Upgrade a G73-jh to 6970?

Even if this is a possibility the 150 watt limit on the Asus board is going to cause a problem. Simple maths even if you have the 720QM that is draining 45 watts the 6970M alone is a 75-100watt card compared to the 50 watt 5870M. It would not be possible for me as my 920XM uses 75watts under general use.

I still believe it is possible to get it to work but then you have the trouble of getting it to perform at 100% load. I dont think it will happen because of the Asus limits they put in place.

 

So, even if we do get the 6970m to work, it would be a moot point. Ugh. I wasn't aware of the power limitations. Oh well. I've been thinking of getting an msi, or alienware. I have to sell my g73 first. I just have to get the neon lights for the vents and install them first, which will be in a few days. Then I will do a price check and post it. I love this laptop, but I would like something a little more upgrade friendly. Thinking about an msi gt660 (or maybe it was a gx), or an m15x. I know both are a downgrade right off the bat, but they can be upgraded farther. I should be able to get a fair price, considering the mods, the new cosmetics, the new 1080p screen, and the terabyte of storage. I almost feel a little guilty for wanting to change laptops, lol. Guess I'm a little attached to this little beast.

 

You haven't had it long lol yes if you pay the price you can upgrade but to be honest unless you are fussy about 10-15fps difference instead of just tweaking the settings the 5870M is more than enough for games at the moment. People (like me) just get caught up in the upgrade storm and dish out money to upgrade. I still think I have gone the right way by picking up a 920XM and SSD.

It all seems good when you say things like 1TB of storage but I suppose it depends if you use it, even with my 96gb SSD I am only using 30gb and that with all my hoarded stuff on my 500GB seagate. The JH is a win win in the price vs performance area if it didn't have its little problems it would be the best around for the price, its a shame the 6970M does not work otherwise it would destroy all but I think it will come down to can we get it to work yes, but can we get it to work with 0 problems - No chance.

 

@fallen386: MXM-upgrade doesn't have an MSI, Dell or Clevo version. The card is a Sapphire card. The imac card is a bit crippled as far as I know (especially regarding the VRAM) and I bet it won't work in a notebook. Maybe with a different VBIOS, but as far as I know the card is too different.
I don't think an MXM-upgrade card has been tried in the JH so far. I put mine in a JW, the system POSTed and loaded Windows, but no picture.

 

The mxmupgrade site says that they cannot get their card to work in the g73jh/g737w. They said it won't show a picture. Now, from what I have read here, the msi version worked for a bit, then died. So, two different cards, two different results. That gives a glimmer of hope for the dell card. The dell precision 6970m is a totally different color (dunno if that means anything) and a different model number. I dunno. I may give it a shot. I am still digging for now. I have found that card for $350 and $236. Both are sold out now, and the $350 jumped to $500. Lame.

I currently have my card clocked at 750 gpu 1050 vram. That is the highest balance I have been able to grab. 800/1000 gets me artifacts, 700/1100 the same. In fact, no matter what I have the vram clocked to, 750 gpu is it for my card. Guess mine is uber-gimped. Sad, cuz I see much better results from others. I have the modded vbios, using overdrive to oc it. I would like to find something to mod the timings a bit, and try to squeeze a few more fps out of it. I know that a tool was used to make a vbios mod that uses lower timings for battery life. RBE doesn't have a feature like that, not that I can see anyway. So, 10-15 fps gain for me is pretty good. I really wanna raise the low point of the fps. Normally, my graphics are great. Sometimes my fps takes a nosedive though. I'm a junkie when it comes to fiddling with things. For me, there is no getting caught up in the upgrade storm- I'm already riding it, and always will, lol.

 

Hey Dallers, how do you know that the G73jh board has a 150watt power limit.

In fact the G73 has been shown to handle 175 watts everything stock including power supply by measurement with a kill-a-watt meter.

ViciousXUSMC did an in depth review of the g73jh back when it first came out in feb2010 including power measurement:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...9400-viciousxusmcs-ultimate-g73jh-review.html

Edit: I would love to see how much power your G73 uses if you would be willing to buy a cheap Kill-A-Watt meter off Amazon or Ebay.

 

Max I have recorded with my Kill-A-Watt meter with stock charger and oced 5870m gpu and oced 920xm cpu was 189 watt. So i believe there is no 150 wats board limmit. If there is such limit then it certainly is not 150 watts.

