Upgradeable Graphics Questions

Originally posted this in "which laptop should I buy" but I think this is probably a more applicable place for these questions:

I'm looking into a Clevo P150EM or P151EM and it looks like the P151 rarely, if ever, has an option to upgrade the video card. I'm assuming this means the card is soldered into the mainboard? If not, what kind of options do you have for after-market upgrades?

Ideally I'd like to be able to upgrade from a 660m or 670m to a 7970 or 680m in a year or so once the prices are down and the laptop is starting to show signs of age. I'm not going to be playing (for the moment) games any more graphically intensive than Diablo 3 and Kingdoms of Amalur, but in the future I'd like an upgrade path.

I've looked at some other MSI chassis options, but it seems like the only laptops with non-soldered options are Clevo/Sager. Also, is it my imagination or do upgrades on an MSI laptop seem to be significantly more expensive (up front) than Clevo?

So far I've been speccing laptops at Malibal and XoticPC, but I'm not opposed to looking elsewhere.

Bonus question: Does the 660m (kepler) actually run considerably cooler than the 670m (fermi) based systems? If so, it might be worth it to me to consider the kepler even if it is ~10% slower.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

 

Ohhh man. This is going to turn into an interesting thread yet once again lol

To answer your questions, I'm pretty sure the GPU on the 151 is upgradeable.

I'm pretty sure some MSI laptops are upgradeable as well, not all have the GPU soldered on (CPU, well, you could not upgrade those from SB to IV so I am not sure about Haswell/further on).

Honestly, unless you absolutely do not have the money now, there is no point upgrading the GPU in a year. Two, may be although if you get the 7970m, I doubt you would have to even in two considering how well it handles both OC'ing and OV'ing.

 

Oh? Has this been covered a few times already? I didn't see any threads in the first 5 or 6 pages covering 660 vs 670, but I haven't quite got the hang of the search function on this forum yet.

2 years was my ideal upgrade time to be honest, but 1 year seemed more realistic given the progression of laptop cards. If I can get away with OCing a 660m I'd ideally stick to that. The only part that bugs me is that a lot of the 660m seem to only come with 1gb GDDR5, and I'd prefer to just straight off get one with 2gb. We'll see, I likely won't make a purchase til late August, in which case there might be a few more options.

 

If we figure out how to OV the clevo cards..........

 

I take it the bios doesn't allow it at the moment? I've seen a lot of petition threads regarding Clevo's bios for their new laptops. I'm guessing this is one of the main issues?

 

That's coz a lot of hate got spread around and they got deleted.

MXM cards cost a lot. A LOT. They cost a lot more than the flagship upgrade for the current year (and after a year, a few hundred dollars won't make you a lot of interest had the money sat in the bank instead ).

The 660m does not bottleneck the memory so 2GB is useless. It is pretty much just a selling point. That being said, what laptop did you see with a 1GB GDDR5 option? All the ones on XoticPC (ASUS, MSI) are with 2GB.

To be honest, I would not bother with the upgrade. Get the 680m or 7970m and upgrade your laptop after three years instead. An overclocked 7970m will probably play games on high for another year and a half.

I had been so used to seeing AW that this did not strike me. Good point.

 

If you're deciding between the 660M and the 670M, you should probably just get the 660 and hope you can OC it a little. You will approach 670M without going insane and it *should* run a little cooler. Once you get higher than the 670 it gets a little harder to decide, at that point you have to start taking the entire laptop package into account.

 

I was looking at Malibal's website mostly... Lotus P150EM SE - MALIBAL

IIRC the Xotic PC - Clevo branded laptops briefly had the 660m at 1gb, but then it disappeared. This was a couple weeks ago, so I may be remembering wrong. The MSI/ASUS I didn't look at as closely because I'd heard (perhaps incorrectly) that it wasn't upgradeable as far as the video card went.

 

NVIDIA GTX 660M (Kepler); 1.0GB DDR5; MXM 3.0b Module - Upgrade Kit | eBay

 

I don't know about the GE60 that I saw for the 660m. It might not be upgradeable. Some are. I would get the 1GB. I really don't think the 660m can fill up a GB of memory.

Thanks for that. I was curious because even the wiki for the 600 series does not list the 660m in a 1GB version. May be I can edit that

 

I agree. RAM won't bottleneck your GPU performance, the chip itself would. RAM is that cheaply manufactured ingredient that can easily be marketed and advertised. I had an ASUS laptop with a GPU that supported a maximum of 1GB VRAM but ASUS provided it with 2GB... Utterly pointless, but a good selling point to the uninformed.

 

Ge60 is soldered.

 

Disappointing, but not unexpected. Thanks for the confirmation Meaker.