Asus G50 - 260M Swap Procedure

i would get the 260 but honestly get whatever is cheaper or just buy a new laptop at that point.

 

If you can walk me through how to get into this editing for any Nvidia driver that would be great. Is it in the drivers itself to change, or the vga adapter part?

I have the Dox drivers installed on my Vista boot, but Got Windows 7 Ultimate on my other boot hard drive and would like the Nvidia stock drivers seeing as y'all were able to make this possible, any help will be much appreciated thanks.

 

Nevermind, I figured it out eventually and I have the newest Nvidia drivers installed actually. HDMI even shows up in control panel for them, but unfortunately still no sound through even though it shows up like it was going to. Maybe someone else can do something with this.

 

have you right clicked on the volume button and clicked on play back devices to set HDMI to default?

 

so Im all setup with 260m in my g50vt. Followed dtd00ds instructions for modifying driver and am now running with the latest forceware. Fan is full speed from power up til power down, anyone able to splice in a speed control on fan cable??? I didnt have to adjust voltage for stability, but may reduce for cooling.

The biggest problem right now is temperatures, idles are really low [email protected] is 28-30C idle, gpu 50C idle. When i start gaming cpus stay fairly cool at less than 60C but GPU goes up to 99-103C. I think i really scratched up the bottom of the heat pipe that touches gpu, may need to take that out and sand it a bit. When i took out the old 9800(which was indeed the damaged component), I transfered over the plastic heat shield on the bottom but also left the thermal pads on ram and other chips, which i may remove and replace with paste. I have a 1" by 2" piece of thick copper sheet(i know shoulda just bought the roll, lol), someone mentioned placing something like this inbetween gpu and 'heatsink' with thin layer of paste on either side. Using a laptop cooler and running with the laptops bottom plate off, AS ceramique 2 is the paste and hasnt fully cured yet.

My option seems to be to upgrade to G51/G60 cooling pipes and fan, but it seems a bit expensive at $30 something that'll probably hit $45-50 after shipping and taxes.

Any thoughts???

 

your wasting your time. leave thermal pads for memory and just paste of ICD or TX-4 and cut out the vent if you haven't already. Buy some mini heatsinks for the thermal pipes and drill the bottom case with wholes and get a decent cooler. You will be fine

You can't upgrade the cooling system pipes. i just bought a heatsink/fan assembly for 40 bucks that was the cheapest place. It is extremely hard to find the heatsink for it.

Also fi you already drilled the bottom panel and have fan at full speed and still hitting 100C you screwed something up. The highest should be like 80C with overclocks. just go to my thread and do what i have done.

 

Seems to me that would take more time than just grabbing a fan + pipes combo off of ebay, other have done this swap too i believe. The cooling in the g50vt is really poor, even the 9800m would hit 95 while overclocked at stock voltage.

Im wondering if there are any specific cooling tweaks that someone whos done the 260m swap has had to do to accommodate the slightly different shape of card and increased heat.

If there isnt anything im missing, ill have to start doing little tweaks here and there for 1-2C each until im within limits.

 

again...drill your back plate...stick the mini heatsinks i have linked and get a laptop cooler...your temps will drop well into the 60-80C range with overclocks

 

So the 260m in your G50vt runs at 60-80C overclocked?

I doubt im going to get 20-40C degree reduction in temperature from a couple of heatsinks ontop of the existing pipes. And plus, heat has to flow quickly from these pipes to the portions that are closer to the fan and are being cooled, they shouldn't be storing the heat near the critical components. Actually, Im probably going to cover the holes Ive already put into the false-speaker and enlarge the existing grill right by the VGA to force more fresh air to flow from there into the chasis instead. Conductive cooling is many times more effective than adiabatic cooling, so Id rather have the heat moved to the existing heatsink rather than released inside the chasis. Carelessly placed air vents are only helping because your laptop cooler is forcing air in through them, but its actually reducing the efficiency of your built-in fan with existing pipes. Unless the forced air is increasing your internal fan speed, that added air is most likely flowing back out of 'intake' vents.


Im looking for specific considerations in regards to cooling for the 9800m to 260m swap.

