I think we deserve to see 2080 upgraded version too

4930mx is running higher frequency and cooler than the original 4700/4710mq so that's a plus. Last official GPU supported by Dell is the 980m which is much better than the 880m Awesome video!

It's really sad how many of these new machines don't even have replaceable storage. I am really concerned about the future of modularity and upgradeability especially with the succes of the M1.

Forgetting the SLI bridge has the same spirit as forgetting the IO shield in a super complicated PC build

Dawid Does Tech Stuff : the GTX 880M 8 GB is impressive considering that it was launched in 2014 based on the Kepler GTX 700 series architecture from 2013 and it had a rich amount of 8 GB VRAM which in uncharacteristic for Nvidia to give to us consumers....though that 122 Watt TDP is worrying since it's a discrete GPU but a mobile GPU nontheless.

Can't wait for him to do this on a framework laptop 16

One thing I've always wondered is why Nvidia's mobile cards of this period (and Maxwell) had so much more VRAM than their desktop equivalents.

765m to 880m ... holy crap that would have been an expensive upgrade back in the day 😀

I've had this laptop from 2014 to 2021 when it finally died. Had it on i7 4700MQ, GTX 760 SLI, and 24GB RAM. Never upgraded it, never needed to

I Love The Good Old Laptops They Are So Easy To Upgrade

The SLI scaling on GTA V didn't seem to be working properly with the new GPUs. If you look at the usage it seems perfectly split and only using around 50% of each card where as with the old GPUs it was using 60-95% usage on each GPU. SLI was non-existent on BFV and CP77 on both but I assume that's just because SLI was dead by the time those games came out.

i always love to see old content brought back to life, even if it's "not worth" the money it's a shame there are so few laptops that can change parts out like this, make a monster david a monster

I love Dawid’s baseless optimism. Really giving it his all out here on the computer webs.

The bsod at 1:03 isn't a bad windows install, its the sata configuration mode in the bios. It can either be set to achi or raid on, depends on the device but usually swapping the mode will fix the blue screen.

I think the best value GPU in those are probably Pascal MXMs. There's a bit of vBios flash involved, but it does work rather well. Alternatively, there's also some AMD MXMs out there that apparently worked, but it's rather uncommon unless it's the 7970m/8970m/m290x. It does give the benefit of consuming less power while havinf much more GPU power to one's disposition. The other unused MXM slot can even be repurpose for an NVME slot after purchasing the appropriate adapter. It's a fun little unit to dig into! Nice to see you give a hand into this :).

Happy to see the MXM GPU and CPU upgrade suggestions put into play!

Forgetting the SLI bridge cable made me laugh much more that it should of haha. Love these videos

Had an old Dell XPS laptop which was very similar to this and I was upgrading it and using it until only a few months ago. Sucked the power through it though....was sorry to see it go. Thanks for the video, Dawid 🙂

Thank you so much Dawid for doing a follow up video on this laptop🥰

Oh the pain of forgetting the SLI bridge, I felt that!

i always find it fun to upgrade something to the factory limits!

Sadly, those "modern" games you tested aren't optimized to use SLI. You have to use old games that had SLI in mind when developed. The 2nd GPU is essentially useless.

Your alienware videos have all been entertaining, I'd like to see more videos on old alienwares. Great video

Should've got one of the Iris Pro-equipped CPUs with the 128MB eDRAM; iirc it works the same as on the 5775c, the extra cache helps out in games a lot just like it does on the modern X3D Ryzens even if it's dog slow by comparison. Also, Adlink makes an RTX A4500 MXM card that is essentially just a 16GB 3070 on a power diet that might be worth a look. If you still wanted to make use of the multi-gpu part then your best bet is probably 1080's though SLI in [current year] is going to be a joke no matter what, but as another commenter said this all depends if the support after the 980M is just "unofficial" or if it literally doesn't work at all.

