m11x r2 upgrade to m11x r3 experience

Hi,

i would like to share my experience in upgrading m11x r2 to r3.

since the laptop refuse to die (^_^) i just might give it a little upgrade.

thanks to the guide from orijin at http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-motherboard-in-m11x-r2-with-pictures.624091/
i have succesfully installed the board and the daugther board and the laptop now is live and kicking.

in windows 7, the face camera recognition software is refused to start. it did not recognize the camera hardware.
i double check there is no cable not connected. the camera is also gone in device manager.
in windows 10, almost all hardware are detected. only alienware specific hardware are not detected. such as the accelerometer.

the laptop is refused to turn on when using daughter board from r2, just as the report from orijin, so I purchased r3 daughter board, make a hole in the hdd side bays to make room for the usb 3 port header.
and while the body case feel like plastic, in the inside, it was reinforced with alumunium fibers. it produce silverish dust when cut. and it is hard not like plastic. so extra force is needed.

there is also another problem i have not solved.
While the laptop is functional, the audio is functional, the usb 3 is not detected in windows.
the renesas USB 3 hub is flag with yellow exclamation mark and code 10 device cannot be started.
when i plugged usb external hdd or usb mouse, it powered on, but never get detected.

both in the windows 7 and windows 10 failed to properly install the usb 3 hub
i have tried many driver combination for the renesas, but still failed.

i have not experienced any bluescreen after upgrading, so it make me wonder.

any suggestion?

 

I have an M11x R2 I thought about converting to R3 specs, glad to know it can be done.

As for the USB 3.0 port, I'm not too sure the M11x supports usb 3.0 at least mine doesnt.
You might want to try just trying to install it as standard usb 2.0 first and start from there.

edit: I might just upgrade my total RAM capacity with 8gb chips instead of 4 and go from there

 

I've always been a fan of the M11x R3 and upgraded the mainboard of my old one and now have a spare motherboard. I used to run 2 Proliant servers at home for home/work purposes but found it too power hungry (silly high electric bills!) and switched to a HP Microserver and sadly found it anemic for running Windows 2016 server (DC, WSUS, WDS, SQL, File server and Media server) so I suddenly had the brain storm idea of using the spare M11x r3 mainboard i have (i7 2617m) and making my own server - USB raid adaptor for hard disks, eventually bump the ram from 8gb to 16gb and mount it all on a chipboard for the time being as proof of concept then look at housing it. the more and more I think about it it seems a good idea - laptop battery for failover etc.

Now this is where I run in to the problem - the USB3 daughterboard for the mainboard. I can't find the product code anywhere! Can anyone please share any info?

 

Do you have a part number for that r3 daughterboard?

 

I want to get a M11 just to do this