Compal JHL90 hardware question

Hello everyone,

I am an owner of a Compal HL90 laptop. I was wondering, mainly for future reference, just how far can these laptops be upgraded? I have experience with repairing laptops with Dell/Alienware, Toshiba and HP laptops from previous jobs but I have not found much information on Sager/Compal notebooks.

Does anyone have any links or documentation that show the possible future video cards/cpu/ram that will be supported with this model?

Thank you for any help!

 

Are you looking for this: http://rs667.rapidshare.com/files/210284256/JHL90_service_manual-Final-0725.zip

The best CPU you can use would be the 3.06GHX X9100. Ram wise you can go as far as you want as long as it's DDR2. For the GPU, any MXM-II GPU that is not NVIDIA based should work fine. So you are limited to the HD4670 which is the fastest MXM-ii gpu if you can find one to buy.

 

Why limited to the 4670, it comes with an Nvidia GPU so you really can't upgrade to another Nvidia???

I understand the 4670 is the best radeon maybe, but are there no more MXM-ii Nvidia cards??

And while I am asking.... since the GPU on my JHL90 can get pretty hot, would you recommend putting a 4670 in? I am assuming preformance is much better

 

The HD 4670 is practically impossible to get. The HD 4650 with DDR2 is easy to get, you will notice some difference to your 9600M GT with DDR2, but it will be no great improvement.

The GT 240M would be a very nice update (although notebookcheck rates it below the HD 4670 I think you should be able to overclock it quite well due to the low current consumption thanks to the 40nm fabrication), however, like Ayle said, forget about Nvidia GPUs. The bios for your 9600M GT is part of the systems bios, so if you put in another nvidia card it will conflict with the nvidia bios integrated in system bios and the card won't work. In order to fix this you would have to edit the system bios, which seems impossible since there is no functioning editor around and even if, you would have to delete the nvidia bios part in the system bios and if you delete the wrong part or delete to much the chance of ing up the system bios, and along with it the motherboard, is pretty good.

The HD 4670 will run quite hot, but if you use a cooling pad and apply some better thermal compound it should work. The problem is getting that card.

Maybe you could upgrade to a 9600M GT with GDDR3, I could work, even though the card would than most likely run at clock rates of your 9600M GT, but the clock rates can be easily changed.

However, I think the 9600M GT with GDDR3 is quite expensive on ebay, so if you want to upgrade you might as well go for the HD 4650 with DDR2, it's 112 € from acer, hoever, I don't know if the improvement you will get is worth that money.

 

I don't think anything other then the standard 9600M GT will work. Ati card's ain't supported in the bios, so they won't work. Anything else from Nvidia will neither work, because they aren't supported in the bios as well.

A 9600M GT DDR3 won't work either, because the VBios isn't recognized by the systembios.

 

I see no reason why ATI cards will not work in the JHL90 while putting them into the FL90 works perfectly fine. I mean the situation is exactly the same with the FL90. It is pretty sure to assume that it swapping the gpu in the JHL90 will work as long as you use ATI cards.

The 9600M GT with DDR3 should run with VBios integrated in the system bios, just the clock rates would need to be adjusted. However, this would be a pointless upgrade anyway.

 

Isn't it possible to force flash the BIOS of the FL90 into the JHL ? Aren't the motherboards the same ?

 

Nope they are not at all. The jhl90 is montevina while the fl90 is santa rosa, they are running 2 separate platforms. Why would you want to flash the bios anyway? As we told you ATI cards will work without problems.

 

I see, I didn't know they are different models, I thought that only the video card was the difference. Silly me.

 

Thank you for your reply Ayle, and everyone else!

Do you think the QX9300 would work in the JHL90? It's quad-core, but it's also Penryn and running at 1066mhz FSB so I know it'll fit and I know the PM45 chipset will accept this CPU but I'm not sure if the BIOS would limit the processor from being used somehow? I have the latest BIOS 1.16.

Not looking to spend this much on that particular CPU at the moment but down the road when the price drops it'd definately be worth upgrading to a nice quad-core system if possible without spending money on an entire laptop upgrade!

Thanks again for your help.

 

Even if the bios accepts the quad-core, I think you will get major problems with cooling. Intel basically glued together two duo cores on one board, meaning the QX9300 looks like this:

The heat pipe is build for a duo core where the chip is right in the middle, so the heat pipe, at least the copper part, which is the only part that really takes the heat away, will not cover the quad-core cpu completely which is very bad as that thing, even being an extreme cpu, will get quite hot.

You could try to put a very thin copper plate that covers all cores between the CPU and the heat pipe and apply AS5 or MX-3 on both sides.

But in any case the BIOS would need to support quad-core and as Compal doesn't state any quad-core support for the JHL90, I think it will not work.

 

Thanks for the reply Daniel,

You are right about the heat for sure... I understand it'd produce much more heat than Compal supplied a heatsink for but I think I could rig up a heatsink like you said using copper plating and good thermal compound and try it out Hopefully I wouldn't fry the board/CPU in the process... but with careful precaution (monitoring the CPU temp with software on bootup along with a cooling pad) I'm sure I could test it out and see if it'll work before any heat produced causes permanent damage to the system.

Maybe I'll give it a shot soon after doing a bit more research (and pricing for the CPU itself drops) and post my results

 

UPDATE:

Apparently the QX9300 has a TDP (Watt) of 45. My current CPU T9600 has a TDP of 35. So I'm not sure how much difference 10 TDP will make when it comes to the temp produced in this particular laptop. (If it even works!)

 

I think Intel's TDP value is very optimistic. It is more likely that the CPU will have like 50W TDP. Since the QX9300 is basically a combination of two P9500 CPUs which each have a TDP of 25W. The TDP itself should not pose a problem, since the strongest CPU that is supposed to run with your system, the X9100 which Ayle mentioned, has a TDP of 44W, so it would be practically the same in terms of heat production. However, I think the QX9300 actually produces quite more heat than the X9100 and because of the structual differences the heat pipe will not work as efficient even with a copper mod... you should consider this option only if you can try it out with the CPU of a somebody else beforehand.

 

Hi everyone,

can you confirm that the HL90 has a MXM card?

Here you said it has, here its is claimed it is not, in the *JHL90* (JHL90 == HL90?) service manual it also looks like a MXM.

Thanks for clearing that up!
Cheers