The Dell Precision M4800 and M6800 are also infamous for being the last laptops to have all these upgradability, and they are also laptop DIY modders dream laptops, and now you can get them much cheaper than ever

Would love to see how far you can get in terms of GPU upgrade. A 2080 might be too much but I can see sth like a 1070 or 1080 works in this Alienware

I used to have that same laptop. It had a 3rd gen i7 and dual gtx765m in SLI. I only just finally sold it last year. It was a great machine that got many years of heavy use. Best laptop I've ever owned, I kinda miss it.

I have been waiting for this video! Good stuff!

Meanwhile Me gaming with a laptop that is 11 years old and it has i3 2310m and 6gb ram with 500gb hdd and intel hd 3000💀

Alienware and Razor are two brand names I stay far away from. Iv recently added Asus to this list for how they handled the 7800X3D situation

Dawid Does Tech Stuff is like “Top Gear” for computers. The format, the jokes, the music and the close all remind me of my favorite automotive show. Love your stuff keep up the good work.

CPU/GPU upgradeable laptops is something I have craved for decades. Yes, decades. When Nvidia went with the MXM design and some laptop brands made some units with socketed CPUs, I got excited. Then the expense, per generation, was insane. It was better over all to buy a new laptop. But seriously, re-pad that too. Most of all, keep your sense of humor. It keeps me coming back. You have put fun back into tech channels.

Lol, power limit throttling the entire time, neither of the GPUs were not even getting close to their max power rating, so simply adding a beefier GPU in there isn't the end all and be all, you also need to consider your power brick

I don't know why the manufacturers gave up at amazing upgradeable gaming laptops... The possibility to upgrade laptops CPUs and GPUs, not only RAM and HDD/SSD was extraordinary.

You should have defiantly replaced those old thermal pads, for the thermal paste replacement I'd recommend PTM7950 (industrial PCM) which whilst pricey for the cost of the surface coverage but the reality is that's got a great thermal conductivity, is rated for a long time and actually gets better with age (also lasts a lot better than traditional thermal pads/liquids). That's why companies like Lenovo are switching over to it in their high end devices...

The 880m's were known to run really hot. My 2nd Alienware 18 had the dual 880m's and I was very lucky to have 2 good cards that didn't throttle like crazy like a lot of other people did. My 3rd one with the 4940 and dual 980m's was a beast and I wish I still had it. It was my favorite computer of any form factor ever and modding it and tricking games that didn't support sli into using sli was fantastic. The AW18 was the last true Alienware laptop. After this they stopped pushing boundaries and became more run of the mill like the rest of the market.

This laptop is insane. Shame they don’t make ones like this anymore

I have a top end 2014 alienware 18. Talk about two upgradable gpus in one laptop. Edit: Specs are 2x gtx 880m sli i7 4940mx 32gb ram 1tb hd 500gb ssd

I have one of these, runs perfectly to this day. Probably even better than my modern laptop (AW M17). This was the last fully upgradeable laptop out there AFAIK, and its why I haven't gotten rid of it. I just remember my friend with a desktop GTX 980, was surprised when my laptop would perform better than his desktop xD. I pretty much maxed it out except for the GPUs. but you can easily get a single 1080 running in it. Nowadays everything is fully soldered on the mobo even wifi cards(which are notorious to going bad), and you dont get to do stuff like this.

Did this exact thing to my Alienware 17 dropped and 880m I wonder if the bios would support 10 or 20 series granted you would have to get a working heat sync and appropriate power draw.

maybe the laptop not getting enough juice thats whay it crashes ? thats the one drawback though , upgradability at a cost ..though i have a similar laptop (more like a dtr) that uses a desktop proc ,which is not too bad , but the gpu 😅

Try using external gpu with this would be a nice experiment if possible

Great video as always! Many thanks.

oh yeah! Nice that you did that upgrades :)

You should 100% try the 2080, i feel like that would be really cool to see. -edit 1 2080, not sli, just to see the difference :)

It's cool to see the whole process but probably it's better value to buy a more modern one 😅

I've actually got lots of experience with mxm cards, I have a great many of them that I've pulled put of various HP, dell, and clever notebooks. I've got a quadro p4000 running in a dell precision m6700 that also got a 120hz screen swap and 16gb of ram. The mod to the driver to make it works is surprisingly easy and it runs even today's games great.

wow new david vids, thank man your vid really make my day

This is proper laptop upgrading. I hope that framework with their 16 inch model can bring something approaching this kind of upgradeability back to the market

something about those cyberpunk scores at the end doesnt seem right 🤔

Dawid I think you have upped you game for past couple of months you content keeps getting interesting which I love

I did this to my Qosmio X870 laptop. Upgraded from a 670M to a 970M. Still runs decent today.

