[M18x R1] 6990m heatsink mod => 7970m

Hello Everyone,

I've been doing some reading on the forums and most users mention that you can use the M18x R1's 6990m heatsink straight on with the 7970m... or I have read wrong.

Laptop : M18x R1 with 2x6990m

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-7970m-crossfire-upgrade.667485/#post-8568526

"The heats sinks for the 6970M/6990M will fit, although they are not quite as beefy as the heat sink designed for the 7970M."

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-from-7970m-with-gtx680m.689067/#post-8852457

"The 6990M heat sinks will fit a 7970M GPU just fine and 580M heats sinks are the exact same part as 680M heat sinks."

I find that my 7970m bumps on one part of the primary heatsink (0Y8T9Y/Y8T9Y) and I would need to cut the 6990m heatsink to let the 4 chips fit... it seems the secondary is less a problem but still...

see below:





So I imagine there are 2 choices left:
1) Cut that metal part out to make it fit... any ideas of tools / way to do this?
2) Get the M18x R2 7970m official heat sink (0V4NXK/V4NXK) in there, question : the m18x r2 heatsink will fit into the R1?

Thanks in advance,

 

Hey,

Is that Clevo 7970M?

Regards

 

yes it is.

 

I did the same exact upgrade a couple of years ago, and had the same exact problem. I documented it with pictures, but I can't get them to upload.

Take a Dremel tool and carefully grind away the bump until it's level with the rest of the surface. Any good Dremel (or similar) should have a bunch of different bits that you can use to remove the material fairly easily. On the Clevo cards the capacitors are the same height as the VRAM chips, if I'm not mistaken, so you'll just need one continuous piece of thermal pad through that whole area. Since I removed material from the heatsink, I was concerned that there would be overheating issues, but there weren't. You should be fine. And just to be clear, you ARE going to have to remove enough metal to bore cleanly through the whole heatsink there, so don't be surprised when it happens.

 

I knew it was going to end this way ....

What about m18x R2 heatsink compatibility in the R1 ?

 

As far as I remember that these clevo cards are built different than Dell one and that's why you have heatsink problems. Next time please consider that when buying a clevo branded gpu. I don't remember exactly but I think these cards with long capacitors that you have are from first Clevo batch. They were all damaged and repaired using these long capacitors, new clevo cards shouldn't have that. I hope the deal was good because currently NV cards are far better if sold in same price. R2 heatsink is same as R1 with additional cooling of some components on the edge. If you won't have these components cooled then gpu will die fast.

I wrote a guide about installing NV cards and modyfing 6990M 100W heatsinks to use them with new cards but read it to ensure that your cards will be cooled properly, watch for red area marked - http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-with-amd-100w-heatsinks.770916/#post-9919810
Look for the place where im soldering additional copper heatsink, if you have components on GPU there and they won't be covered then you have to modify heatsink

Edit:: ah and R2 heatsink will fit into M18xR1 but you will still have problems. R2 is 90% same as R1, just next generation of MoBo and mSata.

Regards

 

Did you find the pictures?

Wait, so re you saying that the batch of this 7970m is probably bad?
I got it for 150 € // 175 $

So wait, both of you are saying opposite things...

 

Hey,

As far as I remember that's first batch of clevo cards and they were all repaired because they were faulty. They were repaired using these long capacitors that you have problems with. Im not 100% sure because i have some memory problems at the moment and I can not remember from where I know that but I remember the fact.

That's not a bad deal. You should be happy with it.

I have been warned by many users to protect these components or card will fail. You have to put faith in what you think is right.

 

Would this continuous piece of thermal pas through that whole area do the job?

 

Yes. I ran my 7970Ms until I sold them to pay for the 680Ms. The point of the continuous strip of pad is to provide some heat transfer since there's not any heatsink material over the capacitors anymore. I'm fairly sure the caps don't get very hot, but at the same time I wouldn't just leave them sitting with no heat transfer medium whatsoever.

Is there a reason that the 'Upload a File' button isn't letting me upload anything? It's a 160kb JPG image, nothing fancy.