[SUCCESSFUL] Clevo P771DM-G MSI GTX 1070 MXM & 4K LCD upgrade thread

DISCLAIMER: This mod is NOT officially supported on the CLEVO P7xxdm(-g) laptops, and YOU assume all the risk and liability by attempting this on your own laptop. This thread was created merely to show how I completed the MOD on my own laptop successfully.

Also remember: The graphics mod only works with the MSI GTX 1070 8GB MXM card as of now

Read the disclaimer before attempting anything that I have done here, if your gpu breaks its YOUR fault!

Things you will need beforehand (if performing both upgrades):

A screwdriver, of course
REV 1.0 OR HIGHER MSI GTX 1070 8GB MXM card (non-gsync variant is preferable)
AUO B173ZAN01.0 4K 3840x2160 IPS Panel
4K P775DM-G LCD connector 40-pin eDP
Good thermal paste (I recommend Arctic Silver 5)
Soldering iron and heat gun
Pliers
A cutting blade, something that can melt plastic, even the soldering iron will do just clean it afterwards

MSI GTX 1070 MXM Upgrade
​

Here is the MSI GTX 1070 I bought, yours should look very similar to this:


As you can see the card does not fit in the laptop mxm slot so we need to make some arrangements for this:





Remove the motherboard from the bottom housing and start cutting the housing as shown below with a hot blade: Do a cleaner job though and remember to sand off any plastic that doesn't allow the back cover to sit on.


So now that the housing has been cut now comes the hard part. The graphics card does not sit flush with the motherboard as you can see here:



DO NOT TRY TURNING ON THE MOTHERBOARD FOR TESTING OR YOU WILL FRY THE GPU AS IT IS NOT SITTING IN THE CONNECTOR PORT PROPERLY!
From above you can see that the m.2 connector and the right most capacitor will need removing, I will show you how I did this below:



FIRST OF ALL SHIELD THE UNDERSIDE OF THE MOTHERBOARD, THE TWO KEYBOARD CONNECTORS ESPECIALLY AS THESE WILL MELT UNDER EXTREME HEAT!
As you can see jumper wires have been made for the capacitor, YOU DO NOT NEED TO JUMPER/SOLDER THE CAPACITOR BACK IN BUT IT IS STRONGLY ADVISED YOU DO SO THAT THE SUBWOOFER CAN WORK PROPERLY!
Many pins came of the m.2 connector but it is not going to be used again, JUST MAKE SURE THE PINS DO NOT TOUCH AFTER REMOVING THE M.2 CONNECTOR.

You can now see in the next image that the gtx 1070 card sits flush with the motherboard, it can now be put into place:





Now all you have to do is assemble the laptop back together piece by piece, just make sure that you don't loose any screws! After assembly you should end up with something like this:



The screws here are different as the bracket that came with the graphics card only allows slightly wider screws, if you can find 4 of the same screws that will be useful.
JUST MAKE SURE THEY ARE NOT TOO LONG!

This should, hopefully, be the final result you have when booting up your computer:



That's it for upgrading to a GTX 1070, I didn't even have to change the vbios, just make sure that your bios is in UFEI mode if you are having black screen issues.

4K Screen Upgrade​

So first of all you will need to disassemble your laptop lid and bottom housing so that the hinges can be removed like so:



The pliers will now come in handy to snap the edge of both hinges like shown below, this will allow the 4k screen to fit in to the lid housing of the clevo:



Now you just need to re-assemble the hinges back into the bottom base of the laptop. You will now need to work on the cover using the sharp cutting blade mentioned:



You will need to remove the metal bracket with heat, after this you will need to cut the plastic clips at the bottom so that the surface is completely smooth and does not interfere with the bottom of the IPS panel. After cutting the housing you should have a result similar to this:



Now the bottom cover has successfully been cut you will need to cut the top bezel, including the plastic clips and the 'lip' that joins the top and bottom lid housing together:





You can then sand down the areas which are jagged, i.e not aligned properly like so:



Now you can clip both the top and bottom housing together without the screen getting in the way, bear in mind you cannot put the two screws into the holes any longer, and do not try to either!

