GTX 780M in M17x R2?

I just read about the GTX 780M and cannot find any information as far as the compatibility with the M17x R2. I know that they're the same architecture, but shouldn't it be more complicated than that, or no?

The only thing I noticed is that UpgradeYourLaptop on eBay is selling the GTX 780M and it states it can be used for the M17x R2. However, I am wary as one auction incorrectly has the GTX 680M listed in the specs, and for both, the drivers lead to 680M. I checked the inf file in the drivers and there is no indication of GTX 780M at the bottom...

Any thoughts on this?

 

It should work . . . but you'll have to figure out a way to cool the memory chips on the back of the card. SLI will be more tricky though - look for the thread where some users on hear got GTX 580m SLI working in an R2.

 

Wouldn't you have to cool the memory chips on the back of a GTX 680M too then? Or is that different somehow (thinking they seem similar)?

I had talked to The Wiz before about GTX 680M SLI before but he moreorless stated that it wasn't going to happen. I'm guessing that means GTX 780M SLI is out...

I talked to UpgradeYourLaptop and I guess the links have been updated now for the new drivers, so I guess it will work, but not willing to try at $800!

 

someone in tech inferno got a 780m working on a r3. once i get enough money ill e sure to try the 780m out.

 

Has anyone tried this yet? I'm interested as well in seeing how this goes...

 

Eager to try this out too. I suppose the fan on my old 5870 setup and the 240W PSU are sufficient right? Just one card is enough since Xfire/SLI seem to be quite troublesome. Also there's a recommendation on the eBay page regarding HWINFO, does it mean I have to keep an eye on that fan speed everytime the machine's up and running? Can it be automated?. It's my very first upgrade and skipping 680M altogether for the 780M. Need to do careful research before shelling out $900. Thanks all

 

It might be worth contacting upgradeyourlaptop and see what sort of things they've found in their testing (and whether they verify that it will indeed work and will refund you if it doesn't). I know some folks have had trouble with them as far as support goes...I've had great luck with their cards (6970's), but didn't need to contact them for support.

It would be intersting to see what they say, regarding HWINFO I wonder if that means that you have to use it to manually control the fans...that would be my guess, but can't say for sure.

Good luck, will be interested to see how it goes.

 

I don't think anyone has tried it yet. Haven't seen anything but questions about it.

 

If a 680M works is it safe to assume the 780M also works in the R2? What might be the biggest issues? Heat, cooling and power consumption?

 

Biggest thing will be cooling (memory chips on the back) and SLI. I agree that there's no reason why it wouldn't work though.

 

i would love to install one of them new monsters.
I do not think there will be any problems with installation, only those bloody memory chips on the back.... i also do not know if 24% performance gain is worth almost 2x extra money comparing to 7970m price point.
I would wait with purchase, firstly, i would ask eurocom about R2 compatibility, as it was done in 7970m case.

another problem is i play only diablo 3 and starcraft 2, and in both cases i have 100FPS on FULL MAX HIPER settings, why would i spend more ? to get 120 fps ?........my eye will not see any difference

ANyways, if Fellas from eurocom would send me one card, i would carefully try to do a closer look, test, test, test.....and make a guide on How To

And i will be doing this in 1-2 weeks, wish me luck

 

Gddr5 does not need active cooling just not being smothered is fine.

 

Best of luck on the installation. I too am up for an upgrade as my 5870Ms on my R2 were just recently sold and need to put in a replacement. Hope it's as easy as the GTX 680M upgrade. :thumbsup:

 

680m = GK104
780 = GK110
780m =KG 104/106
It's an 680m(Technical Upgrade) on steroids.

The memory chips on the back offcourse need cooling but this was also the case with the 680m 4gb cards.
Just throw a thermal pad on them and you ar good to go.

I can't think of a reason why the 780m wouldn't work, It's just a driver recognition issue which should be easily to solve.
I asume it will work the same way we mod the drivers for the R2 for the 680m, It's just a matter of knowing the correct HWID code.

What does concern me is the heat from the Die itself.
The thermal capacity of the R2 GPU/Heatsink is almost not enough to keep the 680m a cool and now the Die of the 780m should generate allot more heat.

Copper shim mods anyone

 

what temps are u getting on a 680m?

 

Anywhere from 28 tot 93 degrees
Any card will remain acceptably cool offcourse but, all gpu's get overclocked so thats more the temp. range i was refering too.

 

Uh, seems like a bad paste job to me, or a bad thermal paste. Or something else.... R2 heatsink is way more than enough to keep 100Watt card cool, but the paste job is important as well as good contact across all elements, witch can be tricky....

