Come in with an open mind, and knowledge about laptops

So I'm currently in military technical training school. I'll be here for around 4 more months, of which I'm not allowed to have my desktop PC in my dorm room. Only a laptop, that I am required to lock up in my locker every time I exit the room.

That said I have an old HP laptop from 2009. It used to play games very well for it's time (or at least the ones I played) but now, as you can imagine, it is very sub-par.

Since I have such a great desktop, I'm not interested in buying a new laptop for the 4 months I'll be here. I am mainly playing league of legends, which it runs fine, but I'd like to possibly play WoW again or Overwatch - which this laptop simply cannot handle with the Nvidia GT230M chip it has.

The HP laptop model is: HP Pavilion DV7-3085DX. It's the 17.3" laptop.
It has 8GB of 1333mhz DDR3 ram, an I7-720QM processor (1.6ghz quad core with boost to 2.8)
I've upgraded from the 500GB HDD to a SSD as well.

I noticed that in the 200 series from Nvidia, they made up to a GT260M.
I've pulled this laptop apart numerous times fixing it, cleaning out the fan, replacing thermal compound while i was in, etc... but I simply do not remember if this sucker is soldered or not.

So TLDR; my question is basically, is it soldered and if so/if not, can I upgrade this chip to anything? Taking the laptop apart simply is not an issue, and buying a new pc is completely out of the question as described above. So if anyone has and input/any technical knowledge as to how to find out if this motherboard will be able to handle a 260M (or even higher, the better the... better lol) then please help me out and let me know. I just don't know how to figure out if this motherboard would allow the 260M to fit in to it even if I did take off the solder (if it's soldered).

Thanks for any info. I wouldn't really ask or try this, but I can get the 260M for only $20 shipped lol. Looking at the specs of the two chips, it is substantially better than the 230M and maybe... just maybe... I'd be able to run WoW again, or Overwatch.

 

Go to HP support website, search for your own laptops drivers and manuals page.

What you want is Service and Maintenance Manual in pdf format. Then look for the motherboard in the parts list, if there is several motherboards with different graphics then it is soldered. Otherwise you would have separate list of graphics cards there.

Without checking I am pretty sure it is soldered though.
In Notebookcheck's list GT230 is just barely above Intel HD4000 that I have played WoW with. 1366x768 and pretty much everything on low and something like 1366x768 resolution first, then step by step settings up until you have something between playable and good looking.