 

Yes but is that not the brick not the board has anyone actually tested the power that is drawn by the board itself? From what I have read it can only utilise 150watts.

His post about it here only mentions the Power supply, if the board can draw more I will certainly get a Targus 180watt that is for sure! But I have had many bad experiences with electricity so I will leave the testing to other more capable people haha

Then again it would make more sense as to how I can run my 920XM load upto 110watts and nothing explodes, at the moment at least.

 

Thanks for that info you guys. The point is to rule out power limitations as a cause of failure when upgrading. If we can do that then we've made some progress.

 

With a kill-a-watt you also measure the power draw of the PSU itself, so the system always draws less than the kill-a-watt reports.

 

MSI versions tested were the 5870 mobility, they never died. But no one tested for long durations either. It was just to prove the ASUS mobo uses a MXM 3.0b slot.

 

My mistake. I thought I had read that tudorwolf's and tijo's were msi and that they worked, then died.

 

Quoted for thought/explaination

Essentially, you would need to wire in a DC version of a Kill-a-watt meter (would a multimeter with sufficient tolerances be enough???) between the power brick and the laptop, and that would get you the closest to an accurate reading of the total power draw of the laptop from the power brick. Additionally, this begs the question, if someone hooked this up, would the draw from that device effect the laptop negatively, or would the laptop compensate for and voltage drop / load put in-between it and the power supply.

Every power supply has some loss involved in it as this is what the heat is, energy converted to heat. The best reason to upgrade to the 180W Targus brick, is it is generally cooler to the touch, which means its wasting less energy as heat vs. the stock one, even if you are running the same hardware. This is the principle behind 80-plus power supplies for desktops (they always produce 80% of the input electricity to usable volts/watts/thingamajigs and waste less of it as heat, providing a more energy efficient power supply). Granted, the 80-plus rating means that it maintains 80% efficiency over a given range of loads (i.e. 100w-700w or something along those lines).

 

the stock power brick should be pretty darn efficient with nearly 90 percent peak efficientcy. Don't know why the darn thing gets so hot.

 

There is definitely copper loss heat. Which means the adapter is really rated for high than 150watts but due to lack of efficiency it looses some of it in the form of heat. So a skewed claim of 150 by the Delta Electronics makes it look like a highly efficient performer.

If there is only little loss there cannot be that much heat.

My AW 330 watt adapter runs much cooler (320 watt full load) compared to the ASUS 150AP from delta (154 watt full load), all read from Kill-A-Watt meter.

 

So is there really ANY way to tell how much power is being lost at the brick and how much the laptop is actually drawing?

 

Yes by opening it up and looking at the components we can get to calculate the true rating on the PSU and from that we can get an idea how much the loss is. Also we can measure the power draw at the power jack of the mobo to know how much the laptop really consumes.

I cant open mine as the usesless 4th screw has lost its thread, I will need to break it open. I had planned on changing the PSU to an AW 240 PSU and mod it.

 

drill it out don't break it.

 

LOL... best advice ever

 

What type/class of bit would you use? Thats a small region to work with and the drill bit has to be really strong.

 

I would use a drill press not a hand drill. I wouldn't really trust my unsteady hands to do the job. As for drill bits you'd just need something stronger than whatever material your screw is made of. So if it's aluminum, go for titanium. Make sure you drill slowly or in bursts so the metal shavings don't heat up and bond to your bit. I guess if you don't have access to a drill press you're kinda screwed (sorry I can't resist puns when I think of one).

If that doesn't work, well there's always my next favorite suggestion, the blow torch

 

Thank for the info! +1 rep

A friend of mine suggested there are counter clockwise spinning bits for this purpose that can drill into the metal and then you can just slide it off without damaging the screw hole threads. But it doesn't matter to me if the hole is destroyed. I wont use the G73 brick's casing, I just need the components inside it undamaged.

When I do this it will be for modding the 240 watt AW PSU.

 

Sigh, I wish I could afford to buy a M18x. Man that makes me drool... well, maybe next year.
Are you sure the screw head is completely gone. I've had success removing damaged screws with a screwdriver attached to a hand drill that I could never remove with a regular screwdriver.

 

There are 'screw extractors' but my luck with those bits has never been good. Basically you use a drill bit thats a hair smaller than the extractor bit, drill in enough for the extractor to bit into it, then use the extractor bit on the reverse setting on the drill (it's reverse threaded to grab the hole and twist the screw out) and hope the extractor doesn't break!

