Dell Inspiron 15R Touch Graphics Card Upgrade

Hello, first post here. I've been lurking for a little while and couldn't find the answer to my question.

I recently received a new laptop as a gift for graduation. The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 15R Touch with the i7 processor and intel 4000 HD graphics. I know my way around computers a little bit, enough to know that the intel graphics may not be powerful enough for doing what I plan to do on this laptop.

Pretty much, I plan on watching HD movies, editing video and other stuff with Adobe Creative Suite, and playing games with friends. For those purposes, I'm not sure if the intel graphics will be sufficient. If it is, please let me know.

My plan is to get the motherboard and graphics card from an Inspiron 15R 7520 (Special Edition, which comes stock with an AMD Radeon HD 7730M) as well as the AMD Radeon HD 7730M card itself.

Are these two items the only things I need for the swap? Now before anyone says that I should just return my laptop and get the special edition one, please hear me out. I am not too keen on the idea of exchanging a gift out, especially one of this caliber (it's not every day that I get a laptop - maybe once every 5-6 or 7 years), and I really like the features of the one that I already have, such as the touch screen (which has made transitioning to windows 8 MUCH easier), and the 1TB HDD.

In the past, I did this swap to my old Inspiron 6000, without much problems. The only problem I ran into was that the motherboard I purchased was used and had a problem where it wouldn't power up sometimes. But, that's all in the past.

Anyways, so would this swap be similar to the one I did in the past? Are all of the bolt patterns in the motherboard the same?

Would I only need to get the motherboard and graphics card? Or would I also need to get a compatible heat sink?

Thanks!

 

You would most definitely need the new Heatsink from the special edition. From my experiece with the Dell inspiron line, they use the exact same motherboard between the regular and GPU special editions. Hell, you can even see the BGA seats on the mobo for the GPU and vRAM. As long as none of the auxiliary ports have been moved and no extra connectors are needed I don't see a problem with the swap.

 

Need a new motherboard, new heatsink, and probably new psu.