Would A RTX MXM Card be compatible with the M17x R4

What didn't fit on it if you can remember?

I asked some sellers and they say that its compatible. So i went ahead and bought one. If its not then I'll just return it

 

I'm sure I'm wrong. My wife tells me I'm wrong all the time.

I thought the copper pipes and the fins at the end were slightly different lengths. I was probably drunk at the time though.

 

lol If that's the case I could always just file it down very painful and slowly

 

Couldn’t for the life of me find my R4 heatsink. Only found a spare 17 R1.
It’s spot on 21cm long



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From my measurements, I got 8.28 Inches which converts to 21cm. So any R1 heatsink will fit the M17x r4 and vice versa

 

They don't fit interchangeably. They have different length. I have tried myself.

Also the 5 heat pipe sits a bit higher than stock heatsink on the M17x r4. Hence, the back cover could not close properly.

 

They do fit its just that like you're saying the cover doesn't close properly. Just received mine a day ago and it fit into my computer with my 1070. Another problem is that it needs a copper shim to make proper contact with the core. Im willing to sacrifice the back cover not closing properly and maybe later down the road try to get it to close properly by modding the cover rather than frying my GPU

 

Maybe you bought the right one for your M17x R4. I bought 5 pipe for my Ranger and tried to fit into my M17x R4 and didn't fit at all. So I had to order another one specifically for M17x R4.

You just need to dremel a bit of the back cover to fit. It's a very easy mod.

 

Yup pretty easy. The only "challenge" would be putting thermal paste on both sides of the copper shim and making sure that it makes contact with the core. Anyways this is the heatsink that I bought. It was advertised as for the 17 R1 only but bought it anyways and fit.

 

I didnt know it's that hard for the M17x r4. For my Ranger, the shim is not required.

Did you use the screws that came with the 5 pipe heatsink? They help to make better contact than the stock screws.

 

Yup I did but the core seems to not make contact by 1mm. I know because I see no thermal paste where the heatsink makes contact with the GPU. The old heatsink makes perfect contact with the core with the 1mm copper shim

 

From the picture that you posted earlier, it seems to me the pads you used are quite thick (2mm). I use only 0.5 mm and they make contact already. But I'm not really sure as I'm using Gtx 1060.

 

I almost have to use 2mm on almost everything as blue pads with the 1mm pads barely make contact. (This is an old picture and i have cleaned up the thermal paste mess but pad placement is the same)

 

I think you should try 0.5 mm pads to see how it goes. The copper shim is okay, but not ideal imo. Direct contact is best.

 

0.5 pads don't make any contact at all with the heatsink. I have tried or are you saying to put a pad on the core of the heatsink and see if it makes contact?

 

The main thing you need to keep cool is the die so I’d get that right first and then the other components. 2mm pads are just too thick. Have you tried stacking 1 and .5 pads?


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No. I have not tried but definitely will when the copper shim arrives tomorrow for the new heatsink

 

What I suggest is replacing those 2 mm pads with 0.5 mm ones.

Like @Maxware79 said, you can remove all the pads and apply thermal paste between the die and heatsink to see if they make any contact first. Then you can figure out what thickness is appropriate.

 

Didn't even think about putting thermal paste between the die and heatsink to see if they make any contact first

 

The die contact is the most important. The other areas are not as much if the card runs generally cool.

 

It seems like my current setup with 2mm is the way to go. 1mm is no go,1.5mm is no go, and 2mm makes perfect contact with the heatsink

 

So,
- Using 2mm pads allows the heatsink to make contact with the pads but no contact with the GPU die
- Using 1mm pads allows the heatsink to make contact with the GPU die but no contact with the pads

Is this the situation?

 

Using 2mm pads allows for components such as the vRAM chips and the other componentsto make contact with the heatsink.

Using 1mm pads, the components such as the vRAM don't make contact with the heatsink at all, leaving a 1mm space of air in between the vRAM chips and the heatsink.

The core doesn't make contact unless I use a 1mm copper shim which the Ranger heatsink doesn't have but the original M17x r4 one does

 

Well I'm thoroughly confused. Wouldn't reducing the pad thickness bring the heatsink closer to the die? What do you mean by die? The die is the center part where the shiny plate is. The rest of the card (or PCB) is made up of vRAM chips and other components.

 

No it doesn't because the problem doesn't lie in the pads, but rather the heatsink itself. If we are talking about the R1 heatsink, it doesn't make contact with the core at all. Because it doesn't make contact with the core I have to put in a 1mm copper shim so it does. This has nothing to do with the pads. if I reduce the thickness to 1mm, instead of 2mm, it just leaves 1mm of air between for example the vRAM. Reducing the thickness of the pads have no influence on whether the core makes contact or no contact in my case

(I also edited the post above so give it another look)

 

So no matter what thickness pads you use, the die will not make contact with the heatsink? That's really strange. I've never tried the 5-pipe heatsink myself but I've never seen anyone have issues with it in the Ranger so if it physically fits in the R4 then it should work the same. Maybe it isn't quite compatible though.

 

Well, with the M17x R4, and with the 1070, it needs a 1mm shim to make proper contact with the core and at least 2mm pads across the board on the PCB components ( to make up that extra 1mm that's being added). That's with my case though. I haven't seen or heard anyone talk about how the thermal pad placement should be with this heatsink and the 1070 in the M17x R4 so I'm exploring uncharted territory here. Or so i think i am

 

It seems so. Good luck, hopefully you work it out

 

I'll report back tomorrow when my copper shims arrive!

