Clevo P750FM (aka P750DM) - The Ultimate MSI GTX 1080 FrankenMod Upgrade | NotebookReview

DISCLAIMER: This mod is NOT officially supported on the Clevo laptop mentioned below, and YOU assume all the risk and liability by attempting this mod on your own laptop. This thread was created merely to show that these mods are possible!

This will be an extensive read, grab yourself a drink and get comfortable, you have been warned

How It Began

@Reciever messaged me near the end of June last year to ask about the GTX 1070 mxm mod that I did on the bigger version of this laptop. He asked if I could help and of course I accepted! I was sent a brand new shiny P750ZM with the base i7 spec (4790 non K, 970M MXM) a gtx 1070 mxm and lastly a 15.6'' FHD 120Hz panel (MSI variant). We got to talking and came up with a few ideas on what to do:

1) Upgrading the i7-4790 to a i7-5775C.

2) Upgrading the GPU with the GTX 1070 given.

3) Screen upgrade from the base 60Hz panel to the 120Hz one given.

3) Possible heatsink modification.

These ideas changed drastically over the course of the 8 months I had this laptop lol, a lot was to be learned.

The Original GPU/CPU Mod

As I had done the 1070 mod on the bigger version of this laptop, I got to work modifying the chassis immediately, the plastic pillar between the mxm slot and CPU socket was removed as well as the plastic piece near the m.2 connector to make way for the extra bit of PCB on the 1070:

Next I had to remove the motherboard from the chassis to take of the m.2 connector and capacitor which were in the way of the GPU 'tab'. I tried a different method to remove the m.2 connector this time by applying kapton tape around the connector and directly heating it to remove it:

As you can see, one side of the m.2 connector still came off showing me that the heat required to remove this connector is not worth it. I would still recommend snapping off the m.2 connector instead of heating the board as you could kill components around it after long heat exposure! (Unless you have an infrared rework station).

Motherboard failures coming up:

Now all I had to do was put the motherboard back into the chassis and test it. Unfortunately, the motherboard didn't turn on, no charging light no reaction to the power button pressed. It was completely dead. After thoroughly inspecting the motherboard I found a resistor had been knocked off near the main EC chip. I tried everything from soldering a jumper wire between the connections to put a similar value resistor in the old resistors place, still nothing happened. It was safe to say that the motherboard was fried...

I conversed with @Reciever and he was very understanding of the whole situation, I decided to order another p750zm motherboard from china to see if I get this mod done as soon as possible.

In the meantime I ordered the i7 - 5775C that would go into the laptop once the GPU mod was done. When I finally received the motherboard I tried the new CPU in it. To my surprise, only one RAM slot worked on the motherboard. I thought that was quite strange so I tried the old 4790 inside the motherboard and the same issue occurred. At this point I was disappointed, not only had I broken the original motherboard but I was sent a faulty one too. I tried the 5775C again and this time it didn't boot at all.

Again I conversed with @Reciever who was once again understanding of the whole situation. I commend that as I would have lost my patience at this point We both agreed that he should order a motherboard from the states and send it over (customs and shipping fees were insanely expensive!)

Guess what? The motherboard arrived damaged, can you believe that! A component near the mxm slot was fried which turned out to be connected to the displays backlight:

I tested the CPU in this motherboard and it didn't show any external display, meaning the CPU was confirmed dead at this point. My last option was to send everything of the one and only person I knew that could repair these motherboards, my Croatian supplier.

It was around before or around this time I discussed the idea of putting a GTX 1080 into the machine so I could use some of the old components and it could serve as some form of compensation for the amount of dead motherboards that had already gone into the project. @Reciever agreed and the idea of the P750FM was born. I'd make a custom heatsink, modify the gtx 1080 vbios for the laptop and we'd be off to the races.

