M17x R3 Upgrading to 560M/580M

Hello,
I was wondering simply how this works. I bought my M17x R3 two months before the 500 series became available, and now I'm considering upgrading to a better card. But I have a few questions on how this works:

1. Does Dell do upgrades, ie: I send the laptop to them, they put in the new card, they send it back. If not,

2. Does Dell sell the cards, so that I could purchase one and have it delivered here, and,

3. If they do send the cards, does replacing it yourself void the warranty?

Thank you for any and all help anyone can give me.

 

They sent me the card with a technician to install it. So my warranty is still active.

 

Okay, but I live in the Middle East (Qatar) so I highly doubt they'd be able to get a technician here. I'm going to go study in the US or Canada in about a year, do you recommend I just wait till then?

 

I have no idea what Dell would do then. I would just order the card you want, and if you ever have any pressing issues, then just plug the older card back in and call them for support.

 

Blood, what card do you have in your m17x right now?

 

It's the 460M, because I have the 120Hz model, that's why I'm slightly worried about replacing the GPU myself.

 

ok...the 460m will overclock easily to 560m speeds. So this is a FREE upgrade. If you haven't done it before, download MSI Afterburner.

Set the following clocks with the sliders...all 460m's will do these speeds easily:

800mhz CPU
1600mhz Shaders
1480mhz DDR5

Voila! Faster than 560m AND the best part, after i did this on my Asus g73, the temps did not get hotter by much. The 460m and 560m are identical spec wise. They have the same number of nvidia cores...but the 560m is slightly faster in speeds. It is NOT worth upgrading the 460m to 560m

SO...the only real upgrade i would do is the 580m

 

Haha, thanks for that tip, I'll do that ASAP. But if I were to upgrade, it would surely be the 580M. What's strange though, is that I recently saw in virgin there was Lamborghini laptop which had a 560M, but it was written that it was 3GB (as opposed to the 1.5GB 460M). Are there different models?

Edit: Can I make it so it only overclocks when in Plugged in Mode? Because I only get around 3 hours of battery life as of now, don't want to reduce that even further..

 

yes you can, only load the overclocked profile when you need it like when you are playing games. Leave it stock for all other times

 

So by upgrade do we pay the full price of like 1k for a video card alone? Or do we get some kind of discount? And from the post above, the new part is covered with warranty too?

 

Okay, thanks a bunch.