planning to upgrade gpu of my alienware m18x r2 laptop

Hello everybody. I had my laptop for quite some time now, and its warranty has expired 5 months ago.

since few weeks ago, i was getting some artifacts and videocard crashes when I'm playing video games.

so I decided to upgrade or replace gpu, but I'm not sure which gpu I should go for.


my spec is:

intel i7-3740QM 2.7GHz
radeon hd 7970M x2 crossfire
16GB ram

if I go for upgrading it, which one can I take without worrying too much about heat sinks or cpu upgrade?

or would it be worthy enough to actually upgrade accordingly to newer gpu?

also is it possible to go for gpus from nividia?


any help would be grateful to me!


update#1
I just did GPU test with FurMark. temperature was ranging from 45~90 for the most of the part.

it was half way through the test, then it seemed it reached 100C and GPU stopped.

it seems like thermal paste problem but anything else to me, so i'm getting IC diamon 7 to repaste it

when i get the paste i will update you guys.

update#2

I just repasted GPU and CPu both of them.

I tried Furmark to see if it's working, and it was working like a magic!

At idle, temp was around 33 Celsius, and in the middle of same Furmark test, temp was going up to 70s instead of rocketing to 90s.

 

Have you tried testing your GPU's to see which is faulty? It might be cheaper to find out and replace the faulty one... You might want to be sure its the GPU failing and not the motherboard before you do anything.. You can officially upgrade to NVIDIA GTX680M however there are many people using GTX780Ms and some with GTX880Ms.. I would stick with the 780M as they seem to be less issues around them then the 880M..

 

I just took out primary GPU, and put secondary GPU into the slot to see if the secondary one is fine or not.

but it looks like this one also have some problem, not as many as primary one though.

I started farcry 3 to check it, but i got black screen after few seconds into the game.

although it seems secondary one is fine if the temperature doesn't go too high like 100.


it all started with green artifacts about 2 months ago. I tried BIOS reset and power reset to see if I can repair it.

for a while it seemed working fine, but since yesterday i'm getting grey vertical stripes when GPUs get heated up.

so I thought it was faulty GPUs after using them for a year and half.

if I have a problem on motherboard as well, how do I check whether it does or not?

 

Have you repasted your GPU's? It could be the high temps causing the issues.. Your GPU's shouldn't go above 80C... Try repasting and if it still doesn't work, then they're faulty.. Also doesn't look like your motherboard is faulty... It would be good if you made a thread in the AW 18 forum as people like Mr Fox etc can help you..

 

currently waiting for the thermal paste to be arrived. I actually didn't know subforum for alienware m18x existed, but thanks to you i will use that forum when i face next problem.
I will use that information surely well