M17x R4 w/ 680m. Looking to upgrade to 980 in Southern Cali

Hey guys,

I have a m17xr4 with a 60hz screen with a 680m. This beast has been a trooper over the last 5 years. I read that all the good upgrades involve the 120hz screen but the 980M is pretty much plug and play.

I'm not looking to spend a bunch of money to upgrade everything at this time but I would like to save some money and upgrade my existing machine to play some newer games smoother.

Is it worth it to find a 980M and plop in the upgrade and call it a day or should I save up and get a 120hz screen with a 1060?

What's everyone's opinion? I literally have no experience what so ever tinkering with the thinks on my alienware unfortunately so repasting and breaking down my machine is way beyond my skills.

 

I am about to put a 1060 in mine, i would say thos is the way to go from what i have read the 980 requires a bit of mucking around with inf files and bios and stuff. The 120hz screen was easy enough to do i watched a video on youtube and successfully done it. There is also alot of vids on repasting the gpu and cpu on the r4s it is straigh foward and if you haven't had it done i reccommend you do it will take you about 30min to do both and cost you a couple bucks for the thermal paste. Also download a monitering app before and after to see how much different it makes in temps. I use cpuidmoniter im sure others use alot of different programs but i like cpuid as it shows all temps.

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How much did you spend on everything (screen + 1060)?

 

The screen i got off ebay for a "make an offer" of about $57USD (im aussie) it was a bargain i think. The 1060 is $950CAD from @woodstackz here on nbr. And i actually got the 240w psu and 3 pipe (100w) gpu heatsink with the rig when i bought it. Maybe thats an aussie thing i dont actually know.

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1060 is 20-30% more performance for the same price as a 980m. Need a bit more fiddling around in bios and boot drive partition change, both require modded drivers though. Afaik 1060 only works with 120hz screens.

 

I just completed a 980m upgrade on my m17x r4 it didn't take too long to do, and with the modified drivers once you get the correct lines you need and saved it's just a matter of copying them in to the new driver before you update. There are plenty of guides out there for the upgrade for both the 980m and 1060m. I don't know the whole situation but I've gone from a 660m and like the guy from oz says I'm in the uk and had both the 3pipe heatink and a 240psu with it from the start. Good luck with what you do.

 

Was the 980 worth it would you say? What were your improvements?

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For me it was, it gives me another few years before getting a complete new system, so that's saved me about £1000 as I got the 980m for £430. As for performance gains I didn't benchmark my old system before I did the upgrade but when you let games chose settings for you and new games that used to set them low to med now set them high to ultra and frame rate not dropping below 50 is good enough for me. I haven't finished tweeting it yet as I only did the upgrade on Saturday. Temp wise I put on battlefield 1 and on high settings it was maintaining 88c and I haven't done anything extra cooling wise.

 

Oh yeah the hardest thing in the whole process for me was trying to convert my drive from mbt to gpt nothing was letting me do it so had to create a windows 10 USB boot stick and completely reformat the drive as all the converters wasn't letting me convert with it being a system disk.

 

I would say 88 for GTX980m is very high in an alarming way. Several people here had 980ms die prematurely on much lower temps me and @Raidriar included and some people had cards after a while of usage black screening like @Ashtrix. I would personally recommend that you find what is wrong with your cooling and fix that because I think the m17xR4 cooling can do way better than this.

 

88C on a 980M is very high because Maxwell is cooler over Pascal, Consider thinking to buy a cooling pad and modify the fans plus the paste job needs to be done properly and all the thermal pads on the MOSFETs ,the Chokes and VRMs. Proper cooling needs to be achieved for maximum lifetime & consistency.

My 980M can't even reach 84C+ it will blackout, t his is a major issue with most of the 980Ms due to the reduced MOSFETs 3 only & poor yield of GM204, if you want to make it more add 3 more MOSFETs (the top row, black small ones & cool them). Plus make sure your vBIOS is running at 1v, Past that needs heavy cooling and low ambient temps & always Run MAX fans when gaming from HWinfo Fan control (On M17x R4 you can run custom settings too without hassles since full RPM is unlocked fully i.e max RPM speed on the both CPU and GPU fans which isn't the case with AW17 - Check the pic above my post by J95 look at the fan table)

Plus the 1060 isn't proper 1:1 980M type board, a.k.a not the 3.0B standard, It only looks like that and need to do some small changes, I would say the 1060 is max 15-20% extra power over 980M (but if you OC 980M the gap closes & the 980M resale is high because of it's compatibility across many system being last LVDS compatible powerful chip & it can do SLI) 1060 stays cool but the downsides are no vBIOS mods for Pascal (No voltage control yeah Kepler was last even Maxwell can't do Uv it needs to be done via vBIOS mod, but in maxwell at-least you an Overvolt granted you have extra MOSFET mod and Overclock too. Apart from the MSI AB curve for voltage & clocks ratio, perhaps TDP tweaker for Pascal chips you can't pretty much tinker with it) The 120Hz is a must (this isn't a disadvantage but just mentioning because if in case the GPU fails the system will throw error codes, due to iGPU not being able to drive and run the 120Hz panel, eDP)

I'd say hold off to those 1060 MXM chipsets, wait for some time, Eurocom should have the standard proper 3.0b MXM GPU chipsets 1070/1080/RX580 (I won't recommend this AMD Radeon chip due to the high TDP/ poor perf ratio vs the 1070 or 1060 even).

Oh and also there are some Heatsinks with 6 Pipes on eBay, they stack 3 more from another HS, I think they work, saw many people use them ( Check the M17x R4 Quadro thread, the pics you can see the stacked HS 1 extra on CPU & maybe have a look at this thread too an MSI 1070 modded chassis of 17x R4 - HS picture).

Thanks for the mention @MahmoudDewy