 

Question: Are all the 6970 a bit faulty or just some that Dell sold?

Finaly we got a service center here that orders parts for alienware laptops but they said that at the moment they only can order the 6970 and for 310 euro much petter price then at mxm-upgrade for 475 euro. Soo... wait for the 6990 or try the 6970? Would have the money for the 6970 next friday

They said that the orders can take upto 3 weeks but 310 euro is cheap

Stange as it might sound for a copper heat sink try a roofing company. Found one that sells copper sheets for roofs and they also have flat sheets of copper upto 6mm thick.

 

If you are doing this, please make sure you get the heat sink completely modded to cover all the VRMS and the big fat inductors. I checked the temps on the one I have in my M18X they DO get hot. Death is certain if they aren't cooled.

The M17X r2 and M17X R3 GPU heat-sinks can be modded to suit our modification purposes. Or as you planned custom modifications around the existing G73JH heatsink will do.

I could have done this by now but buying the M18X has sapped my funds to pursue a heatsink and PSU mods at the moment.

Good Luck!

 

Well as they sell parts for AW i might aswell ask the price for the M17X heatsink. Noo need to reinvent the wheel i think If the price is not to high then will take the easy way but if not then just need to go get me the 6mm sheet ....they sell the copper sheets at 1mx1m but the guy there said if i want a 8cm x 10cm i could just go and look if i find something in the scrap pile for free

So better to go for the 6970 then ?

 

Well if its not much a difference in price 6990M is better, ONLY if the difference in cost is not by much. Which I doubt so your best bet is 6970M. You could always try getting a deal on 6990Ms

My 6970Ms are the oldest stepping and they are not as powerful as most of the newer stepping 6970Ms from DELL. Not by much though, not enough to be pissed about it.

Yup the CPU style stepping also plays an important role in how these chips perform.

 

Hmm you said older and newer 6970m. How do i know if they have the older one or newer 6970 ?

 

No way to know, but if you are buying a single piece chances are you are getting a fresh piece, since already used/pulled cards always go into refurb laptops.

 

Nice to see this thread hasnt died.

Really make sure everything is properly cooled (core, vram, inductors...), cant stress that enough. Lets be certain this time that thermal problems arent killing it. Im interested to see if it can actually work right (powerplay, working fans...).

 

Im back in this game, considering an upgrade January if this still can be done I will instead order me a 6970M and a Targus 180watt to go with it.

 

If you are going to wait till Jan 2012 then you might be interested on waiting a little longer like say March 2012 when the 7000M Wimbledon should be out in the wild (ebay/eurocom). Lot cooler and more horse power for the money.

Since its 28nm the die size shouldn't be as big as the current Barts, yields should be better per wafer. Which means over all lesser cost to produce the chip.

 

Sadly I will never cough up big bucks for a laptop and I am always a GEN behind to make sure it stays that way. I sold my G70S for about £500 for a Dell XPS SLI for £500 and sold that for £500 to buy my G73JH for £500 I intend to keep doing that because I gain without paying anymore haha!

 

Any in any case just make sure you have the proper heat sink for the job and it should all work out just fine.

Hopefully I can join you guys by then. All I need is the free time and a little bit more funds to pursue this.

 

The 7000 series would be nice but i do not think they will be cheap. Well looking over my funds that i have and the income of this month i will order the 6970 form the service center next Friday and then its just a 3 week wait for it to arrive

Now need to go heatsink material hunting

The store is asking 103 euro for the alienware heatsink


I realy hope that i am not nr.3 or would it be nr. 4 death of a 6970.

When i start the swap i think i will reconnect everything without the case and have the motherboard so that the GPU will be on top. Then i can monitor the temps with a touchless temperature indicator...just to be on the safe side.....if the system keeps its cool then can but it back as it was.

 

Order has been sent by the shop.


They asked 50% upfront so thats 155euros now and 155 after I get the card

Now its a waiting game Have about 3 weeks to find the correct heatsink.

 

Thats a pretty good deal you got there... Cant wait for the results, if it works ill need to get in contact with whoever sold you that GPU .

