Video Card Upgrade for Sager 8150/Clevo P150HM

I bought my laptop a couple years ago under the assumption that I would be able to upgrade in the future to a better Gfx card. Unfortunately, I've been on the phone w/ people from Sager and they keep saying that I can't drop an upgrade (ex. 780m) into my laptop. I'm currently running a 580m and while I do plan on keeping this card for another couple of years before shelling out for an upgrade, it seems to currently be dying and on its way out. Somehow the price for a replacement 580m exceeds the cost of a 780m which I fail to understand. Anyway, I had replaced the thermal compound on it a while back w/ some IC Diamond 24 to get cooler temps. Even with that though, my laptop will do what's shown in the video below except my display is blank, and my fans go to maximum on their own while my numlock, capslock, and scrolllock lights blink. So what do you all think? Also I think it should be possible to drop in an upgraded card with some minor modifications to the current heatsink plating, but I'd need to get measurements and such from someone who has one of their newer model laptops to do so and figure out what needs tweaking.

 

It goes a bit more in depth than just making it fit. The BIOS/EC don't support it and there are TDP ratings on the system that don't allow the 7xxm cards to work at this time. Prema was working on getting the suckers to work but I don't believe a success was ever achieved. At this time not possible unfortunately.

 

The 580m is a 100w card so it was entirely a system bios issue.

 

That's ridiculous especially after everything I was told by Sager 3 years ago. As a company, they have the resources to figure it out, but b/c of the product cycle they won't be. I never thought top of the line parts would crap out like this especially just months outside the extended warranty wearing out despite keeping it all clean and in good working order. Thanks for the input guys!

Update: I spoke too soon about the drivers fixing the problem. It still BSOD's when gaming and sometimes when playing 1080p Blu-ray movies. What needed to be changed on the bios to get the newer cards to work?

 

I would try reflow the card, just take a hair dryer and blow it over the card at very close distance, bit by bit, make sure both sides are heated. I did it on an old video card ( ATI 3650 mobility), which died and would not boot up, and it worked.

also prema's mod: GTX780M FUNDRAISER | Prema Mod

 

The 7970M with HM bios would at least be an upgrade.

 

I'll check out that mod. I have a heat gun that I can use so I'll probably try out that route. As I just re-pasted everything, I'm going to hold off on the re-flow for a little bit. If it gets worse then I'll definitely be taking out the 580 and fixing it that way. There's no way I'm shelling out $800 for a replacement especially when a 780m is almost 3/4 to 1/2 that price right now. Although I don't think upgrading will be justifiable until the next few generations of gfx cards come out.

 

They could well not work with the hm though due tod it not having enduro/optimus.

 

Yeah. I was told the opposite when I was purchasing only to find out that my laptop didn't support switchable gfx. Honestly the newer cards should be able to be run all the time. Could there be a way to code a bios that would be universal w/ GPU upgrades? That's how desktop rigs are so it makes sense as a concept imo.

 

Notebooks have motherboard controlled fans and power management and display outputs which complicates things.

 

That's true, but the if they knew what they were doing, the gfx portion should be isolated from the rest of the code which leads me to believe that tweaking it to work with future generation cards shouldn't be all that difficult. Although I don't know if it will be possible to get the src for the original Bios for tweaking.

 

With the HM to EM there was the optimus enduro issue putting in a big change, with the 7xx series it was boost 2.0 which changed things up a little, we will see if issues continue with the maxwell chips.

 

What sort of budget are you working with? My reseller was able to get me a 680m kit (heatsink & screws included) from Sager for $650~.

 

Not a very big one since I'm a college student and all, and I'd rather jump forward than go backwards and put too much money into older tech. For now my only option is to re-flow and see if that helps any. I've taken some pictures, can any tell me what I should mask off to provide heat protection from killing the components? Thanks! I'd really like to be able to game again...I mean I do have a desktop available to me, but I want to save myself the hassle of moving it around and what not.

















All I've had on it is IC Diamond, but I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with it. Also it kept throwing a 016 error with the Kernel for the GPU being the fail point a few months back. By then it was unfortunately outside the warranty period I had gotten from my re-seller by a month or so.