M17xR4 GTX 675m Graphics Card

I am the original owner of this early 2012 AW. I has a GeForce 675m that died last year. I switched to the integrated card and have been using it ever since (rarely play any games). Now, I want a replacement graphics card and I am going to buy 2 new hard drives and reload the system as well. I have two 500GB drives on a RAID mirror and will go back the same way. I will get the drives from Dell, but the graphics card is a little harder. I have found a NVidia GeForece GTX 680m 4GB MXM graphics card (N13E-GTX-A2) that says it fits the M18xR2 and M17xR4 for $310. So, questions that I have...

1 - Do I need to open my system and do a visual comparison of my card's memory?

2 - Do I need a new heat sink or other parts?

Alex

 

1 - The GTX 680M will fit and work without issues and run cooler than the GTX 675M.

2. - You can reuse your original heatsink. You will need new thermal paste. If you don't plan to overclock just about any paste will do. MX-4, Gelid Extreme, etc.

Other thoughts:
Why buy the hard drives from Dell? Surely they are much more expensive and there isn't a "Dell" hard drive. They just buy them from drive manufacturers. Order them from Newegg or something and save a bunch of money.

Oh and welcome to the forums! If I have offered anything incorrect there will be someone along shortly to punch me in the arm.

 

Thanks...

Thanks again...

Simply because Dell said they were the correct part lol. I looked on NewEgg for sure, but are these drives SATA 3.0GB or SATA 6.0GB?

 

Hi, all correct from @deadsmiley, just note the 4gb version is not dell but clevo. The dell card only had 2gb memory but in many upgrades I have never seen this cause any issue.

With the 680m you also get the advantage of no bios mods or driver mods in an R4 .

 

The new drives are all SATA 6.0GB from what I understand. What is your concern sir?



Sent from my overpriced smartphone

 

Because, despite being a 19 year software developer, I'm rather hardware challenged! I'm guessing my system will use either one just fine?

 

Yes it will!

I am sorry I did not understand what you are getting at. SATA 3 is backwards compatible with older version.

This question come up quite often on the M15x forum as well.

Sent from my overpriced smartphone

 

Ok, I've searched this site with the built in search, and Google, and there are simply too many hits to make sense of. I see you have an M17x-R4 with the GTX 680m and Windows 10 Pro. Can you point me to a thread on installing Windows 10 Pro, with all drivers, and as much of the Alienware software as possible? I can install Windows 10 clean on new drives, or install it over the original Windows 7 (clean install). This would also a clean install on the new drives, but I would be doing a product key change (to Ultimate or whatever), since I bought Window 7 Home with the system because I have an MSDN license.

 

Hi, yes, I upgraded it from a 675m.

TBH I never used any win 10 install threads. I simply put off the upgrade nags while I watched for any serious problems. Then I just let it do it's thing and upgraded as-is. It went smoothly and the only software that messed up was alienware respawn. No surprise there since it's doing stuff to backup the O/S.

I did test a clean USB install on another laptop and the only issue was licensing, and that sorted it's self out after the install. For the first time after a windows upgrade I had all the correct drivers and versions . No 'hunt the driver' stuff.

You can get all the drivers from dell with your service tag, but to get any pre-installed software go to mydelldownloads.com and register. You get three downloads of all the software that came with the machine.

Good luck.

 

Any way to find the hard drive physical size without pulling them? It's not in the owner's manual or spec document that I can find. I'm looking at 2 of these 7mm drives...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAEE3Y26343