The end result should look a bit like this:

Benchmarks​

Here are some benchmarks I took to show how well the gtx 1070 performs with the 4k panel:





Scores better than the P775dm3!


That's all guys, hope you enjoyed the tutorial. Unfortunately I have already sold the laptop to someone and now I have a Dell Precision 7710, I would have uploaded the .inf files if I had any but unfortunately I don't.

 

Nice work. Just some things I want to add:

The cap you removed is for the subwoofer. With the long thin wires you added that cap is not doing anything useful. Either just remove the cap, or replace it with a low profile surface mount cap. It needs to be able to handle 10V. Make sure you use an electrolytic cap if you replace it. Multilayer ceramic caps cannot be soldered with an iron.

You actually can run MXM cards at an angle. I've done it a bunch.

How's your LCD lid flex? The older laptops had rigid LCD panels with steel frames that laptops actually relied upon for horizontal lid strength. When I switched out my panel the twist in the screen was extremely excessive, to the point that I felt I could snap the LCD panel just by closing the lid on one side. I sawed up an old LCD's steel frame and placed it behind the LCD hinges to strengthen it. It still flexes too much, but is not as bad.

 

Ok now I understand why the subwoofer sounded louder, I thought it was just me lol. Yeah the lcd does flex but that does not cause much of an issue as I hid the lcd connectors behind the lcd itself. This kind of adds support to the back of the lcd.

The laptop was good but it had slight throttling issues with the processor not due to thermals but due to power limit even using a 300w adapter.

Yeah the capacitor fell of eventually btw.

Oh, I forgot to mention this mxm graphics card did not run at the angle it was at, the mxm slot is actually very loose for some reason, dell ones are structured very well compared to clevo ones. You are right I ran my 7970m in my msi gt780dxr at an angle it worked flawlessly. Just to let the general user know I would not recommend it.

 

Good job!
Could have taken care of that part...

 

No sli cable slot on msi gpus tho, sttrange maybe!?!

 

Instead of that risky wires on PCB, you can try to fit polymer-tantalum capacitors (similar to these on GPU power phases).
For example: https://www.tme.eu/pl/Document/a5d90d85079967994fb49c0e8f8ad6e9/293d.pdf

 

The wires are typical speaker wires, they have a special coating on them which prevents shorting with other components. I use it at my workplace when repairing iPhone ic’s such as the u2 ic power management ic and even the baseband ic at times. It is very easy to do and not risky at all.

 

The capacitor is not really needed, figured I got better sound quality without it lol.

 

It wasn’t really an issue, I used xtu to get rid of the turbo frequency, so the cpu ran at a full 4ghz.
Speaking of that the 6920hq in my dell precision has been overclocked to 4ghz and it performs better than the clevo in every benchmark. Dell are more reliable and offer better performance in my opinion.

 

These systems run at 5Ghz+ with the Mod...

 

Wow I really did not know this, if only you could mod the ec for the dell precision 7710 to allow full power to the cpu without current throttling. Sky lake has this issue.

Of course this is probably not possible as it’s a dell and the bios is encrypted. Still would take my dell over the clevo anyday. Plus it’s has an alumnium body and temps reach a max of 60c on both cpu and gpu

 

The cooling/power delivery has to be able to cope with such high power limits.

 

Modding a Dell Precision would get anyone into a lot of trouble as it is their highly secured version for business customer that work in special envirements.

 

I will be adding an MSI gtx 1070 mxm into my one, is there a way to remove the power limits of the mxm card?

 

You can either hard mod the shunt resistors or get a low voltage BIOS programmer and look at the unlocking thread.

 

Please can you give me a link to the unlocking thread, thanks.

 

It's in the main section on the front page:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/mobile-pascal-tdp-tweaker-update-and-feedback-thread.806161/