As you may know by this point, nothing ever works out as it should

The Croatian supplier got back to me with some good news and bad news (a lot more bad then good lol, I'd take anything good at this point). The good news was that the original Clevo motherboard had been supposedly resurrected by his ingenious soldering skills, the bad news was that the CPU was confirmed dead and the motherboard that came from America as well as the motherboard imported from China were dead/had the same issues. I was sent back the motherboard and at last I could finally continue with the mod. I tried the GTX 1080 in this motherboard and nothing.... The screen was blank, there was a bios compatibility issue.

The light at the end of the tunnel:

At this point @Reciever and I were deep in the money pit, I told him it's best we scrap the idea of using a ZM board and go straight for a DM board. He agreed and on the same day I bought a P750DM and tested the GTX 1080 mxm. To my surprise it booted! We could finally continue the mod. I flashed @dsanke's bios on to the laptop and bought a 9700F for the laptop too. If we were about to do a motherboard swap we might as well go all out

The FrankenMod

Here things got very interesting I learnt how to solder heat pipes together learning a few tips and tricks from @Reciever on the way. I bought a toaster oven and two p750dm heatsinks just in case I managed to mangle one whilst heating.

I began by heating up the gpu side of the heatsink to around 200c, once the heatpipes came of the copper block I turned off the oven as overheating the heatpipes could cause them to burst:

Finally the heatpipes came off after around 15-20 minutes of heating, I didn't know what to expect so I stayed away from the oven until I heard the gpu copper piece fall off the heatpipe.

Now it was time to modify the copper plate to fit the MSI GTX 1080, surprisingly this really wasn't that difficult lol, all I did was turn the copper plate 180 degrees so that most of the VRAM chips and gpu die could be covered easily, here is how it looked:

Now it was time to line up the heatpipes with the copper plate, this was the single most difficult part of the whole mod as I got this wrong several times:

I thought that having the heatsink unified was the way forward but that made it a nightmare, AN ABSOULTE NIGHTMARE, to solder everything together. So separating the heatsink was the way forward... for now

Oh and BTW I used solder paste to put the heatsink back together, I wouldn't have done it any other way

The base copper plate was now prepped after soldering extra copper shims to it, the heatpipes could now fit perfectly on the plate without needing to be bent:

I managed to mangle the end heatpipe by applying too much pressure with the wrench, all the gas came out and rendered it useless, hence I had to start again from scratch (learning from my mistakes). Here I made the decision that separating the heatsinks was in my best interest for the most efficient cooling, or so I thought:

After several attempts at joining the 3 gpu core heatpipes I finally got them soldered on perfectly, all I had to do now was to solder some copper plate to cool the vrms on the mxm card otherwise the GPU would shut off after a few minutes of use. I used kapton tape to hold the copper shroud onto the heatpipes and used the g clamps to hold the vrm copper plate and gpu copper plate onto the pipes. Finally this was my end result, after coating it with black spray paint of course :

This is how it fit on the GPU, nice and flush:

Yes yes, I know what your thinking, "the heatpipes don't cover the GPU die!" well to put it bluntly I had to make do with what I had, the heatpipes were simply not long enough to cover the GPU die, I looked far and wide for some heatpipe even one that was the same angle and the same length, I got nothing. Well that's a lie, I got something much MUCH later on

As you may already know, there is was no way in hell that dodgy heatsink was going to cool a 180w GTX 1080, let alone a severely gimped 150W GTX 1080 lol. I had to make amendments... After a few days of thinking and gaming (a lot of gaming) I finally came back with an idea aaaaand a heatpipe

So, this was the heatpipe I was adding in:

I made adjustments to the chassis so that the back cover could still close as well as having all those heatpipes inside, remember I was trying to make it a sleeper build at the time. Here was the end result of soldering the heatpipe and adding a copper shroud:

This was the end result... for now. I was getting decent temperatures underload (75-80c underload LM) but this was at 150w where the GPU was clocking only up to 1400MHz in furmark! That's GTX 1080 Max-Q performance! I didn't do all this work just to see a crappy performing gtx 1080, it had to be the best of the best

So for my final iteration of the heatsink it was time for something big, something that would beef up the mass of the heatsink, I stacked another shroud on top of the existing GPU shroud whilst adding yet ANOTHER heatpipe to the beast:

This was by far the hardest heatpipe to solder onto the existing heatsink, I had to clamp everything down, what couldn't be clamped had to be stuck down with kapton tape.