 

Well, with luck on my side, I was able to successfully install the R1 heatsink and the thermal 2mm pad setup with no problems (1mm, 1.5mm pads wouldn't make contact with the heatsink on any PCB component). All I did was put the copper shim in with thermal paste on both sides, made sure it was making contact, and it has now lowered my temp from about 86C to 76C on call of duty modern warfare with about 30mins of gameplay and went from 86C to 72C with American Truck with about 30 mins of gameplay I am noticing that I'm a little bit on the hot side of the spectrum though with 60C on idle and then the fan turns on and brings it back down to 50C which I don't know if its normal. I did although have some issues in the beginning by not having enough thermal paste on the side of the shim that was making contact with the Die (the first picture shows this) but it has been fixed and decided to just stick with this picture that i took first. As you see with the 2nd picture the case does flex a little because the heatsink has the 2 extra pipes, but I'm not worried about that. If you have an idea of the temps I should be getting with this heatsink, that would be great.

 

Solder the shim to the heatsink or use liquid metal, having a shim and two passes of traditional thermal paste is terribly inefficient.

You could also get a faster fan, but will increase fan noise.

 

I have used the fan on my Ranger. The improvement is negligible.

 

From my usage so far, temperatures have not been that bad at all. On call of duty modern warfare, on a flat surface I get about 76C In a game of domination. At an angle, I get 69C. And in a 30 minute furmark test with GPU burner enabled, I got 72C at an angle

 

Stock fan curve is a stock fan curve. I doubt your getting 54c at full load from a 1070 at 120w.

System controlled fan isnt going to max a fan out. You have to cut the PWM wire. Not many people cut that wire for obvious reasons, but nor did they ever have my temperatures either. Which is why I have the number 1 spot on the 17 R1 with Firestrike iirc.

Its high for the laptop but not terrible for the GPU. Pascal lowers clock speed after 56c iirc so its best to keep it as cool as possible just to eliminate 1 factor of limitation that comes with Pascal.

of course however, if it performs to your needs then thats all that matters.

 

Its high for the laptop but not terrible for the GPU. Pascal lowers clock speed after 56c iirc so its best to keep it as cool as possible just to eliminate 1 factor of limitation that comes with Pascal.

of course however, if it performs to your needs then thats all that matters.[/QUOTE]

Yea I think for now I just want to enjoy my laptop which I haven't been able to for 2 weeks waiting for shipping and parts to arrive. I will probably solder on the shim in another week or 2 after I get some enjoyment out of this!

 

Thank you. I didn't know about the PWM wire.

 

The full chopper heatsink is not so easy to cool down. After all the chopper is hot, it take a while to cool down to normal temps, but between 55 and 65 degree is normal for 120W at gaming.
Could you sent a link to your FS benchmark, please.

 

I don't have a link handy, I've got a couple screen shots in my log which is here in Alienware sub forum, might have also provided a few links in there.

Sitting in the doctors office.

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/42507003?

 

Updated last post with link

Can find list here (hopefully copy/paste works)

https://www.3dmark.com/search#/?mod...NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (Notebook)&gpuCount=1

 

Daaaamnnn how were you able to get such a high graphics score? Mine with 200+ on the core got me in the 17300 in graphics score

 

He used an MSI 1070N which is the best 1070 GPU ever made and this was his thread on the modding of AW17 R1 Ranger. The HP 1070 that black PCB is not capable of that class of performance, even the VRMs on the MSI 1070N is top class, it even has SLI support. Also Zotac 1070 cannot beat an MSI 1070N either, this Zotac MXM 1070 had VRM placement different and need a custom HS again and only @Striker1234 managed to document it and made it work iirc. Here's the first MSI 1070N upgrade on R1

As for that 5 pipe HS from ebay, I tried and never got it working, it was always tight fit and even wouldn't fit properly when I shine light on the coldplate it always had imperfections, both CPU and GPU, plus too much pressure on the GPU die = cracked GPU, too much risk to try also without PWM cut for the R1 getting that HS is waste due to saturation of heat and staying there in that heavy copper.

Also Dell locked out EC profiles on the 17R1 unlike M17x R4 and that machine only runs the Fans on full blast during the BIOS Flash, the Unlocked BIOS with DPTF was an option but I didn't see anyone mentioning success with that, even with the DPTF driver (yea you need that crappy driver and it only works with MX CPUs).

 

So with the standard 3.0b 1070MXM, I can expect to be in the low 17000 then in terms of graphic score

 

Overclock the memory as high as you can, and tune for the best performance under the tdp limit. Then test to make sure you minimize any throttling for consistent performance.

 

So I forgot to overclock my memory. Turns out that my 1070 can push a graphics score of 18 300 with 200 core clock and 280 mem. I think that's as high as I can go with this specific 1070

 

Thats odd, +500m is rather common from what I can remember, but of course all 1070 are not equal. Either way a steady bump.

 

Nice. I believe I was only getting a graphics score of a little over 16,000 so you're killing my card. I haven't undervolted or overclocked yet.

 

Stock I was at 16000s so overclock will make the difference

 

Will the 3940XM make a big difference in my M17x R4 if in terms of framerate If have a 3630QM? I know there is no way for certain to know, but I figure you might have an idea.

 

I'd suggest the 3920XM, it should be cheaper and it has a habit of overclocking better than the 3940XM. I think you'll enjoy the upgrade from the 3630.

What did you use for undervolting and overclocking?

There should be a 3-pipe CPU heatsink for your R4. I desperately need the 3-pipe for my R2 to push past 4.1GHz

 

Alright will definitely do. I use MSI afterburner for overclocking the 1070 in general. If you need help, let me know