Revamping my AW17 Ranger (confidence boost for the noobs I hope!)

Hey all

My intentions here are not to duplicate all the great info that is already available here and on Techinferno, but to kind of help others who are unsure whether to invest in upgrades instead of replacing their laptop altogether.
The main concerns I am reading about, are usually related to fear of opening up the laptop and damaging something, fear of modding drivers.

So, a couple month ago, I was all ready to sell my AW17 and replace with a current gen AW or an MSI/Asus. People here were quick to convince me to upgrade my current AW17 instead, something I confirmed in other forums and when investigating the other laptops I had in mind. The main issue I hadn't realized was that most laptops now have soldered GPU's... There are exceptions of course but the ones that could have met my requirements were out of my budget. I am moving next year to a new house where I'll have more room (hopefully one dedicated for my gaming/music/movie watching etc...) so I'll get back to my favorite hobby: building a desktop PC from scratch. Top configurations will cost a fragment of what a high end laptop would cost me...
Anyway I am getting off track, so let's get back to what I did to revamp my laptop...

1- Tools/Basics:
Make sure you have a PH0 Philips screwdriver as that's the one you will need for all screws in your laptop. The one exception were the screws for the Optical Disk Drive caddy which are PH00 but unless you're planning to mess with it, you won't need it.
Ideally I would recommend you have a nice set of tips with a quality driver. I personally invested in the new ifixit pro tech tool set and am very happy with it. It includes 60+ tips, antistatic band, and lots of nice gadgets to help with any kind of work on electronics etc... It costs me $65. Expensive but worth it. And less than other premium sets like Wiha (only tips without any gadgets...)
Other than that, you'll need some thermal paste and cleaning solution for repasting the GPU (and CPU if you choose to do so).
Make sure you take the right precautions against static shock and fully power drain your laptop.
Other than that, your OS needs to be installed in UEFI mode (easily done using the official microsoft media creation tool on a USB drive) and some settings need to be changed in the BIOS (legacy mode, secure boot etc... Again there are many detailed threads on that and I don't want to duplicate this here...)

2- GPU. I had the problematic 880m... It KINDA did the job, but that was with the slv's vbios to treat the catastrophic throttling on that card and with lava-like temps... I repasted, use a cooling pad to help but temps still hovered around 85deg under load. (<40 idle)
I bought the 980m MXM from Woodzstack on eBay. He is well known here and the purchase process was very smooth and he assisted with pre-flashing the GPU with the correct vbios for my laptop and giving me initial tips on finding modded drivers.
So I will break down this part in 2 as it is two things that people are worried about here:
A- Installing the GPU. Laptops like the AW17 R5 and the earlier R3/R4 etc.. are easy to open up. Just remove the bottom cover and you immediately have access to all hard-drive bays (except mSata), CPU and GPU.
There are countless videos on Youtube showing how to disassemble and reassemble AW laptops so make sure you watch these. It's really very simple.
The hardest part honestly, and I am writing this NOT to scare you but to illustrate how straightforward the procedure is, is removing the heatsink. It might be a little stuck on the GPU so don't be afraid to apply a bit of force and twist it a bit until it come off.
Clean the old paste off the heatsink and install the new GPU, using a quality thermal paste on it. In the case of the 980m, the screws you need to use to attach the heatsink to the GPU are NOT the same as the 880m. So make sure they are included with the 980m when you buy it (woodzstack) did that.

B- (forgot that part the first time around.... doh!)
Modding drivers. Guys, this is not something to worry about. I will not go into the details here. Just check out 2 threads on Techinferno: google techinferno + modding drivers and techinferno + alienware aftermarket driver and you'll find these. The first thread will teach you how to mod drivers yourself and the 2nd one actually hands you the modded inf files on a silver platter (big thanks to j95 for that). I really really recommend you try learning how to mod drivers yourself. It is extremely easy. You CANNOT damage your GPU. Worse thing that can happen is that the drivers won't get installed... That's it. So give it a try. If you made it this far, why not go all the way ;-)

