Can I upgrade graphics in my G73SW?

I really love my laptop but can't play new games at max.BF3 only at medium Possible to upgrade my G73 with something better and faster?
Maybe 570 from G74?

 

Nope

/10 char

 

You will not notice a major difference with that upgrade anyway. Medium to high settings at most forget AA so no point really.

 

so also no point to buy new G75

 

Debatable but no in my opinion. If you had the 1st Gen G73JH then it might be a worthy upgrade to jump 2 generations of CPU and 1 of GPU but mainly it will be to have a longer battery and less heat rather than more performance for gaming.

It is a difficult move to upgrade an Asus you normally have to wait a good 2 years before its worthwhile. Next year you will be probably be better off with the new refresh of Ivy CPU's.

 

I think anyone who has 40nm 5870M, 460-560M shouldn't buy the 670M if they can afford to do what I did. Just jump ship from Asus and buy a laptop that supports the 7970M. It's just so affordable.

Ironically this will be the most I've spent and most powerful laptop I've ever purchased, and I've only played about 2 1 hours of gaming total in the last 4 months. Just that desire to have a beast machine remains and of course to see what a 95% wide gamut display looks like.

A NP150EM for example would be around around $1450-1500 if you got it stock with 7970M which still comes with the 60% NTSC LCD, 8GB of 1600 DDR3, and 500GB 7200 HDD. Oh also an estimated 4-5 hours of battery life.

 

Unfortunately, that GPU is soldered on the motherboard and cannot be upgraded.

 

No one has mentioned implementing the vbios into the bios using MMTool . If you look into G73JW and G73JH, you'll find that you can extract GTX 460M's vbios from the G73JW's bios and HD 5870M vbios from the G73JH's bios. What if we insert the vbios extracted from G75 like that?

I was upgrading VGA in an old Asus A8SR, from Mobility HD 2400 to HD 2600. And the method I mentioned above made the A8SR to POST with HD 2600 on it. It couldn't POST before I inserted the HD 2600 vbios from F8SA into A8SR's bios. Fan is on full blast tho that's the only issue.

This is just methodology though, ASUS might have changed the way they write the BIOS if you comepare between now and back to 2007, the thing is, vbios can still be found inside a G75 bios, do you see any possibilities here?

But before everything, there needs to be an MXM slot or it's just a dream lol.

 

Do you really think a 670 vBios will work on a 460M? I doubt it. And the 560M is just an overclocked 460, so no point there.

There is also no point in doing that. The only reason to flash a different vBios is if you were somehow able to unlock cores, that AMD/Nvidia locked. So for the 460M, best he can do is just keep on overclocking. That and get a new laptop.

If he likes the G73 so much, I'd think G75 be better. Better GPU, MUCH MUCH better CPU, better cooling, and it's thinner and lighter than the G73. Though spending that much, shame can't get better performing GPU.

 

I'm not saying putting a vbios on a 460M. What I was saying is that you can add the 660M, 670M vbios into the G73 bios and it is very possible that it'll make the G73 become compatible with an ASUS GTX 660M/670M pulled from a G75.

 

But the 460M is soldered onto the board, so that wouldn't matter either.

 

Well not for the G73JW/G73JH users, they can still try .

 

1% chance of success. Better odds from a heart transplant.

 

Well I'm going to try it on my G73JW when I can source an ASUS GTX 660M.

 

No it's not. Where did you get this nonsense from?

 

Probably mixed up with a G74SX?

 

I am sure SVL7 tried it with plenty of cards and had no success. I think he managed to get a 460M GTX to boot on the G73JH but then had BIOS issues. The only other implementation he managed was the MSI 5870M if i remember correctly and the fans ran flat out and that couldn't be fixed or maybe that was @Tilla. One of the two

Try all you like but whatever Asus do they do their best to make sure you cannot change the card and only the 6970M has had partial success with serious modding and just to make doubly sure they now solder the card into the board and do not even allow people an MXM slot. A funny company indeed Scared of their own punters.

 

Well yea there are many problems but most of them seem like came from the cards that are not made by ASUS. Well I'll give it a shot for sure if I can source one . By the way did svl7 and @Tilla mention anything about inserting the vbios into the bios when trying the ASUS GTX460M in a G73JH? I know this works on the old asus notebooks as I have done it before, but the new ones might also work too .

 

This was time ago you will have to drop them a line or maybe they are still lurking and will comment. I am pretty sure they did some hardcore testing and flashed left right and centre so what could have been tried was tried. Unable to find the old posts but on @Tilla signature he has the MSI replacement in a G73JH.

Mod to your hearts content if you do not try we cannot confirm it just do not be out of pocket because the likelihood sadly is that is probably will not work as similar attempts have not and the Vbios can be a problem.

 

I read @Tilla's post about MSI HD 5870M on the G73JH it seems like he didn't mod the bios. When inserting the vbios into the bios using MMTool you only need the original vbios and enter the vendor ID and the device ID for that vbios and insert it, and that's mostly how the Asus bios recongnize if the card is supported. The reason that the MSI HD 5870M boots on the G73JH is probably because the ATI vendor ID 1002 and the device ID 68A0 matched. As the only hardware id that's different between the 2 cards are the sub-vendor ID and the sub system ID and those are not input into the BIOS assuming ASUS thinks the laptop should only install the cards made by them.