 

i got the G51j. The heat spreaders pull heat right off the heat pipes and with the wholes in the case the laptop cooler will pull the air from the internal heat spreaders. It helps a lot with a good laptop cooler. You should easily get 80C with speaker/fan intake drilled all the way open, use ICD or some other good paste, use heat spreaders, and laptop cooler. That should make you set. I can run with all those mods plus a modded cooler and internal fan at full speed and get a 920xm at 75-85TDP and run at +-80C GPU runs at 60-65C but the fan at full speed plus modded case fan make a night and day difference so you should only be able to get GPU to 80C with everything i have stated

 

Ressurecting a slightly dead forum, sorry!! Ive been watching this, as i had a g71 and it was just too big, so despite warnings that the 260m wouldnt fit, i bought a g50 and successfully completed the swap! YAY! im using the DOX185 drivers, and i will admit that it took some modification of the cooling system. The g71 260m has a protrusion that goes right where the fan bay is in the g50. Luckily, the g71 fan was plastic and had plenty of space to fit the card. So some hacking proceeded, cutting a hole in the g71 fan, cutting the g50 fan off of the cooling fins for the cpu, and making sure everything fit. Typing from it now actually.

 

Wow. I don't know what to say other than I can't believe you did that! That's amazingawesome! Congrats on the mod!

How does it run? What did you do about the heatsinks? Really incredible that you did that!

 

Wow really ? Do you have any pics of the final result ?

How's the temps ? Is the fan always @ MAX ?

And any chance of using my recent drivers ?

 

Anyone get drivers for the 260m working on Windows 8? I can't seem to get it working.

EDIT: Got it! After disabling driver signing and modding the drivers as usual for the 260M, everything works great (306.xx).

 

Hi there two questions. One how did you get 8gb of RAM on a g50 and two i thought g50's could only use X9000

 

Hello, welcome to NBR!

In short, you can use 2x4GB DDR2 800 RAM and the X9100 works fine.

The following information applies to the G50v and G50vt:

These laptops use Penryn Core 2 Duo CPUs, with a PM45 chipset. The PM45 accepts up to 8GB of RAM, either DDR2 or DDR3, which is chosen by the manufacturer. Asus chose to use DDR2, but at the time of its inception, 2GB modules were the maximum capacity available. So Asus will say only 4GB is allowed (2x2GB) because they could not officially test 8GB (2x4GB). However the chipset supports it just fine.

As all Penryn series CPUs are supported by these laptops, you can use *any* Core 2 Duo Socket P CPU. This means all Txxxx, P8x00, P9x00, X9x00, and E8x35 CPUs, The X9100 is the same as the X9000 but has a later stepping (revision, makes it run cooler), and a FSB of 1066MHz instead of 800MHz.

 

Ok guys there are 3 dif versions of the gtx 260m and only 1 will work in the g50vt its the ver 2.1 the 1. blah and the 2.0 WILL not work and will just give you a black screen at boot up..

 

Hi! I've gtx260m rev 1.2 and x9100 for sale...
Vga will work after a bios mod and x9100 is the qhbq version but, naturally, is perfectly working as same as slb48
Sorry for my english and if bad section

 

I know this thread is more or less inactive but I recently did this swap to replace my dead 9800m.. I was wondering if anybody managed to get the fan speed and HDMI audio issues fixed without splicing in a manual fan control that is.

 

I haven't heard anything on either of those fronts, sorry

 

Well its not a that big a deal just seemed like people were trying to resolve it I use mine to watch movies/TV series alot and HDMI audio is more convenient than one of those headphone adapters and the fan noise is only a minor annoyance but it is keepin my temps nice and low... I'll be trading up as soon as I get the cash anyway.

As a side note glad to see you're still on top of this thread alot of people wouldn't have bothered responding to such an old thread and so quickly too.. Cheers for you! :thumbsup:

 

Yeah HDMI audio is much more convenient. Most new TVs have a standard 1/8" audio input, and mine (cheap Insignia HDTV from Best Buy) even has an HDMI port that is labeled "DVI," meaning it pulls audio from the 1/8" jack instead of over HDMI.

If you are feeling crafty, you can splice together a simple switch to turn the fan on or off (just make sure you monitor GPU temps! You can cook your GPU if you're not careful!). If you need help with that let me know.

See also: http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-gaming-notebook-forum/560381-g50vt-fan-cable.html

I'd like to think of myself as one of the G50/G51 gurus on here. We're a old, dying breed...
/bragbragbrag

 

So I've just read all 28 pages of this thread. Congratulations to those of you that figured out all of these mods to keep our dinosaur of a gaming laptop relevant. However I have a question. I own the G50VM-X1, and I know that guy from Italy said he did the swap to the 260m, does this mean that the 9700m GT does use Asus proprietary connector? As I've been unable to get a straight answer. Also if I decide to do a CPU swap as well, what is the best option I have in your opinion? I eventually plan to swap to an SSD and upgrade to 8GBs of memory as well. Do you guys have recommendation for any other mods I should look into?

