MSI 150W GTX 1080 MXM inside a Dell Precision 7720!

To give a bit of a backstory I ordered this card from taobao to put in a barebone i7-8850H GT83 which DHL seized due to it having a lithium battery in it, sounds crazy I know! The seller and I tried to get it back but alas nothing can be done.

I recently made a Dell Precision 7720, converted from a Dell Precision 7710 and the idea popped up, what if a GTX 1080 could be put into a Precision 7720! It should 'technically' work right? I mean this laptop does support pascal quadro cards (P3000 - P5000 MXM).

So here we are, somehow I managed to get this beast working and finally got to test the mxm card too













Some great news to start off with, the card booted with optimus disabled which proves the native pascal support. 2 copper shims were added to the GPU die to allow contact with the GPU heatsink, the placement was no where near the actual copper padding on the heatsink hence there was poor contact with just the aluminium surround of the heatsink making little contact. 1 copper shim was also added to the CPU side to allow proper contact as this is a unified heatsink, if the gpu height is raised so it the CPU height...

I could run furmark for around 10 seconds max before the temps got into the low 90s where the laptop had to be shutdown, but you can see it drawing 170w from the mxm slot! This shows that the precision 7720 has no motherboard ec limitation on the GPU mxm slot which is good news for future upgrades, to let's say a hp Turing card.

The GPU was boosting higher than usual for 2 to 3 seconds then it would drop off at the default 150w with stock clocks due to the thermal limitation. With a properly designed heatsink this gpu could be a viable replacement!

There was something to note however, the laptop would shut off instantly upon running furmark on the original dell charger. With a non genuine/copy charger the laptop would allow the gpu to take as much as it needed This shows some kind of dell power supply ec limitation...

Overall, I'm surprised and frankly impressed the gpu booted and drivers installed without the cursed error 43 popping up. This could be the slimmest laptop to successfully run a 1080 mxm lol.


This is proof that a 10xx series and possibly 20xx series card can work in the precision 7730 with the amount of power headroom it has.

@Papusan maybe you are interested in these mods
@Khenglish is a heatsink mod possible? Or would it not be viable?