New to Alienware! Please help!

I recently bought a used Alienware M17x on ebay for quite cheap (not gonna reveal )

It has a pretty outdated graphics card and I was looking to replace it, but I've read some places that some Alienware cannot have their GPU replaced?

My graphics card now are
NVidia GeForce 9400M
NVidia GeForce GTX260M

I have the latest drivers, but obviously the cards are very old and outdated (2008/2009).

I was thinking of upgrading (don't know to what graphics card yet), I just wanted to see if I was actually able to replace these graphic cards without a problem?

 

Hi, welcome

For AW laptops you have a few choices. Seeing you either have an R1 or R2 you might be better off asking in the owners lounge if you don't get any response here.

You can go with the most powerful GPU that was available at the time the machine was current. This will be fairly straightforward (but care is needed with re-attaching the heatsinks to make sure you get good contact). I believe this was the 280m. Or you can go for a much later one, but then it gets harder. BIOS changes are needed and the iGPU has to be turned off - no more optimus. You also need a modded driver so they will install. The NV drivers only include machine/card combos that the OEM supplies them with.

Have a search around as well, I've seen quite a few threads on what you need to do

Drivers and modified .inf files: LaptopVideo2Go: Drivers

HTH

Edit: forgot, you can also add another 260 and Sli them. This will need an SLi cable and heatsink (and x-bracket) specific to the machine and slot you will be using. Performance-wise though you'll be better off with a single more powerful card. Sli does not give double the power but depends on the game as to how much better it is, although you can also just use it for Physx and take a load off the main GPU.

I don't know enough about the R1/R2 to be more specific

 

In my opinion the best thing you can do is get 2x GTX 280 SLi; that's what I'm running and it does a pretty darn good job with the new games.
You can put ATI Radeon HD 5870 with CrossFire in as well, but this can be a little tricky since they were made for the next model R2 and not yours/ours.
But pretty much doing anything will be worth the money/performance; even if you decide to stick with GTX 260 and just get a second one.

As Micky stated - you can actually install the latest driver with a little modification; check one of my topics (I have several regarding the proces and different issues I encountered so far).
Good luck.

 

This is the best set-up that we recommend on the m17x R1, if it was an R2 you could put some really powerful cards in it.