7970m is a 100W card, 780m is 100W card as well

i keep my 7970m at 75-83'C max (100% load) and 32-35'C Idle, so i expect same temps +/-5'C on 780m....

 

You are kidding me right... You are telling ME i did a bad pasting job??
I have the highest benchmarks for the R2.
I have the highest stable clocks on the cpu and gpu...

I wrote a walkthrough on the difference between thermal pastes and thermal pads.. I even re-alligned my heatsink..

What can you tell me that you knwo for fact?
So you are telling me, that an M17xR2, that never had a heatsink designed to handle more then 80watt... 5870m.... a m18x that has special 100w rated heatsink for the 580m series.... That my card runs hot??

Offcourse it's a 100w card. The design isn't allowed to go passed 100watts.
You calculate temps based on asumption and tell me i did a bad paste...

What kind of drugs are you on my friend....i would like to test this drug

sort of on topic:
Did you overclock your 680m? If not,....83 degrees is hot for stock clocks, i reach those temps when i clock my core to 950 and ramp up the memory... You might wanna repaste that baby.

EDIT:
You have a 7970m and not a 680m
Never mind

 

Flingin,
Any updates on the 780m in the r2?
I am very keen to see the results of this setup.

 

The memory chips on the back need a bit of room to breathe, not cooling.

 

I am waiting for the bloody card to arrive, and UPS has missed estimated delivery date of 14.06 Friday. Not happy at all.
When i get it to work, i will post a guide

i based my assumption on the fact that you are on stock clocks.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings Bro. Keep it cool.

 

Then why does the 680m bracket come with a backplate for VRM's

 

VRM =/= Memory Chips

 

That's what i mean.
Meaker said that you don't need to cover them but i think you do because the 680m bracket comes with a special cover attached on the back for the VRM's. So i think Nvidia expects them to be cooled with cover/padding.

 

anything yet?

 

no, nothing yet,
because, my 780m was STOLEN.
YES
see the tracking last event:

Delivered On:
17/06/2013 16:26
Delivered To:
JERSEY, JE
Signed By:
LETERBOX
Left At:
Front door

Thank you for giving us this opportunity to serve you.

Sincerely,

UPS

I came back from work and card was NOT on my corridor, i asked my neighbours (14 flats) and 5 of them saw UPS parcel at approx 16:30 lying on the corridors floor next to the wall. At approx 18:30 neighbours told me parcel was gone, at 20:15 i came back from work.

I will not be sending anything to my home address anymore, now that i know there are burglars operating in here.

The worst thing is, loads of parcels from amazon are dropped trough this letterbox, and almost 100% of them i received, BAD 3|!@#$ luck of mine, i got robbed from the most expensive $!@$$!@ pracel that ever came trgough that LETTERBOX.

anyways UPS fault, they should leave a note, because it is SIGN FOR delivery, i spoke with the guy from UPS and he told me '' i could drop it in there, the value was low stated at only 35USD''

i do not know if this is a good idea of posting this here, but what the hell i dont care anymore..


my brain is melting now

 

Man i hope you can get it sorted out with UPS insurance.
Even though they value is low, it still has to be signed off for sooooow....ships man ,i feel your pain

Did you order this from ebay? Who put the low value on it?

 

We all know from who i bought the card and this is not their fault, they declared low value to avoid customs charging in UK, well i am in jersey and i do not pay any taxes like UK people do, but i wanted the parcel to arrive quickly and i asked the seller to put low value on it.

i feel depressed, !@#&^, mad, not because of money, not because i care about this stupid video card, but because of those @#$^$ BURGLARS !

 

Well, no i didn't, that's why i asked? you didn't state in any post where you got it from , just some vage thing about testing from Eurocom.
I guess it doesn't matter at this point.

So what's you next step?

 

if it needed a signature and the delivery guy just left it at the door, i would go to the mailman and and raise heck!

 

This is very tragic and hope that you can at least be able to get the insurance due. I'm sure we all feel your pain as none of us would ever want something like this to happen. Especially so for a GTX 780M.

 

This is a true tragedy. Condolences to flingin and the deceased/lost 780m.

Anyone else on the horizon getting a 780m for their r2? I have just bought a r2 and will either upgrade to 780m or 8970m(have a 6990m ATM in it) but more-so probably later this year around Sept' onwards. Curious to see benchmarks and how it all goes. Should be ok from a psu POV but as always we need a beta tester just to be sure...

 

Thanks bros,

Just to inform that i am not abandoning my project. But i have to wait until UPS investigation finishes, clearly, i expect they will not have much to say. But it is not my fault.

