80m cards are 100w. You will need the 240W PSU.

HTH

 

Thanks so much for the quick reply and great information!
OK so I have to rethink my upgrade plans then it seems.
In your opinion does the 680m compare nicely to the 770m? Is it worth the hassle? The reason I'm asking is that I am so unbearably sick and tired of dumbing down my games with my 660m here that I'm trying to weigh my upgrade options, with the most "bang for the buck" being my working mantra.
Thanks so much again.

Alex

 

The 680m will blow the 770m out of the water! Even at stock it's a great worker. I run mine overvolted and +200mhz on the core and temps stay well under control.

Technical ability, or keen to learn is a must though . What do you currently do for driver updates?

 

It can because 680M is a smaller chip with less units than 780M. 780M is faster becuase it has more cores, even with a lower clock.

 

Technical ability...I'd say better than average, with a known penchant for Google™-ing and YouTube™-ing as much information as I need to make a semi-educated guess.
I do manual updates of my drivers and usually stay at least one or two versions behind to avoid problems. I seem to enjoy stability.

As far as the 680m goes, it is peaking my interest nicely here. The PSU upgrade is unfortunate, but not all that costly either.

 

Not when I was benching against a 780m. The 780m does have more cuda cores enabled bit it's still a 680m (fermi?) core just opened up a little. The big problem was with overheating on the 780m. As soon as you overvolt it it starts throttling without careful monitoring. NV even tried to take this core to the 8xx level with the 880m - total failure, they had pushed it too far. It never even got to a desktop variant.

 

And no, I'm not familiar with those. My r3 came to me pre-loaded and I didn't tinker with it that much. Is it nasty?

 

Great thanks, so do you have to use a modded inf file for the install?

The reason I ask is that it is one of the tricky steps people have difficulty with. The R3 did not support a 660m...at stock.

Search the forum for 680m R3 upgrade. It should come up with a bunch of threads. I'll probably be in a lot of them!

Getting the heatsink may also be a challenge. I got mine from AW Support - 680m heatsink for R4. As it was going in an R3 I had to accept 'no returns' but hey the guy was working with me! Big plus is that it comes with pads and paste in-place and simply needs assembling. Price was good as well, around $50.00 delivered IIRC.

If you do go for the 680m I have a bunch of stuff that might help, just hit me up in a PM

No, just a little tricky if you do not understand folder structures. Finding the file is the first challenge. Then correctly copying it to overwrite an existing file (that only appears after a failed installation has extracted the files).

If you just run the driver download and it works ATM then I am confused . On an R3 with a 660m it should fail to see the hardware.

Are you sure it's not an R4? this supported the 6xx GPU's.

 

You're absolutely right. It is an r4. I've had "r3" rolling around my head for years though, for some reason.
Sorry about that.
Am I able to change the forum title then, so there's no confusion with people looking for an answer on this later?

 

No problem, I thought I was loosing it, haha.

Anyhow, your life just got way easier. The 680m IS supported in the R4 so it's a plug-n-play option . And you should find AW support able to help with the heatsink (hopefully)...
I don't think a title can be edited but I have not tried.

 

MickyD1234, thank you so much! I may PM you in the near future when I'm attempting this, if that's cool.
For all those reading this, I don't want to close this topic, but I will be following MickyD1234's suggestion and seeing where it leads.
Thanks to all!
Cheers!

Alex

 

Cool, just one more important bit; the 680m comes in two variants. 2gb is Dell and 4gb is Clevo. Only important if you want to overvolt via vbios.

Good luck.

 

780M is a Kepler. I use 880M with 780M clocks and it's cool. Triple pipe heatsink + IC Diamond.

Better get more memory version if you want 680M. Nowadays games are very vRAM hungry

 

Yeah I wasn't sure but the 680m IS Kepler - same core.

So are you running the 880m at a lower clock than stock? At one point they were failing weekly!

 

Well I wanted a 780M but they weren't available so I bought 880M and set 780M clocks. Works good so far, that was 2-3 years ago I think.

 

That's interesting, good idea, I'll remember that!

 

I had my first 980m fail and never had a 880m fail on me once and I dealt with (pushed them a little bit too hard at times) quite a few 880m's for a couple of years and non of which were underclocked but rather overclocked and undervolted.

Check this out https://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/9787982