This actually got me wondering if my 2014 Alienware laptop was upgradable, until I heard the eye-watering cost to upgrade yours. 🤑

Eyy good job.

I got one of those laptops for free a few years ago, someone listed it as not working and free to collect. I recognised the fault and went with a friend to pick it up, on the drive home I explained to him how to fix it and by the time I was home I had a fully working alienware M17 R3 :)

not surprised its crashs since i saw that sli connector on the card u showed has some crispy looking pins

Skididi bom bom bom

First

What about power supply adaptors, did you find any higher wattage one? May make a difference lol

6:00 u defenitely should have done a copper shim mod. and a copper heatpipe mod that are glued to the cooler with thermal glue. On the heatpipe u can install the small copper shims / heatinks. helps a ton!! also good thermal paste like cryonaut would help.

It's crazy it still won't run cyberpunk with the two 880s in sli

That "ops" at 6:30 got me every time 😂

10:50 I think those avg and 1% benchmarks aren’t the cyberpunk ones 😅 fun video to watch though, I love seeing u tear down and potentially seeing an explosion or something gone wrong

I had my Clevo P370EM3 GTX680M SLI upgraded to GTX980M SLI and could have even went further by modding the frame to fit larger MXM card. Downside was that I needed modded BIOS and vBIOS that made graphics drivers needed to be modded as well.

Nice upgrade

The finger in the opening lives rent free in my mind constantly. Is it ever going to touch that mirrored surface???

Thanks for all the great videos! What overlay software do you use? Thanks in advance!

Dude I am just about to upgrade mine, same model and make, could not have been a better video on youtube!

Great video, thanks!

I'd love to see how far you can push this labtop with jankey parts!

I have a Toshiba from 2011 I decided to finally upgrade. It had a Pentium B950, 4gb of ram and a 500gb HDD. I bought a new keyboard for $15, new battery for $15, 16gb of ram for $30, a 240gb SSD for $30 multiple years ago, and the cheapest quad core I could find. The i7-2630QM for $35. Not half bad imo

my first gen 17 r1 still runs and i had always considered upgrading it like this

I was so excited when I saw the opening to this video, wow! I have this very machine at home that I use for bookkeeping lol I could possibly do this as well! Then I found out that you paid more for the upgrades than I did for my entire machine years ago lol 😝 darn haha

I have replaced the 4k screen on this laptop, it is perfect, the screen model is NV184QUM-N21. It requires cracking the bios and expanding a new edp circuit.

ok I lost it over the whole "show dolphins" statemen, that was a beautiful analogy my friend!

A bios/firmware upgrade could do a lot to increase performance. If the power supply can handle more power to the video cards. Because spec-wise there is still some performance left on the table.

I have a HP DV2000 (a DV26660SE specifically) from 2008 I found in a pawn shop last year for only $5 due to display not working. (turned out to just be power cable to backlight being loose. Might have been dropped on it's side at one point. :P ) and I managed to upgrade it's CPU. Not easy as it required a full tear down pretty much to get at the CPU heatsink/socket. Upgraded it from a T5250 1.5Ghz Core2 Duo to a T5850 2.1Ghz Core 2 Duo. It has an ExpressCard slot and I've heard that's basically a PCI-E 1x slot and I found adapters for such online so I will definitely attempt to attach my GTX 650 to it at some point to see if I can supercharge gaming to the max on that old mesozoic period laptop. The CPUs supports 64-bit despite being capped to 4GB of DDR2 ram so at least modern OS/games could theoretically run on it. :D

Hey Dawid just wanted to let you know I think you re-used the BF5 numbers for the cyberpunk benchmark. Good video as always though!

