Sager NP9262/Clevo D901C Video Card Upgrade

Hey All,

Bought a Sager NP9262
4 GB RAM, SLI 9800M GT about 3 years ago now. I'm interested in upgrading the video cards to something more modern, money isn't a concern at the moment. So far I've only seen people mention the 280m which isn't even a huge leap in performance from these cards in SLI. I want something more powerful than that. Any ideas/tips would be greatly appreciated.

 

Absolute highest single configuration you can take is 1x GTX 280M MXM 2.1 graphics card. It will be unable to do SLi. Sorry.

Highest SLI configuration: 2x 9800M GTX MXM 2.1 graphics cards.

If you're looking for any DirectX 11 action with a desktop CPU, you should be looking at the Clevo X7200.

The X7200 is a 17.3 inch laptop that uses Intel's X58 platform, with support for 6-core processors (12 threads total due to hyper threading). Currently, it can support a maximum of 2x GeForce GTX 485M graphics cards in SLI.

So to summarize: If you're looking for something "more powerful," you'll need a new machine.

 

^ You're wrong. The MXM 2.1 280m can be used in SLI with some modified vBIOS. Actually they were hp fx 3700m.

Honestly, your best option is building a pair of cards if you actually want to keep your notebook.

What you can do is put an extremely high binned g92 core on the 9800m GT board, although a 1gb 900mhz board would be better. Search around for N10E-GLM3 BGAs.

Basically you would be able to get 285m in SLI but with even higher clocks. 1ghz core would be an ambitious but easily attainable overclock.

This requires industrial BGA soldering equipment. You would be able to repair GPUs with one of these. They start at 400$.

The easier option is using 2x Lenovo branded fx 3700m cards. They can be found at 150-200$ each. They can be overvolted to 1.1v and will go up to 285m clocks.
Since its been proven no SLI cable is necessary to run SLI, you would most likely have success flashing them to 9800m GTX vBIOS that were made for SLI in your machine.

These are still older and hotter than the gtx 280m however, so they definitely wont go over 700mhz core. That would be the advantage of soldering the FX 3800m BGA core to you 9800m GT. Not only is it binned for almost 700mhz already, it is 55nm and much more efficient at the same voltage.

Overall if you are considering getting a new system, you should analyze costs and see if this is more effective. This would probably be better than 460m SLI.

There is one other card that may be compatible. This is the ATI 4850 mxm 2.1 from Alienware systems. These could possibly be run in dual CF and be your best option, if you can find them.

 

Alright, I appreciate the informative replies guys. I was hoping I might be able to get a powerful card in there, but I think at this point it may be better to simply create a more up-to-date system. A whole new CPU, GPU, MoBo etc in a desktop is probably what I'm going to do, as well as keeping the laptop for some small mobile gaming needs, because the thing is still a champ.

Thanks for all the information!

 

but the used gts250 is very cheap right now, get two take their core resolder on it......we taiwan workshop soldering like this costs about 90usd