Dell Inspiron E1705 GPU and AC Adapter Upgrade

I needed a laptop for school and being cheap I decided to buy a used one. Here is what I scored for $200 (I love how cheap you can buy old tech for!)

E1705 with Intel Core 2 Duo T7400 2.16GHz
4GB DDR2 Ram
80GB HDD
17" WXGA+ Matte LCD (1440x900) (not the best option but not the worse either)
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 Go 256MB

Now here are my two questions:

1) What is the most POWERFUL card I can fit in the laptop? I read that the 7950 GTX Go can go with some cutting but I was wondering if there was anything more powerful.

2) The laptop did not come with an AC adapter. Does the size (and power) of the GPU have an impact on what power brick I buy? In other words, I don't want to buy a underpowered brick only to buy another more powerful one once I upgrade to a more powerful GPU.

Thank you for any advice and I just want to say I love this forum!

 

What is your units Service Tag number that will give us a better look as to what is inside your Dell E1705 also the largest Dell OEM adapter I think it needs is the 90Watt power supply. I don't think there is a bigger one but with the Service Tag number we can see what size of adapter it uses...

 

No 7950M GTX Go is the best card, but they ALL suffer from the Nvidia BGA issue and will keep on melting. You need a 90W adapter or a 120W adapter.

 

The 7950 will indeed work with a little modding, but I don't know if the power circuitry will hold up for extended periods of heavy use. Using something better than a 90W adapter may help.

That being said, all of the Nvidia cards available for this chassis suffer from the BGA issue and are not worth the money. I would have put that $200 towards a new laptop - even something basic with HD 4000 has GPU performance on par with the 7950.

The WXGA+ is also the worst screen for this chassis. Afaik, there is only WXGA+ and WUXGA.

 

What exactly is this BGA issue? And are you guys saying that I should just stick with the 7800go? Is there anyone here who has installed the 7950 GTX in their e1705 and not had this bga issue?

One more question, will it be ok for me to buy the 130w XPS power brick if I stick with the stock 7800go card (in case I want to upgrade to a better GPU later) or will the extra 40watts kill the laptop somehow right now?

 

No, all Nvidia cards from the 2006-2008 era had solder issues. They used defective bump material on the GPU and hence due to thermal heat stress, it would cause the solder joints to fail and the GPU would get desoldered from the PCB/motherboard. You need minimum 90W adapter, the laptop will only draw the power it uses.

 

Ok thank you for the information. I will go ahead and order the 130w power brick that is used in the XPS. One more question, will using a hardcore notebook cooler such as the NZXT Cryo LX or Cooler Master Notepal U3 decrease the chance of BGA with the 7950gtx? And since it sounds like nvidia knew about the GPU issues from 2006-2008 that sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen. I wonder if the 7950gtx upgrade, it if caused the BGA issues, could be easily fixed with the "oven bake" trick?

 

Using a cooler may prolong the time until the solder craps out, but it definitely will not stop it. The class action lawsuit already happened, but there weren't any recalls or anything so there are still a ton of bad machines out there (like yours). Yes, you can usually bake failed GPUs back to life, but they will just go bad again. Why you want to own a laptop that will require that sort of maintenance is beyond me.

 

It's actually all Nvidia chips from that period, I had a chipset die from it too. Depending on how much the GPU has been used it could be a matter of days, weeks or months but it will die early and suddenly.