The Blue Screen said "Inaccessible Boot Device" which makes me wonder if it was missing a driver. I had a RAID setup on my computer but when I did a firmware update it wouldn't boot into that drive. I believe that it was because when the firmware was updated it messed up something and I needed to get a new driver.

Yay! Been waiting for this

Have you looked into POSSIBLY being able to running a more 'modern' GPU in the system? Like on forums or other places where people that have already tried this were bale to give feedback as to whether or not they were able to get it to work.... I really don't expect it to, unless it's something that doesn't require additional power cables..... like how the RX6400 only ran on PCI-e power.... but I'm not sure if any nvidia cards were like that..... I'm not too familiar with their full lineup before the 30 series, but I have seen references to a 1030 before...I think.. maybe that could work if they made it in that MX form-factor.... I would LOVE to see it, if you found that others were able to get it working, even with some weird hacks LOL :) GREAT VIDEO btw... I didn't even realize the GPU's were replaceable when you made the first vid on the lappie... I thought it was just the CPU :)

Awsome video, suscribed😀🇧🇻

we need other videos like this ! It ultra interesting !

These laptop videos, man. I feel like Dawid has invented a new genre of horror, the tech horror genre. The only thing scarier than taking apart a laptop, replacing components, putting it back together and realizing you forgot something is opening up a laptop and realizing that you can't replace anything, lol.

This brings back memories of jacking the i7 2630qm out of my grandmas toshiba satelite laptop and replacing it with the i3 2310m that came in my m17x r2. I was a very devious kid, but for real whos idea was it to put that i3 in those laptops

YOOOOOOO its a GTX 800 series in the wild, actually quite rare, only exists on the laptop platform. thank you for this one !!

Odd you didn't explain the cpu, and what you upgraded it too. Also is there a possibility of upgrading what is I assume a hdd with a speedy ssd, and is the ram upgradable. Also if there is another video where you did that, then never mind I was not obviously paying attention. But interesting video as always, I do enjoy the madness of your plans.

that used to be my laptop, got it brand as a gift from my grandmother but sadly it died because it got thrown around when I got in a car accident. I then got the newer 17 r3 with the 6700hq to replace it shortly.

Will connnecting an external 240Hz monitor increase FPS? Also, try to use with 1 x 765m & 1 x 850m as the Dell power AC adapter may not powerful enough.

I wonder if he's going to forget that SLI bridge...yup :D Keep up the great videos Dawid.

i swapped the sli 770m's from my m18x out with some 980m's from aliexpress and all i had to do was dremel the heatsinks a bit and the cards work fine.

great video, still love the idea that you can upgarde old electronics and have it not end in landfill. But the cpu bottleneck.... Case in point, Please do random sht with Frame works laptop.

2:16 I thought this was one of those one in a million reload animations until I realized the hand wasnt on screen lol

I did the same upgrade 4 months ago, but without the sli bridge😊

LOL i can't believe how difficult it was to tear that machine down. I had the predecessor to that model (M17x R4) and had just 2 screws to remove from the bottom panel and it exposed (almost) everything worth changing. When the stock AMD 7970 GPU died, i was able to source and install a GTX 980. That gave it another 3-4 years worth of life.

Man I didn't know mxm platform existed. I wish it was more well adapted. Imagine the amount of laptop salvageable. My cousin have a laptop with a 980 in it just collecting dust

My neighbor was going to give me this laptop but his wife threw it out before he could give it to me. I'm still heart broken. It's such a fantastic design. The fact you can just swap out GPUs on a laptop is amazing.

You should get a HDD caddy to replace the optical drive, well worth it if you rarely use disc media.

Wow 🤩 a Dawid Alienware upgrade video and a caught hacker …… made my day 🥰💪🤩👍

I KNEW HE WOULD FORGET THE SLI BRIDGE!! Btw 900-1000 series cards would almost certainly work!