Here was the end result:

Temps were much much better, the GPU actually settled in the mid to high 60s at 150w which meant I could finally ramp up the tdp. I settled on 190w (default clevo tdp) after a lot of testing. GPU sat between 80-85c during the most intensive benchmarks. Strangely the gpu never broke 82c even after running furmark for 20 minutes straight. This was a success in my eyes.

More about temps, fan mod and subwoofer mod in the later sections

Moving onto the CPU side I repositioned the heatpipe cluster in the middle of the heatsink to allow optimal heat transfer and to allow another heatpipe to cool the VRAM on the GPU lol. It turns out partially unifying the heatsink is a must, otherwise it would be nearly impossible for the GPU heatsink alone to cool the whole card. Now I understand why manufacturers like MSI do this

Here are some pictures of CPU heatsink modding:

The heatpipe ended up sitting flush with the vram modules, overall GPU temps also decreased by a couple of degrees too.

Fan Mods

For the heatsink to fit inside the chassis the original GPU side clevo fan had to be modified. The fan was taken out and dismantled, metal bottom of the fan was cut so it could be pushed back further into the chassis to avoid the fins from hitting the extended heatsink shroud:

This was the final mod for the original GPU side clevo fan. Unfortunately the 5v fan did not have enough power to dissipate all the heat the heatsink was saturating from the GPU so more extreme measures had to be taken.

@Reciever had also included some 12v Asus G73 fans inside the laptop box which I thought would not be needed until I came up with the idea of stacking heatsink shrouds

Luckily the CPU side ASUS fan fit right in, wiring was slightly difficult at first as I had no idea which wire was for the TACH and which was for the TEMP sensor. After figuring it out the laptop booted perfectly and the fan span fine, albeit much slower than the Clevo one due to it being 12v instead of 5v, this didn't matter much as airflow was still much better than what the Clevo fan could muster.

The GPU side was quite difficult to work with, the ASUS fan was too big to fit into the chassis so I modified the housing of the fan, taking off the top lid and plastic surround until I ended up with this (I also cut part of the bottom plate too, exactly like the original clevo fan mod):

I got the fan to finally fit in perfectly and I added aluminium foil tape around the edges of the fan outline to stop any air from leaking through the chassis. Next I needed to add a top cover to allow optimal airflow, otherwise I wouldn't be able to cool the second GPU shroud:

Now the top cover had been glued and plastered with aluminium foil to stop any air leaks from the top, the gpu heatsink shrouds and fan cover perfectly aligned. The only problem now was finding a 12v source to power the fan. At 5V it could barely cool the GTX 1080 running at 150W! So I asked my Croatian friend about 12v outputs, sadly we couldn't find any. The eSata port would have been the best option but luckily I stumbled across something even better The capacitor that was removed alongside the M.2 connector had a 10.5v line going to the positive connection, this was perfect for the 12v fan So I got my soldering iron out and started soldering, here is the end result of the fan mod:

Not the best soldering I know! But it does the job, cleaned up the motherboard with some isopropyl alcohol and now it was time to test! Low and behold temps were looking great (as mentioned in the FrankenMod section, check temps section for the details).

One thing to bare in mind was that the laptop kept cutting out, it knew the fan wasn't hooked up to the fan rail, the only way to bypass this was to run the ground wire through the fan connector. This seemingly tricked the laptop in to thinking the fan was active (well it is active all the time now ). I thought that the TACH sensor was playing up but it turns out you can run the fan without the yellow TACH wire in the fan connector , it's only there to measure RPM at the end of the day. Robust design by Clevo I got to give them props for this, GPU's dying because of fan failures in this chassis is not a thing, take note MSI TORNADO F5!

