Upgrading Alienware 17 R1

Hi, I recently gotten this laptop with it powered on showing lots of dots then goes black screen. Doing some research, I find it is possible the GPU (860m) is dead. Given the situation, I was thinking to upgrade it and heard @woodzstack could provide upgrades.

The spec of the laptop is as follows
CPU: i7-4710MQ
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M 2GB GDDR5
RAM: 8GB
It's got a 3D glass so I assume it's a 120hz (which people on the forum mention it is recommended for 980m or 10 series cards)

So I am just wondering 2 things,

1. how do I debug to make sure if its GPU so I can upgrade to the best GPU that's supported
2. Is the CPU worth upgrading as looking at the specs, it's not clocking too fast

Ultimately, this will be my portable gaming laptop and eventually a gift to my cousin.

Thanks for the help in advance, and apologies this is my first post so I'm not sure what rules are there for posting.

 

The system needs balance so if you are running 3.5ghz you'll get most of the performance in most games but 4.0 or higher would be ideal. The point of the xm chip is to clock it higher.

With the 1060 I had very high utilization in games like siege but not all games behave the same way.

Generally if you go to the device manager a dead gpu may display as error 43 or simply won't report to the OS at all.

 

It's a little harder to test for GPU issues with the 120Hz display since you can't just pull the card and see how it performs on Intel graphics. I would start by opening the machine and cleaning out the fans/heatsinks and reappling the CPU and GPU thermal compound.

You could try to run the pre-boot assessment by selecting the Diagnostic in the boot menu (F12 during startup). This checks for hardware issues but it may not pick up an issue if the card is only just starting to fail.

A cheaper GPU upgrade would be a 780M or you could also go for a 980M, 1060 or 1070. It depends how much you want to spend. The 10 series cards also take a little more work to get running. A 4900 or 4910 processor would be good options and you'd only need to go for an extreme CPU if you want to overclock.

 

Thanks for the advice @TheReciever, the issue is I can't even get to windows so I wouldn't be able to see the device manager... In terms of CPU, I really want to overclock this as I plan to use this as HTPC/Gaming PC in living room (it will be hidden and connected with HDMI and USB3 hub)

Yea, I saw post mention you can pull the GPU out and use integrated Intel graphics, so I will give that a try but hopefully there isn't a BIOS setting to prevent this. In terms of overclocking, I would want to do it to get the most juice out of this machine. I saw that my current CPU i7-4710MQ and i7-4900MQ does not support overclocking and only i7-4930MX does, hence I ask if I need to upgrade. I haven't done enough research on overclocking yet as I can't even boot this machine up properly... which will be my next thing once I fix this machine.

Part of the reason I tagged @woodzstack as apparently he sells GPU and the heatsinks so I thought maybe I can just install the working "better" one.

 

All haswell i7's can do a certain level of limited overclocking, XM chips however have unlimited multipliers. There is realistically no reason to get any chip higher than a 4900MQ.

With a 860M heatsink, you should be able to upgrade to a 970M fine, if you swap the heatsink you can use a 980M fine. 1060/1070 is a little weird and not really recommenced unless you know what you're doing.

 

Grab anything from I think 7xx and up and you can test with the eDP panel (120hz 3d), obviously the cheaper the better.

Where are you located?

 

Ah, so what I'm hearing is, there isn't a point to get the 4930MX as 4900MQ would overclock good enough? Would I be able to hit 4Ghz or 4.3Ghz with the 4900MQ (need to purchase if 4710MQ isn't good capable of doing that)

I'm located in Ontario, Canada Oh so any 7xx MX GPU would work, that means I would need to purchase one, which brings me back to the original question of whether I should just go for the best GPU available that's reasonable pricing, which sounds like 780m, 970m or 980m, as 1060m and 1070m are super expensive?

 

Problem will be you wouldn't be able to rule out variables correctly. If you swap gpu you couldn't say it was a dead mobo versus a doa gpu.

I wouldn't get a 780m just for testing, or even 7xx but the quadro equivalence may work as they can be cheaper at times. Market is quite volatile at the moment.

In some platforms you can bypass the limits of the lower end sku chips, that being said i was never able to do that in the ranger personally. Yet to see an example of that as well anywhere on the net with the ranger.

I have an 860m and 4930mx, as well as 32gb 2133mhz ram I could part with. Sadly the 4980hq doesn't work in the ranger.

 

If you need a testing card, get the cheapest Nvidia card you can find, K3000M is pretty cheap and I've confirmed it to work in 120HZ in the Ranger.

As well, its not some platforms, it's all platforms.

 

You can’t pull the card and test with no GPU. The 120hz has to have a dedicated NVidia card. You’ll just get a beep code error.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Yeah unfortunately AW didn't wire the eDP port to the iGPU at all, figured that no one would use it that why and so why should it be designed that way.

 

If I find it somewhere I have InsydeH2O BIOS that can OC 4910MQ CPU, with changing multipliers and so on

 

Stock BIOS can do that

 

Thanks! I'll shop around for low end GPU that I can test with... it appears the GPU is definitely dead as when I opened and cleaned the thermal paste and put back on, black screen.

Oh! I will look for this!

Yea that's what I read too!

 

welcome to the forums. Not much business lately, the older MXM style cards slowly being faded out, but I still have some business and still have access to this and that, send me a PM if you want to have a 1 on 1.
as for your AW17, I'd get a 4900MQ and just save the cash, your not going to get much more performance out of any overclock because of thermal and power limitations.

 

Ok, I've got a question that was repeated time and again, but I can't get the camera to work. The connection is there, the FN+F9 with Alienware OSD only triggers HDMI-IN port, without Alienware OSD nothing happens, I haven't yet tried on the original cable (one from the 60Hz screen), but is there a way for the system to see it? It's not popping up in Device manager either.

 

As I was looking through some cooling mods for the 17 R1, I am going to attempt the fan mod, but with stock fan, to see if removing, for now temporarily, the two middle connectors I can improve the cooling, because the fan efficiency is truly woeful. Reason being that I'll eat an M15XR2 heatsinks first before paying an exorbitant fee for an M14x or M17XR4 fan assembly. Will post you all back.

 

Hi woodzstack I'm looking for a gtx 980m card for my alienware m17 r1 2014 i7 4700mq do you have any in stock or know a trusted seller please
My number is 07908207003