 

I don't know about the 9700m GT, but the 260m and 9800m GS definitely are proprietary. It's a reversed MXM module, so if you take a look at the shape of your 9700m to determine where the GPU die is and where the slot notch is, you can usually tell if it's reversed or not vs a standard MXM module used in Alienware/Clevo/Sager/Dell/etc laptops.

For CPU swaps you might choose an SLGEB E8335 2.93GHz (NOT the 2.66GHz version) or SLGEA E8435 if you don't care about battery life (they have some power-saving features disabled and run at a high voltage [which also means they can OC pretty well]). Otherwise a T9800/T9900/X9100 are pretty good options, too. Don't pay too much! These CPUs are starting to show their age.

If you change out the GPU you will definitely want the G51 version of the heatsink/fan, since it has 17 blades instead of 13. You'll likely be heat-limited in the end.

Honestly it might be cheaper to find a more recent refurbished laptop at this point. Even the 260m, while potent, is starting to show its age.

Good luck! Hope this helps!

 

The X9100 is still potent with single-core x86 performance. Performance increases from CPU generation to generation have greatly slowed down in the past years.

Yep, be sure to use the DFS541305MH0T “F8U5” 17 fin fan, your old fan can be unscrewed from the existing heatsink and put this one in, should be $10 or so shipped for it.

CPU upgrade; there are some X9100 CPUs available from "Shirley" for $109 shipped New Intel Core2 X9100 Mobile Processor CPU SLB48 3 06GHz PM45 | eBay

Use Arctic MX5 thermal compound for a good mix between longevity and performance (don't want to have to open it up very often to repaste), claims 8 year longevity

GPU upgrade, lots of hassle with needing the heatsink for that particular GPU and it is *impossible to upgrade from a 9700m to greater (9800gs/260m) but if you already have a 9800gs then it is possible to upgrade to a 260m, as Duct Tape Dude knows all about. Can't get audio from HDMI anymore and you are stuck at full fan speed all the time unless you mod.

*Someone might have done it, I saw a thread on here where someone claimed to have done it. I wouldn't bother trying.

 

Eh, my laptop still works, so I will upgrade this thing and run it into the ground. Plus you just get that sense of accomplishment that, yes your computer still preforms with the best of them and it is because of the work you've put into it. I mean even now, with all stock components except for an additional hdd, I can run the new Tomb Raider on low settings. I personally think that is amazing for a laptop built in '09. So if changing the cpu and gpu can get me to normal settings on that game(because I dare not hope for high) than it will probably open other games that I couldn't play before. I could still utilize this as a gaming laptop for quite a while. Well a gaming laptop that is tethered to an outlet as the fan will always be on after a gpu swap.

I'll look into the SLGEB E8335 and see if that is a better option to the T9900 I was considering. Does the fan+heatsink of the G51 just drop in? I wonder if they put out a G51 that had a T9900 and a 260m as it might be easier to get an as-is one with a broken screen and cherry pick all the stuff I want for my G50VM.

I realize if might be cheaper to just get a more recent obsolete laptop(is that an oxymoron?), however like I said above there is just something about continuing the life of MY laptop as opposed to just simply upgrading to a different model. Plus it is a learning experience.

Thanks for the advice, and thanks for being so fast to respond on a thread that I had no business reviving.

 

With an X9100 CPU and putting the laptop by a window air conditioner, you can overclock to 3.5GHZ or so with throttlestop, can't do that with a E8335 or T9900, but the performance difference of the clockspeed isn't that big.

The laptop uses a single fan. There is a GPU heatsink and a CPU heatsink. The fan goes in the CPU heatsink. When you upgrade the CPU you can undo two or three screws and swap the fan while you are at it.
The GPU swap procedure is more involved with not only needing the specific GPU heatsink but also needing shims or something so you can cool the RAM chips.

 

does the OEM overclocking software in Direct Console work for a swapped cpu? like if I get a 3.0ghz cpu and turn on 'Turbo Extreme' will I then be running 3.2ghz? I'm more focused on the cpu and ram as that is what is bottlenecking my system according to the 'windows experience' those are my lowest scores with my hdd following.

 

That just overclocks by bumping up the FSB. Yes it should work on the new CPU. Throttlestop software allows voltage increases and multiplier increases too. Don't go above 1.40V ever.