The only disadvantage of doing the above mod is that the fan runs all the time at full speed whilst the computer is on, once off it turns off too. I checked online and it is said that 10.5v is the absolute maximum voltage for a 12v fan to operate 24/7, I guess I got lucky there

The fan isn't particularly load either, its like a 12v clevo fan set to 40%, it produces a low whooshing noise and no high pitched whine, easily bearable and becomes background noise after a while. Best of all the GPU idles at a cool 24-27c, improving the longevity of that liquid metal!

GPU Scores/Temps

I'm sure this is what most of you are looking forward to, was all that modding worth it? Personally, I'd say it definitely was, sure temps aren't the coolest of the bunch but you have to factor in the custom heatsink design too

Here are a plethora of GPU benchmarks, I have yet to see this GPU thermally throttle (unless @Reciever lives in the Sahara Desert high ambient temps won't make much of a difference, 1 - 2c at most).

Time Spy Stock:

Time Spy Overclocked:

Unigine Superposition Medium:

Unigine Superposition Medium OC:

Unigine Superposition High:

Unigine Superposition High OC:

Unigine Superposition Extreme:

Unigine Superposition Extreme OC:

Unigine Heaven Medium:

Unigine Heaven Medium OC:

Unigine Heaven High:

Unigine Heaven High OC:

Unigine Heaven Extreme:

Unigine Heaven Extreme OC:

UserBenchmark Stock:

UserBenchmark OC:

Furmark 10 minute run:

Speakers/Subwoofer Mod

As I finished the mod I realised I still had space where the m.2 slot used to be, there was only one thing that could be done to top it all off and that was to install a subwoofer!

I started off with the baseline subwoofer that I love using, the GT70 sub. To this day the only laptop subwoofer that has outright beaten it is the Clevo X170SM-G one, so going for the second best was the least I could do, especially if I could get it to fit in that space..... which I did

Initially, my idea was to use macbook pro 15 speakers and make a quad speaker setup, kind of like what ASUS does with their ROG laptops, when I completed that mod the speakers bottomed out at around 60% volume which was obviously unacceptable, hence I wired up the GT70 subwoofer and fit it in snugly next to the gpu fan.

Bass reproduction is better but not the kind of improvement I was hoping for, this was for show though

Conclusion

I've learnt a lot in the last 8 or so months that I have been modding this laptop for. Things don't always go as planned and I planned a lot for this laptop, a lot of days were spent up until 4-5am in the garage trying to figure out how this insane heatsink project would come together If I have to be honest I winged it the first time I tried soldering the heatsink together, thinking it would be a piece of cake, it most certainly was not lol. What helped me most was using kapton tape, copious amount of it to be exact. Without it I'd still be struggling to get the heatsink shroud soldered to the heatpipes

I lapped the heatsink for a good hour or two to get that surface flat and to allow good contact between the GPU die and the copper plate and luckily that paid off, lapping can make a good 5-7c difference if you know what your doing and in my case it saved the GPU from throttling into oblivion.

GPU temps are still good, better in fact than before. I believe the liquid metal has passed it's 'curing' time temps have dropped by a good 5c across the board, we are looking at high 70s to low 80s in games and benchmarks now, ambient temperature is still the same so it seems the liquid metal is finally doing its job

Would I do it again? Yes but I'd mod the heatsink to support Clevo MXM cards for futureproofing, this was more for fun just to see how much performance we could eek out of this beast

If you liked this mod feel free to share it

Donation Link: http://paypal.me/ZeeshanAkhlaq

Thank you again @Reciever for trusting me with your laptop, I hope you get some good use out of it!

Clevo P750FM (aka P750DM) - The Ultimate MSI GTX 1080 FrankenMod Upgrade

DaMafiaGamer Switching laptops forever!