Zotac has officially abandoned the mxm format on the new EN72070V

Well as the title says it looks like we can't buy these mini pc's strip out the mxm gpu and put it in other machines, I guess it was fun while it lasted

Its strange how different the card looks to a normal mxm whilst the outer case is the same dimensions, if it weren't for these photos I would have bought one to do an mxm upgrade!

From here I was hopeful...



Then all hope was lost





If you want to see the detailed disassembly check this link here: https://imgur.com/a/UmlXSsW#uUEtbR5

 

BGA, the unholy sight that brings despair into the hearts of men.

 

Eww

 

Well there goes my dreams of performing a GPU upgrade on my Ranger to a Turing series graphics card.

But why, just why? I feel like a move like this would only increase manufacturing costs. There was nothing wrong with MXM, and it was a great standard that everyone but Clevo seems to be abandoning now in favor of proprietary modules.

 

HP has made some turing cards in the mxm format, you may want to have a look at that. The rtx 3000 is probably the best value for performance.

 

Yeah I saw that. They're pretty much standard MXM format with a slight protrusion on the right side where the VRAM chips are. Minimal modding required on the chassis.

I saw someone slap a Quadro RTX 5000 into an Alienware m18x R2 on these forums somewhere. I'll be waiting to see how that turns out. Quadro cards are quite expensive though. I'd rather purchase a gaming card, but I don't mind getting a quadro if I can snag a good deal on one.

I think all the Pascal Quadro MXM cards are under $950 now. It'd be nice to have a Quadro RTX 5000 MXM module in my Ranger power modded to 120 Watts. Basically 2080 Max-Q graphics performance I believe in a 2013 model laptop.

I don't really like having to settle for 2080 Max-Q performance levels, but the fact of that matter is that it's probably the absolute best I'll ever be able to achieve in this laptop.

I'm highly doubtful we'll ever see standard format RTX 3000 series MXM modules. I'd be incredibly surprised if even one shows up.

 

My supplier from China tells me sometime in November normal looking mxms with turing will be released. The guy doesn’t have a track record of lying either so I believe him. I guess they’ll use those hp mxm cards and somehow Frankenstein a 2080/2070/2060 chip on it...

I mean I’ll take HPs version of an mxm card rather than the abomination zotac created with the 10xx cards, that were plagued with error 43 and blowing up mosfets not to mention the extended height of the card...

 

MXM actually has a lot of issues from a power efficiency standpoint. Power from the mxm tab being brought up through the whole length of the card, the goes back down after voltage is reduced. Power to core overlaps with half the memory. Desktop card design has this issue too, but it could be entirely avoided in mxm if the card was wider than it was tall. Standard format boards like the 980m will burn over 10% of their power in wire resistance on the board.

 

@Khenglish what do you think about this card? Can it do 200w without any issues later on?

 

@DaMafiaGamer

That card looks really good and I would think even 400W would be fine. I'm surprised they were able to route power over the pci-e signals for a few phases.

While the 980m board was inefficient, I could still draw 270W on one. The inefficiency is just extra heat that needs to be dissipated somehow.

 

Interesting. I did not know this. Perhaps this is the reason why Dell switched to their proprietary DGFF cards?

If this comes to frution, it'll be yet another socket victory against BGA. I'm looking forward to this.

 

RTX 20XX are the latest MXM, wonderful.

Even though, these laptop "creators" would ever switch to this form factor instead??
It seems to be the best way of upgradable laptops, not the DGFF or this Zotac new crap video card slot.

 

That format is only possible with GPUs that use HBM, if they use regular RAM chips they would need to be much larger.

 

Nowadays if there are any upgradable laptops they are top of the line. So this makes sense - HBM only. It can still scale down - removing some power delivery and replacing it with RAM chips, keeping the board size and connector the same. The cooling and the board design would be different, but even today they vary. What we would actually get is another story

 

And how many consumer GPU's are currently available with HBM from Nvidia? Or even from AMD?

MXM can be tweaked to offer better power delivery and add a couple mm's in either dimension to accommodate for more VRAM, if HP can put an RTX3000 into what is for all effects a standard MXM3.0b, just make a new MXM4.0 format, but the thin and light crowd wont buy them, so OEM's wont offer you that.

 

HBM memory should be used for now on, easier cooling for this entire thing.
How many decades there are needed to bring this to the nowdays laptops?
Or everything BGA where "everything" is so awful..

 

Does anyone knows if there is any adapter that allow to use this type of GPU on others systems? (either desktop or laptop)

 

You can use an MXM GPU on a desktop by using an MXM to PCIe adapter. I don't recommend doing this though since compatibility is not guaranteed, and it's a worse value than just getting a regular desktop card.

You can reuse the Zotac MXM GPUs in laptops if you flash the right VBIOS onto those MXM modules. Again, this is not guaranteed to work with a;; cards, but the Zotac GTX 1070 is known to work in the Alienware Ranger (2013 model Alienware 17) with the MSI VBIOS flashed onto it.

 

Thank you, I have seen such adapter on AliExpress, however, I was talking about this particular GPU mounted on Zotac Barebone which is connected though the proprietary system of Zotac. I was wondering if this solution is a new type of standard for the industry. I found a refurbished 2060 like the one in the picture and I dont know what to to with it

 

There aren't any adapters that I know of for those new weird cards. Someone else will have to chime in.

This isn't a new industry standard. It's a weird proprietary from factor for Zotac's mini PCs.