SUCCESS! Upgraded the video card in my Toshiba P100!

OK heres the deal. 1 year, 8 months ago, I buy a Toshiba P100 (Model PSPA3C-SD402E). It comes with an NVidia GeForce Go 7300.

It worked well in games for a while, but newer games tended to suffer greatly, and C&C3 was totally unplayable.

So I have two solutions available to me:

1. Buy a nw laptop, maybe one of Toshiba's X200s. Safer, but far more expensive.

2. Track down and install the GeForce 7900 VGA board that came in the PSPA6C-SD802E. Less expensive but more risky.

I chose option number 2.

After months of tracking down the part I finally found it. Installed it, tested it, it works! Yay!!

Anyways, I made a vid of th process. sorry, the quality is lousy but I haven't figured out how to do the high quality vids yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxAHWTVSVr8

Check it out leave a comment, watch my other vids.

And in case anybody wants to try this on their own, here's a link to the particular part I installed, though I got it from a Canadian company:

http://www.sparepartswarehouse.com/Toshiba,Laptop,Part,A000006510.aspx

It says "G71M" but it is really a 7900...

 

Nice, is it a Toshiba-based GPU or a MXM-card?

And did you've ran 3DMark06?

 

Toshiba unique GPU. I wish it was MXM...

I had 3DMark06 running all night on it last night. 0 errors!

 

Good job. I've upgraded GPUs in a handful of notebooks too...mostly Dells: C600, C610, D800 and D810 and an Alienware (forget which model, but was a i945 based Core 2 Duo). They were Dell proprietary rather than MXM except for the Alienware. Did you get the GPU on ebay? That's where I got just about all of mine (either by itself or swapped with another laptop from fleabay).

 

@ sunairport: could be the m5550 / m5750

In Europe it's hard to get Dell-cards. The MXM-cards are no problem for me and I can get them for a nice price.

I'm still looking for a upgrade for my XXODD which can handle all cards (MXM-I untill MXM-IV) but I can't get the 8800M GTX anymore. Maybe I've to wait on the cards of ATi.

 

DaMarcus, thanks, the m5550 is exactly the laptop I was referring to. It uses an MXM interface for the GPU. If I were in Europe I'd check the US ebay site frequently and just have them ship it overseas, it shouldn't be expensive to ship a laptop GPU.

 

Most of the time I'm checking frequently but finding an upgrade for the 8700M GT is difficult.

The only problem of my 8700M GT is that it has bandwith of 128-bit.

So I'm still waiting on the cards of ATi. I can get a X1900 Mobile, but that one is slower than the 8700M GT.

 

The ATI equivalent to the 8700 would probably be one of the high-end 2000 HD series from ATI... Those are pretty expensive tho...

 

Actually no, I ordered it from Metafore, a Canadian supplier for Toshiba parts. Put a dent in my VISA card to do it

 

I know that they're equivalent, but I'm waiting on the HD3850 / HD3870 Mobility. The games are flooding the bandwith of my 8700M GT (128-bit) and creates a huge bottleneck.

 

Very nice, I am glad that you were able to upgrade your graphics card.
I was looking to buy a P105 from Toshiba, but I read that the graphics was not upgradeable, but clearly the site I read, was wrong. I went with the Clevo D900K, cause i knew the gpu was very upgradeable.
I hope you are enjoying the performance of your new graphics card. Nice video, and some sweet music.

+ rep for an awesome upgrade and a video to show other P100 owners how to upgrade.

K-TRON