 

i blame ups because u requested for a delivery signature and they just left it at the door.

 

If you had it shipped at a low value, that is all they are obliged to refund.

That is the risk of trying to avoid customs.

 

Hope the stolen GTX780M gets sorted. I just had to pay £107 in tax last week when UK customs intercepted my new GTX680M from the US. I was expecting it, though, and when parcels are tracked it is almost impossible for customs to miss them, so I can understand the temptation to try and avoid it.

Anyway, just to go back to this point made on the previous page for a minute...

The memory chips on the back of the GTX680M (which are presumably in the same place on the GTX780M given that the cards are all designed to the same layout template) are over the large thick rectangular sticky pad that prevents the card from shorting on the motherboard underneath it. So... there's no room for anything else on the chips, is there?

 

Yes, there is like 1mm gap between the card and the black pad that isolates MOBO parts from the GPU itself.
So almost no space whatsoever, maybe for very thin thermal pad, like 0.5mm one would fit in there, but i do not see any purpose in putting a thermal pad there anyways, i prefer the fan to do its work on blowing out the warm air from completely naked memory chips than to isolate it. So putting a pad overe there would cause more harm than good to my opinion.

Some people installed 580m's alrady in R2, completely forgetting about memory chips on the back, and they are fine.

 

So who will go on with the 780m buying and install in an r2?

 

I already bought it from Eurocom,and i am awaiting for re-shipment soon, at least i hope so.
This is really %&@#! up situation i am in.

I hope i will gonna be the first, i hope, if so, there is gonna be a youtube guide Dedicated for NBR community.
I planned this for a long time...

 

Well that is good new flingin
Just make sure you have a shotgun at front door step so this time the 780m is not stolen

 

It will be send, IF it will, to a new, very secure address, i will not make same mistake 2 times.

I guess i could do horrible things to the person who stole it if i would catch him, but then i would end up in the prison with him, witch would not be great for me again.

 

Flingin, very sorry to have read what happened to your 780m...what a waste.

 

guys. i think it would be a better option for us if we go with a 770m instead of a 780m. 770m has a lower base clock and memory clock as well as lower memory bus width (at 192-bit). however it only needs 75 watts to power it and it cost almost half of the 780m. we could put 2 770m on the r2 on sli and probably beat out a single 780m.

clock differences:
AnandTech | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 700M Series Launched

770m
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770M - NotebookCheck.net Tech

780m
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M - NotebookCheck.net Tech


what do u guys think?

 

i think that i rather have 1 card that performs good enough for any game i will throw at it. Sli and x-fire is a headache for me, until drivers are not improvedi rather stay with 1 rock stable card.

but yea, double 770m may interest overclokers and benchmark score beaters.

 

firestrike 3400 vs 5200 is a huge gap you would need a second Gtx 770m just to beat one Gtx780m but must fight with sli issues and noise^^

 

I bought a new Nvidia GTX780M graphic card from upgradeyourlaptop on Ebay I have received the graphic card yesterday and I have installed it exactly as instructed by them on their Ebay selling page and place all the the thermal pads as they instructed in the pictures, when I first started the laptop it stared normally the Alienware logo then the boot screen then windows is starting but after that a white screen appeared and it kept like that for a long time so i had to restart my laptop, then nothing showed on the screen and after a long time there is a beeb sound, now I don't know what to do I rechecked the installation process but still nothing showing on the screen I installed all the drivers that I should using safe mode but still, Please Help Me

system specs:Alienware M17X R2
Nvidia GTX780M (New graphic card)
BIOS A10
its not equipped with 3D panel
ATI Radeon HD5870 (previous graphic card)
CPU Intel core i7 820QM
Ac adapter 240Watt

 

Hi
respect for getting a Gtx 780m you will definetly find help in nbr. forum
maybe you should ask for help in this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/720908-m17x-r2-7970m-crossfirex-37.html

 

Errr.. to be honest, it sounds like your card died. I mean, if it booted once, any failure to do so again HAS to be due to a malfunction.
For your sake, I hope it's just a case of improper card seating / heatsink contact. First things first, take the card to somebody with a compatible machine and try to boot it there.

 

Hmmm does not sound good. Did the 780m damage the screen?
Further testing required. Keep us updated deejay what upgradeyourlaptop say.

 

They gave me a new vbios and told me to create a bootable usb, I removed the card and plugged it in then the screen started working again so I tried their solution but still the problem is not fixed and now I noticed that after a while a green screen appeared after windows start the fan speed kept increasing then the system crashed and restarted.