np8130 graphics card user replacement

I currently have a 460 in my laptop, now I'm wondering how hard is it to change GPU in case I find a better one. Will I have to remove heat sinks and all that or is it as easy as removing the hard drive? I'm not too comfortable opening computer so that's why I'm asking, thank you!

 

It's not extremely difficult, it is a little more intensive than say changing the hard drive but isn't too difficult if you exercise caution.

You'll also want to have thermal paste handy when you do change the GPU.

An excerpt from the service manual on it:

 

Out of curiosity, where would you even find a replacement GPU for a laptop?

 

eBay, MxM resellers and the like.

 

You do need to exercise caution when doing this though, as ES parts (Engineering Samples) often come with no warranty and are not officially supported/may not run at the same speeds as stock (sometimes better, sometimes worse).

 

Aikimox can order Radeon 6970M's but if you have an 8130, you'll need to also order and buy the larger powersupply (from the 8150) for it.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/member.php?u=235434

 

You have 3 main choices up to date :

GTX 560M - ~15% more powerful than the 460M, costs about 350$
GTX 485M - the current top performer, costs about 700-800$
HD 6970M - about 5% weaker than the 485M, costs about 500-550$

 

What would be the 560 and 6970 performance ratio? At notebookcheck they say it would be similar to 6970 "The performance of the GeForce GTX 560M should be near the GTX 470M / 480M and according to Nvidia even beat the fast AMD Radeon HD 6970M". On 3DMark06 they differ 2400 points just as the 6970/485. So would the 560 be 5% weaker than 6970 thus 10% weaker than 485??

 

At notebookcheck they pile results from different platforms, so one needs to be careful drawing conclusions. While comparing the GPU performance look for the 3DMark Vantage GPU (not the total) score and gaming benchmarks (note the CPU used). Also, "according to Nvidia" is just a pure marketing. There's always a game/benchmark that favors the REDs or GREENs and can be used to poke the opponent

I'd say, the 560M is ~ 15-20% weaker than the 6970M while being very close to the 470M and 480M.

 

I need to second this as well. Those charts can be somewhat misleading at times. While the 560m is a very good card, it's still not in the same class as the 485m or 6970. It's still a higher middle tier card where the other two are the performance kings. Two 460m's in SLI about equaled a 485m- the 560m is ~10% faster than the 460m, so it stands to reason that two 560m's in SLI would be about 20-30% faster than a 485m- or put simply, on 560m would run you about 70% of the power of a 485m as Aikimox states.

Vantage scores tend to be the best equal comparison for all GPU's. While overall system specs can change, the Vantage GPU score will basically give you a bar to measure with over all tested systems.

 

Don't worry dude. With how fast the technology is changing, there will be better options down the line.

Though the ones available right now, while expensive, are still very good.

Mr. Mysterious

 

What would be easier/cheaper to update down the road, the cpu or gpu? Also I’ve been told that if I go for the ATI card I will be only able to upgrade for other ATI, I couldn’t go for a Nvidia in the future, is that right, since the mobo and all other components are the same as far as I know.

 

Well I can't answer your second question, but let me tell you this: If you are a gamer, then you will bottleneck your GPU much faster than you will bottleneck your CPU...

The SB processors and even the arrandale processors are really amazing.

Mr. Mysterious

 

No, thats not correct, that'd be like saying once you plugged one brand of video card in a desktop you can never use a different brand, it's essentially the same concept here.

The current AMD and Nvidia cards for machines like the NP8130 use the same MxM standard, a standard created by Nvidia, you can always change the card out between the two brands so long as it fits the MxM 3.0b standard and if you have enough wattage to drive the card.

 

Ok time for some mathematics...

The 560M has a clockspeed roughly 15% faster than the 460M. Assuming linear scaling, the 560M should be 15% faster.

The Radeon 6970M is about 70-80% faster than the 460M. So take 170% and divide by 115% than multiply by 100% and subtract 100% and you get roughly 50%. So there you have it. The 6970M should outperform the 560M by 50% on average. Note that this is on average and in some cases the nvidia cards can beat the amd ones. You have to look at the frame rate comparison of a variety of titles to be able to draw a good conclusion.

 

There is no linear scaling in graphics cards between different architectures. You cannot make that assumption. You are right, You must balance your decision on how each performs in the games you want to play and what features they have or features they excel at. 6970 for example, has no hardware physics acceleration (even though I think PhysX is dumb, games have been designed for it because Nvidia has given developers bags of money).

You can't do straight math but looking at benchmarks in general shows the 6970/485 to be about 40-50% faster than the 460/560. The 560 is more like 10% faster only.

 

mrmysterious66

With that in mind i guess it is better to go with a better cpu since it will last longer and upgrade the gpu one or even two times down the road with same cpu?

 

Games are no longer bottlenecked by CPU, so unless you're not into heavy rendering/encoding and need to save a few minutes when processing huge data chunks, even the entry level quad 2630qm will be more than enough for a few years. I'd still recommend the 2720QM as the best performance/price option.

 

The 6970M costs $468 shipped.
But if you have the Sager NP8130 (Clevo P151HM1), then you have to get also the 180w PSU; together, they cost you $546 shipped.