I use throttlestop for voltage/multiplier increases and I use setFSB for FSB increases, using in the drop down menu, Clock Generator: ICS9LPR604AGLF

 

Can I use the same Clock generator as you since I have a different model laptop? Also what happens above 1.40V? does it create a hole in the time-space continuum?(I'm joking, I figure it would either cause the heat to skyrock thus damaging components, or more likely it will short out a lot of important things.)

 

I don't know. You have a G50VM which is a weird model number, different model from G50V, G50VT, G50VX? Check to make sure the laptop can handle 1066MHZ FSB CPUs since what I am seeing on Google, the laptop comes with a T5750 CPU which runs on a FSB of only 667MHZ.

 

Well there are other people on this site that have done it (Link for proof http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/302069-asus-g50vm-x1-can-u-upgrade-processor.html), so I figure that I can definitely upgrade the cpu. It was the fan assembly and gpu I was sketchy over as I hadn't heard of anyone doing the fan assembly to my model. And the only one to do the gpu was that italian guy 20 or so pages back and I think he might have over complicated his explanation.

 

Oh crap, the G50vm runs on Merom. I thought we were talking about a Penryn architecture. They're the same physical socket and Penryn mobos can accept Merom chips, but there are sometimes compatibility issues when inserting a Penryn CPU into a Merom... might be worth a try though.

I can hit 3.518 GHz stable on my E8335 with no voltage increases. I'm running a heat-limited laptop for the most part though.

 

This is my cpu info according to SIW

 

Yeah definitely Merom. From what I'm reading on Penryn CPUs in Merom mobos the consensus is it will *likely* work. Personally, I'd be willing to take the risk. Not sure about how you feel though.

 

Well, I know that our computers share a motherboard for the most part. According to SIW my socket is a PM 45 revision 07 what's yours? I'll include a pic of what I'm talking about.

 

Yup I used hwinfo32 and my chipset is PM45 as well, ICH9M which is the Penryn chipset. So it looks like your CPU is a Merom CPU and the Penryn chipset has just underclocked itself to work with it. So your laptop should be the same as ours so should work with the high end Penryn CPUs just fine (but not quad core ones, as ours don't either).

Since you have the 9700m video card, I don't think it's possible to upgrade the GPU. Unless you can decipher how the italian guy did it.

 

Good to know I can start saving up for a new cpu, thanks for checking that for me.

As to my GPU and the method used by that Italian guy(do we know his name?), He is correct in that my laptop and yours have different 'mounting plate' for the gpu's however we both use the reverse mxm asus proprietary connector. But I don't think replacing the plate(what's it called?) is as easy as he says. As of this moment my cpu is what is bottlenecking my system so swapping that and putting in a forcecom fan is a higher priority. After that I am more concerned with maxing my ram to 8gbs, and then migrating to SSD's. I will probably only tackle the gpu when I have a new laptop. As replacing the gpu seems to disable hdmi audio(which I use for my DJ'ing gigs) and causes the fan to be always on and 100% spin.

Really it's the always on fan thing that makes me cautious about it as I only have one computer(this laptop) and I am a student and sometimes use my entire extended battery(all 4.5hrs worth of charge if everything is on powersave and I don't go near my games or image editing software) throughout the day. So being permanently tethered to the wall when in use, would be an issue for me. I realize I could hardware mod my fan like DTD did his, however I don't want to risk forgetting to turn my fan to appropriate speeds and cause damage to the laptop. If I get a new laptop and no one I know is using one worse than this one(as I tend to give my family/friends my stuff when I upgrade if they are using older equipment or it breaks), than I will go ahead and preform the gpu swap. I might even video tape it so that way other people like me know it can be done, and can follow my instruction to minimize risk of damage.

 

Since you're on the PM45 you can take any Penryn CPU with no hitches, which is great!

That said, if you're worried about battery life don't get the E8x35 series CPUs, since they have DFFS disabled, which downclocks the FSB dynamically (saves a noticeable amount of power).

Given what you just said I'd strongly advise against the 260m, and even the 9800m GS, since both of those are more power-hungry than the 9700m you have now. I programmed my LCD screen using LCDHype to give me a constant readout on my GPU temps, and they have been overly high on many occasions when I forgot to turn the fan on. I don't know how it isn't dead yet, and also thermal shutdown seems to be broken for me too. But it performs ok!

