Replacing my dying/dead 6990m in an M17x R3.

Okay, so I'm pretty positive my 6990m has played it's last game, and I'm running purely off my IGP now. Being able to use my computer is nice, but having an alienware that I can't play the games I wan to on is less than ideal, so I want to replace my gpu.

From my little research, it seems I will pretty much have to buy a card from ebay. The two sellers with MXM cards seem to be upgrademonkey and eurocom. If anyone could provide feed back on them that would be great, especially in regards to support.

It seems like in my price range that these cards would be choices; 580m; 7970m; 770m; 8970m; and the 680m. I know that 580m is roughly similar to what I have(had), the 7970m and the 8970m are essentially the same, and the 680m is a little faster (stock) than the ATI cards, however, I don't know much about the 770m.

I do like that the 8970m from eurocom comes with a kit. I feel that would make it much easier for me to do the work. If I don't have the kit that might just serve as another problem for me to deal with.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for reading.

 

I would go for 680M, just because it is cheap, and you can overclock the hell out of it, @J95 http://forum.notebookreview.com/member.php?u=462874 is selling one, perhaps it is worth to talk to him
8970m would be a good upgrade as well, Eurocom have a very good price tag comparing to as usual very overpriced upgradeyourmonkey, so in that case, get it from Eurocom if you go for AMD card.

Overclocked 680m can match or easily beat stock 8970m from what i could see in benchmarks, 680m just have a HUGE potential, where 8970m is just 50MHz quicker 7970m card.

decisions decisions.....

i would go for 680m

 

The 680m would be nice, and upgrademonkey has much cheaper shipping to Japan. I'm worried about having to get the xbracket, thermal pads, etc separately, though, as it's a pain for me to find locally due to time constraints and being that I don't speak Japanese. It's much easier to get package deal of course.

 

Quite Simple.
If you are using CAD,Solidworks,etc.
Go 8970

 

Just playing games, recently go the humble origin bundle, so I plan on playing a whole lot of bf 3 and crysis 2.

 

xbracket from any 5870m/4870m will fit as well, pads - just use those you currently have on your 6990m
680M FTW

 

Ended up buying an 8970m.... Now the wait, and preparation is on.

Thanks everyone for the input.

 

Let us know how the upgrade goes! Post some pics of the process if possible.

 

It seems that with the 8970m HDMI in/ VGA output are not working, it could be driver related though... http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...yone-installed-8970m-m17x-r3.html#post9370659