Inspiron 8500 video upgrade-heat sink mod mandatory?

Girlfriend has an Inspiron 8500. I have increased the memory to 2Gb, added a wireless N card and put in a 160Gb HD. It runs Win 7 RC ok with it's Mobility Radeon 9000 32mb but was thinking of putting in a 9600 128mb.
My question is if you're not going to be doing any gaming is the heat sink mod mandatory to use the 9600 in the i8500? Looking mainly to use some of the Win 7 eye candy features. Found a place on the net selling new (supposedly) 9600's for $100, which is what used ones go for on Ebay.

Sam

 

Anyone have an opinion on this?

Sam

 

I had Inspiron 8600 (which is not very different from 8500), and it had an nVidia Go5200 32MB card, which I replaced with an nVidia Quadro FX1000 128MB. I didn't do any heatsink mods or anything like that. It ran just fine and didn't overheat at all (the temperatures remained pretty much the same). I also added 2GB of RAM (that's the max it can take), however, when I installed Windows 7, that was NOT enough to enable the Aero (or maybe I just didn't try hard enough with all those settings). The laptop still runs perfectly fine after 5 years (2004-2009), it's just that I have a newer toy now.
I hope that helps!

 

i miss my i8600 was falling apart after 4 years of constant travelling.

IMO the 8500/8600 series was the best dell made in terms of upgradability etc for a decent price and great battery life on the 8600 too.

anyway regarding your question, the 9600 in my 8600 dint really seem to have a different heatsink. i believe the design of the cards are the same, to fit into the dell chassis. so if you reuse whatever you have, it should work.

im not sure if you can enable aero on win7.

i installed vista on my i8600 with the radeon 9600, and it was absolutely horrible. i had a 1.4ghz pentium M. Judging by how vista barely managed to run, i dont think you'll have much luck with win7

 

Windows 7 runs just perfect, very fast, reliable, I think much better than XP. I don't have any complains about W7 on my Inspiron 8600. Never tried Vista though.

 

Thanks for the replies. I think going to the 128mb 9600 would at least speed up Win 7's response, it seems just a bit sluggish on the graphic end. Other than that 7 runs fine on her 8500.

Sam

 

im assuming thats without aero enabled.

im wondering if its worth upgrading if you have to pay $100 for the card, when entry level laptops of better capibility can be had for about 300-400...

dell outlet?

 

Correct, without Aero.

 

Her 8500 is a 17" screen model so that would be a bit more $$. I guess it just bothers me to get rid of something that works well. The memory and hard drive upgrades have been done over the past 2 years so putting in a $100 vid card isn't bad for now. Plus she's a bit tight with $$ and probably wouldn't replace the laptop unless it died or just wouldn't run Windows anymore.

The mod I mentioned I found on the net while looking for info on the upgrade and requires taking the heat sink off the card, removing the tape/pad that is used as a heat transfer between the card's chip and the heatsink then replacing that tape pad with a little piece of copper and heatsink compound for better heat transfer. The issue (from what I read) is the BIOS on the 8500 is set to shutdown the laptop if the laptop's chipset gets too hot. As the vid card fan housing contacts the chipset it can make the 8500 shut down from over heating. The mod cuts the operating temp of the 9600 in half. The 8600 has a BIOS with a higher temp cutoff point and didn't suffer from the problem.


Sam