I think any CPU/GPU upgrades you make will unfortunately cost you a bit of battery, but if you can find a good T9x00 CPU, or even the X9100, you should be in ok shape. The P series CPUs are just better-binned, downclocked versions of the T series CPUs, so maybe you can look into that too. A SSD would probably be your best bet for money spending, honestly. Maybe 6GB (1x2+1x4) of RAM too. But beyond that, you're honestly better off just getting a new machine, since the RAM is DDR2 and can't be used later on. The only "investment" you can make on this machine is a SSD, imo.

Let us know what you do! And I like the video idea. But do what makes the most sense for you.

 

I was thinking of doing a T9900 along with the 17blade fan swap. I figure the extra power of the T9900 would be enough to keep me playing games for a year or more, but since it is a core 2 duo extreme it will take less power. I understand that doing a cpu swap will cause me to use more battery power, but I figure the increase in performance is worth losing an hour of battery from my extended life battery. I tried using LCDhype on my OLED display but i have such bad burn in from the battery meter and such that is there stock that it looked horrible. Also I couldn't get the speedfan plug-in + script to function properly.

If I only up my ram to 6gbs will I gain less of a NOTICEABLE performance increase than if I went to 8?

Like I said earlier, I'll only contemplate the gpu swap when I have another machine and this gets downgraded from 'daily driver' to 'toy.' That being said, I anticipate using this laptop for a couple more years now. Asus' slogan holds true, this machine is rock solid.

 

With an SSD, I do OK with 4GB. The SSD takes care of page file swapping pretty well even if I have 99% memory usage. It does slow down but still manageable. DDR2 laptop RAM, 4GB modules are way more costly than they are worth, around $55 per module whereas DDR3 laptop RAM is much cheaper.
4 to 6 of course you'll get more improvement than from 6 to 8. But get an SSD system drive first and then evaluate if you want 6GB.


With my X9100 CPU, I don't have much higher power consumption at idle than my original P8700 CPU. It throttles itself nicely. But of course if you utilize 1 or both cores, the CPU will use a lot of power.

 

As for RAM, 4-> 6GB only helps me when I have 20-30 windows open (50+ Firefox tabs and 2-3 instances of Visual Studio). I have 8GB on my work computer (separate machine) and I struggle to use all of it. Right now it's at 6.16GB used with 69 Firefox tabs, an Ubuntu VM, SQL Server Management Studio, 2x Visual Studio, Outlook, and 3-4 other applications. I contend >6GB is plenty unless you're doing something intense like media editing. And as Ickibar said, it's so expensive now it's just not worth it to get 8GB.

I couldn't get SpeedFan to work, either.

As Ickibar mentioned, idle power consumption should largely be the same in the P series vs T series CPUs. I don't have my usual stuff easily linked but you can look at this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...m/545521-g51vx-rx05-cpu-upgrade-question.html

 

Thanks I'll take that into consideration. Funny enough the cheapest I've found is the x9100 for ~$100 on ebay. The next cheapest t9900 is like ~$150. One thing I'm not quite understanding is how your ram effects how many tabs you guys are opening, as far as I know firefox is a 32-bit browser thus can only access 4gbs of ram regardless of your set up. I'll think about just getting one 4gb stick vs a pack of 2 as you are correct in that ddr2 ram is stupid expensive.

 

I have an Asus G70SG-A3 and I know this is an old thread but was wondering if I could also do a swap for the gtx 260m. If So, would I still need the 260m form a g51/g60? Or one from a G71? Right now I have a 9800m gts.
Thanks

 

I am 90% sure you can use one from the G71. You can use a G51 version also but it might be harder to find. The main difference is just the shape of the PCB (the G71 version can't fit well in a G51 because of an extra tab thing).

 

As with DTD above me, I think you can use one from the G71. It should be a fairly easy thing to check, would require nothing more than popping your laptop open and eyeballing it. It was weird getting an email from this site informing me of a new post, as I had totally forgotten all about it. But that happens when you start a new job, things get lost in the shuffle. I will update those that care, that I was able to successfully upgrade to a x9100 and have noticed a significant improvement in my gaming capabilities. This old dinosaur still has a few years left in her. Thanks for everyone's patience with my questions and your fast responses whenever I posted in here(especially considering the age of the thread and how often it goes stagnant).

 

Awesome. So if the card has basically the same shape I should be alright? I should be able to use the same heat sink as well correct.

 

as long as the mounting points match I can't see why you shouldn't be able to

 

Thanks for the help. Time to open her up.

 

Hi Peeps. Another G50vt (BB) owner here with a dead 9800m GS. I'd like to source a replacement GTX 260. Can someone kindly make a suggestion or point me to where this card can be sourced?

Thanks and Cheers.