3- Hard-Drives:
I purchased my laptop initially with a single 1TB hard drive with a 80GB mSata. I promptly purchased a 840 Evo 250GB which I installed in the 2nd HDD bay. This was plug and play, super easy. I DID read that in some cases people didn't have the HDD caddy and had to buy it separately. In my case it was already there (empty of course). Pretty sure you can easily procure one from Dell or eBay.
I recently upgraded my HDD setup again... I replaced the 80GB mSata with a 250GB Crucial mSata and installed an additional 850 Evo 500GB SSD. What I did was remove my Optical Disk Drive and replace it with my old 1TB storage drive. I purchased a compatible caddy from newmodeus (make sure it is 12.3mm and for slot loading drives. They have great customer support so you can contact them to make sure you get the correct one). You WILL need a PH00 screwdriver in order to remove the ODD from the plate that fixes it to the laptop. The screws are really tiny.
As for the mSata, things get a bit more complicated as you need to fully disassemble the laptop to access the mSata port which is under the keyboard. Again, there are many many videos showing how to do that.
2 tips: Keep in mind that there are 2 lengths of screws. In case you put the long ones in the wrong positions, you might end up with a laptops with zits (search the forums to see pictures of someone's laptop with this "disease"...). There are LOTS of screws so make sure you don't lose any (15-20 screws in total). You will need to remove the hard-drives AND Optical disk drive to access some screws.
Once done, there are tricks showing how to separate the keyboard from the laptops' bottom (one circle at the front of the laptop where you can press with your finger to help with that). Make sure you pay attention to 2 cables which needs to be disconnected. One is done from the bottom very easily, the other for the card reader is a bit more difficult to reach, ESPECIALLY when you're done and want to reconnect it. In my case I didn't do it properly and my laptop wouldn't turn on the first time around... Again, my intention is not to scare anyone! The key is to never panic and backtrack and check everything again. When you're careful, things CANNOT go wrong.
Replacing the mSata itself is very simple once you can access it so I won't cover this here... There are videos showing that anyway.
Tip: IN case you have only two RAM's (8+8 for example and installed in the bottom of the laptop, you might want to take the opportunity to put them under the keyboard instead. This will make it easier in the future if you want to install additional RAM for some reason. You won't need to full disassemble the laptop again... Just remove the bottom cover.

Tip 2: I decided upon installing the mSata that I'd rather use it as my OS drive. The best tool I found for cloning my old OS drive (my 840 Evo) was a tool called Paragon Migrate OS to SSD. It's not free but with a coupon I got it for around $15 I think. Very very simple and it automatically cloned my UEFI OS onto the new mSata drive. Then just access BIOS, fix the boot order and in Windows use Diskpart in command prompt to remove the UEFI partitions from the 840 Evo and format it. All in all, took 15-20 minutes. If what I wrote sounds like Chinese to you, don't worry. Again there are EXTREMELY detailed sources on the internet that can hold your hand and guide you step by step to accomplish everything I am writing about here.

Well that's it I guess... You could easily upgrade the CPU as well but everyone here recommended I don't spend my $$$ on that as it wouldn't have any impact on what I use the laptop for. I have 16GB of RAM which again is plenty.
The one thing that I could do is upgrade to the 120Hz screen. It's cheap (<$150) and I might do that in the near future. There is a very very comprehensive guide on how to do that and lots of helpful folks here so you'd be in good hands if you want to go for it.

Laptops are not known to be easily upgradable, like say a desktop pc. But the old AW have this big advantage over the new ones and I can honestly recommend you go for a deal on one on eBay instead of spending big bucks on a newer model which you won't be able to upgrade in the future... If AW continues on this path, this will very well be my last AW laptop and I will have to try and get my hands on a Clevo/Sager or Eurocom laptop... (or build my own desktop hopefully!)

Good luck to all those who finally decide to upgrade their laptop! Will be happy to help in case you need some advice!

 

the problem with the screen is just finding the parts and procuring them is quite difficult. they seem to be quite rare on ebay now.

Here's one listing for the cable:

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Original-for...712793?hash=item4af5573419:g:5tQAAOSwNSxVJoxx

 

The cable can still be bought on Aliexpress right? I saw it a couple days ago. It is expensive (~35-40 USD) but still an option.... And the screen itself can be found on laptopscreens (the exact part number was posted in the thread dedicated to the upgrade to 120Hz).

 

the problem with aliexpress is the payment methods: visa debit cards don't seem to work and they don't take paypal ever since they ended their partnership with paypal so it makes procuring them quite difficult. i had to pay a good sum of $70 and i got it from an amazon merchant to where they have run out of stock.

it was easy to get the screen 3-5 months ago when laptopscreens.com was well in stock...now they have low numbers for some reason - probably due to the EDID corruption issue.

 

In that case I might very well not go for that upgrade and eventually build a beastly desktop PC in the near future instead...

 

the only reason i went for the 120hz panel is because i didn't want optimus....pure and simple. you still have a chance with 10+ stock for the panel....it's just the cable that's the annoying bit.

 

The 120hz screen supplies a far nicer image as well...as many can attest it just animates differently and much more smoothly then the 60hz screen. The difference is night and day but something that is really hard to explain.

 

the mouse cursor at 120fps is so much more fluid than at 60fps you don't see the screen trying to catch up with the movement. it's cleaner with no judder...and yes it is quite noticable.

the side affect is that the 120hz panels lockout the intel GPU because the intel GPU doesn't support 120hz, but with the advent of DX12 and multi-gpu support I am not sure how that will work on the AW17R1 if at all based on how the hardware configuration. not many people who have the 120hz panel will consider this an issue since most of them find optimus a pain in the butt!

 

Can you please elaborate on your statement regarding DX12? I already know that the 120Hz lock out integrated GPUs but are you saying this could be an issue with DX12?

 

DX12 lets games use multiple GPUs from different vendors like intel, nvidia, and amd together. this form of multi-gpu support may not work for those with 120hz panels since the intel GPU has been locked out at a level that DX12 may not even get exclusive access to enable it and it may even break the system if it was able to even do so.

not sure how it'll pan out for those in optimus mode.

EDIT: would like to see how Gears of War Ultimate Edition - the first of many DX12 games - shape up.