Anyway if I happen to source a GTX 660M, I'll try it out and post the result.

 

Yes but the MSI job was a 5870M being replaced with a 5870M and even then it ran into problems. What you are talking about doing is similar to what SVL7 tried by trying to run a 460M GTX in a JH and a 5870M in a JW and both failing, apart from the fact they are both Nvidia in your case you are still replacing a completely different card, from a completely different vendor, with a completely different Vbios.

I just can't see it happening personally, but knock yourself out

 

Well the vendor will be the same nvidia (10de), what will be different here is the device ID. GTX460M(0dd1) and the GTX660M(0fd4). Fan will most likely run into full blast, but first getting it to show something will probably be a different story . If this really works, what I'll do next is probably make a modded G73JW bios that's compatible with multiple ASUS cards. That's what happened to the old ASUS laptops, if that carries on to the G series, its going to be a big news . I'll pm svl7 if he's tried the similar method.

 

With all due respect for your experiences, but IMHO 'today' there is no vBIOS hidden in the system BIOS anymore.
Did you really extracted a 5870m vBIOS from the JH BIOS?

In my tests with the MSI card, I also risked and flashed the ASUS vBIOS on the MSI card. It worked and the sub-ID was right now. But still the system had troubles and the fans were running fullspeed (failsafe mode?).
That are hardware things (PINs, EC values ...) we can't influence on an easy level.

 

If you think you really love your G73SW, ... From what I read and saw, only one laptop can make you forget about your G73SW..


I also read that at the end of this month that they would add the 680m as a single GPU on their laptops. They might even add a 7970m as a single gpu setup also.

 

There's still vbios in the bios and you can extract it . True the fan will probably be a problem, upgrade in the old Asus laptops showed that sign too, but that's another story.

 

Nice. Didn't know that.
But it seems to be a very first bios version (09/01/09) and has strange clock rates. 300/300 or 160/700.
Weird.

 

You were right, the vbios is from 09/01/09, 22:21. And clock 00 at 300/300, clock 01 at 160/700 . Not sure if it's the problematic gsod vbios tho as I don't own a G73JH.

More screen shot about the extracted vbios:

 

Here's the GTX460M in the G73JW BIOS:



Tested with nvflash against my GTX675M:

 

Here is the GTX 660M and GTX 670M in the G75VW BIOS:




Tested the extracted GTX 660M vbios against my GTX 675M:




Tested the extracted GTX 670M vbios against my GTX 675M:

 

man dont keep opening same topics over and over , you already asked about this and you didnt want to upgrade because it was a risk , so this will be a real risk so dont try it , just be happy with what you got. Asus doesnt have correct mxm structure , but jh has 60% of it , reason for that is : designer was drunk when he made the mxm structure. there a little bit of chance to make a card work on g73sw .
in my G73jh im using a clevo hd 5870m but the fans are at max for no reason,
we dont know why asus make not upgradable laptops.

 

Are you talking about me? I did state that I'm going to try the upgrade for sure if I manage to source an ASUS GTX 660M. What I'm showing here is what you can really find in the bios, and until now I still haven't seen any similar way of upgrading the VGA for the G series (Modding the BIOS that is). For those are still on the MXM2.1 they have been using this way to upgrade their VGA, it could be possible on the G series too.

 

@hackness great job , I have done that mod 2 months before ,i removed that firmware and replaced it with the clevo vbios file , but still , the fans at max , so there is something wrong. its totally waste of time.

 

sorry mate I didnt ment it to you , I was telling it to OP.

 

Yea the fan is the only problem in this method, we still have yet to confirm the EC firmware in the BIOS, EC firmware was probably writen for the supported cards accordingly. So if one day we manage to find that, we can extract and replace.

It's alright, just making sure .

 

hey sorry for the wrong info , I actually edited the bios to fit clevo vbios with amibcp , but I read that bios with mmtool and found it is still with asus hd 5870m vbios , so now I replaced the vbios to clevo hd 5870m with mmtool , il flash the bios and tell the results.
please pray god , hopefully it should work.

 

Breathless moment...!

 

Hey!
all my bios editing tools are on my 40gig laptop hdd , so can you find me the amibcp that will support g73jh bios , so I can confirm that the bios is normal before the flash.
thanks

 

James D posted a quicklink here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-gaming-notebook-forum/657214-how-lower-fsb-ram-ratio-g73jh.html#post8445517

 

ok flashed ! but still fans at max , il see if I can do anything on os.

 

Yea it seems like EC couldn't read the temp reported by the unsupported cards. In the old times, A8 and F8 series, inserting the vbios will allow to laptop to use the GPU but fans will be on full blast, what people come up with for the A8SR was force flash the A8SR into a F8SA and that fixed the fan issue on the A8SR using the mobility HD 2600. A8SR originally supports HD 2400, if you place a HD 2600 without inserting the HD 2600 vbios into A8SR's bios, the laptop won't even POST.

 

is there a way to replace asus EC with clevo ?

 

Sadly not that I know of yet .