Alienware 18 CPU & GPU Upgrade HELP!

Hi guys, I have an Alienware 18 which currently has the 4700MQ and 2 x GTX 770M’s. Decided to upgrade the CPU & GPU. So I’ve ordered the 4940MX & 2 x GTX 980M’s. Read through the forums as there is a few posts where people have upgraded to the 980M’s but am still confused as some say you need to switch to pure UEFI and some say you don’t, also something about the second fan not working after the upgrade. So my question is what do I need to do. Can anyone give some input of what I need to be doing. I’m currently on bios A12. Do I just uninstall current GPU drivers and then do install, download new drivers and good to go or do I need to change boot option to pure uefi which is going to be a pain but have seen a post about some software which will let me make a partition in GPT on my current ssd and I won’t need to backup everything and do a fresh install. All input will be appreciated. Last upgrade I did was on a m15x where I swapped the 240m for a 7970m

 

I think the second fan issue is with Premas vbios which has been fixed. A12 bios supports 980M SLI, you could get an unlocked bios though. If you have 770M SLI now it should just be unplug current and plug in the 980Ms, if you want to push the 4940MX to the limit I would recommend picking up the A12 unlocked bios. The AW18 is a pretty easy upgrade.

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So I don’t need to change from legacy to UEFI then?

 

I Used Windows 10 with mine so pretty sure UEFI was a must. So I couldn't answer that one for you. Any reason your not using UEFI? Windows 7?

 

When I purchased it it came with windows 10 so I left it, and now when I was thinking of upgrading I read up on it and when I checked my bios it was on legacy. Hope it’s not hard to change over to UEFI.

 

No it's not

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Well I’m going to have a go at it once card’s arrive. Another thing I want to ask is I currently have 16GB hyperx ddr3 installed. Can I move it from under the back cover and place it in the slots under the keyboard as they will be accessible once I take it apart. I ask this because If I can it would save me taking apart the laptop again when I want to add another 16GB in the future.

 

Yes you can without any issue

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I tried to convert ssd from mbr to gpt using some software and then when i rebooted I went into bios and changed boot option from legacy to uefi, turned safe mode off and then booted machine up and got black screen with cursor in top left. So restarted and changed bios settings back to normal and tried to boot but got the same thing. Tried this a few times with no joy so I’ve had to do a fresh install of windows 10. Tried to recover my programs from a system image I had on an external hdd but get an error message when trying to do this. Says something like boot off cd and then I should be able to do a system image recovery, tried that but still no joy. So started manually downloading everything I had which is going to take me ages. At least now I’m on uefi which from what I’ve been told is a must to upgrade to the 980m’s.

 

software? Just use diskpart its built right into windows

 

That was the first thing I tried but when I typed mbr2gpt /validate I got an error message

 

did u clean the drive and all partitions using the clean command?

 

No I don’t think I did

 

that could have been the issue, well at least your on UEFI now!

 

Yes lol, but having to install all my steam and origin games as well as all programs I had. Hardest part is trying to remember what I had on there

 

HAHA been there many times

 

Well once I’ve downloaded most of the stuff I will do s system image recovery for future fails