A bit unrelated, but since this is an upgrade thread, if anyone is thinking of upgrading the wireless in their G73JH, i can recommend the Killer Wireless-N 1102. I received it today (upgraded from Intel 6200) and i can tell you it does make a huge difference with latency and lan transfer speeds, BUT it doesnt have bluetooth if thats something that matters to you.

 

As i spent 155 eur on the card i have to wait for the end of this month the get my paycheck. Then i can order some IC7 and the heatsink from a x17m.

The shop i ordered it from is a local computer shop that opened in august and the had the aw x11m and x14m on sale so that why i just called their service and repair center and lucky me the placed orders for all AW series notebooks. I do not know if they ship to EU.


Here is a good question as someone said that the AW heatsink could be moded? My question is how ? by removing the copper pipes ? They should be glued or solderd to the heatsink itself if i am correct ?

 

Yes, i cant see how you could possibly use the AW heatsink as the heatpipes are of different length and bent differently. I once tried to shorten the heatpipes by clamping them together, soldering and cutting after that part and it completely broke the heatsink conductivity. Bending would almost certainly do the same damage.

Id suggest to just properly mod the G73JH heatsink - or get a replacement G73JH heatsink if youre not comfortable cutting/soldering on the only one you have. I believe ZandParts sells those as spare parts.

 

I can see the aw heatsink working if i remove the AW heatpipes. When i but the new GPU in with the heatsink the JH heatsinks pipes will still be at the same spot ....the GPU core so the only mode i see that needs to be done is i will have to grind down the Al. fins so the pipes will be flat with the heatsink ( if the pipes are at a nother angle on the AW heatsink). My only question is how to reconnect copper to copper again :/ i know that they solder it. So a gas heater and some tin. Have read that you can use superglue mixed with copperpowder or something that conducts heat.

what do they use in the heatpipe as standard ? gas or liquid ? then i know if i can heat it or not do not want it to blow up in my face of overpressure.

 

It shouldnt blow in any case. When i modded the D900F heatsink i heated it to the point where the solder just gave and some parts literally fell off. So go nuts .

Simple schematic of how heatpipes work if youre interested:

 

Thats what i wanted to know Just need some tin and a gas-burner and should be able to resolder the G73JH pipes to the AW heatsink. Ill go ask a nother dell service center on Friday to see if i can get the AW heatsink for a bit cheaper price then 103 euro

 

Wouldn't it have been cheaper to just sell the G73 and buy a Clevo with a 6970m?

 

If they only sold them here. Well they do if i order them from the states but like AW prices they start at 4000eur


Wow as i was writing this I looked the prices over and they have gone down. Now sarting at 3200 euro you can get a AW x18m here with 6 gb 1333 ram, intel 2720, 1x 750GB HDD, It does come with dual 6970.

I might get 1000euro for my G73 if lucky but that is even to much to expect. I am better off just upgrading the GPU on it.

 

You wont get 1000€, trust me, ive tried selling mine for that much and its... a bit more equipped . Cheaper to just upgrade i guess...

But if you do want a Clevo in the future, MySn has them at decent prices, ships anywhere in EU and they build them properly.

 

+ by just upgrading the G73 it will keep the wow factor I realy like the designe on the G73.

Also if we pull this off then think about it for a sec then just by adding 310 euro to a notebook that is worth now for. I did order it for 2200USD but is worth now howmuch? 700-1000USD ? No if i sell the notebook for thath and go for a AW or clevo then i would still have to pay about 1000-1500USD.

Soo 420 USD(GPU swap) vs 1000-1500USD (new notebook)
And what will you win ? well if the G73JH cooling can be fixed with the 6970 then there is nothing stopping you from going 7000 seires (if they do not make MXM IV ). As long as its a ATI and MXM III then its cheaper to GPU swap

 

Update

Got a email from the shop. They think the GPU will arrive in 1,5 weeks so mid October + when i asked for the price of the heatsink they said why do i need a second one ?. So that mean that the 310 eur price is GPU + heatsink for a AW x17m R2 notebook

 

Thats one thing less to worry about... keep us updated.

 

That was me.

Heat the AW heatsink with hot air gun or gas welder to remove the heatpipes and reattached G73JH heat pipes in place. Job done.

To ensure safety you have a blower blowing off on the radiator so excess heat from the heat pipes are dissipated quickly.

Don't mix super glue and copper powder etc. The super glue interferes with the thermal conductivity it will render the copper elements useless for conduction.