M9750 and ATI 3870

I'm new to the forum and I have to say I'm quite impressed with the knowledge base of this site. As the headline says I'm trying to upgrade my M9750 which currently has two 8700M GT cards in SLi. Both cards are dead so is like to upgrade. I need some specifics please...

What is the specific card that fits in the computer? Model # on the card etc...

What crossfire cable should I use?

I'm sure that this has been covered before but I'm kind of a noob. lol

Thanks in advance for any help

 

If you search you will get better info but yes the 3870 should work just fine in your laptop. They are more rare, and I have not seen if others were able to use them, but if you can find a 4850 / 4870 that may work as well. Swapping MXM cards is trial and error though as even if a card fits in a slot it's VBIOS may not work with your laptop. Most sellers on ebay won't post you the VBIOS version either, and even if they did most user's don't list the version that worked for them haha.

 

Not sure why people won't share what VBIOS worked for them, I didn't know they were a national secret.lol I'm purchasing a card today off of ebay, I'll let you know if it works. To test a card do I need to hook it up to the heat sink and use artic silver paste just to test it. I just want to do a quick boot to see if it will work. Thanks

 

Of course you need to hook up the heat sink. Be careful man, that question being asked makes me a little nervous.

 

I'm a little farther along than you as I recently decided to upgrade the GPUs in my m9750 as well. 3870s seem to work relatively well so far. The issue I'm having now, and for the last several hours, is trying to enable crossfire on my second card.

CCC will show both adapters in Hardware, however there isn't an option to enable/disable Crossfire.

I'm using AMD Legacy 12.6. All my benchmarks aren't using my second card. Anyone have ideas? I've never used Crossfire before.

Thanks

 

I managed to resolve my Crossfire issue by simply going into FULL SCREEN. Apparently window mode in any application won't utilize a second card, so I originally had it working properly.

I'm using a new crossfire cable for an M17, not M17X, that I purchased off eBay. AMD Legacy 12.6 Drivers. There won't ever be an option to enable/disable crossfireX in Catalyst Control Centre.

You might run into heat issues with your first Master card. Make sure you use a thick thermal paste (I used ICD7), and be sure to place your thermal pads over top of the memory modules as they won't be in the exact same location as your previous GPU.

I also used a 0.5mm copper shim for between my heatsink and the core of my Master card. This also helped to lower my temps.

What won't work is trying to undervolt the 3870 from 1.2v to 1.1v. While this did lower my temps dramatically under load, it also caused my display driver to stop working on occasion.

Good luck.