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Hey.

My old Acer that crapped out around May last year has a broken screen and a long-gone hard drive. I was planning to resurrect it and start using its glorious 17.3 inch display again, but as I was taking it apart I noticed something.



You probably don't know what this is, so let me show you a picture of a board with the space filled.



A space for a graphics card! All this time I've had one on the motherboard but had been resignedly utilizing the craptastic GMA HD gpu integrated within the chipset. Anyway, I was wondering how complex a procedure it'd be to install a swell 5650 or 5850 in there (I don't think there are any compatible nVidia chips, please tell me if there are). Initially I thought it'd just be as simple as just soldering the card to the board, turning it on, and presto, gaming PC, but looking at MXM cards (basically mini motherboards with just GPUs for swapping on higher-end laptops, not mine) and on the 'populated motherboard', there are a few extra components.

Firstly, the black boxes around the GPU itself, which are probably VRAM. They'd be simply enough to install, I figure, but then there are also extra conductors and other miscellaneous metal stuff on the populated board, where on mine they aren't there, but they have spaces for them. I'm assuming that given the structure of MXM cards that these are crucial to functioning but on boards like mine without MXM slots the necessary components are scattered across the board to keep heat down.

Short of taking an MXM card and somehow taking the parts off and soldering them to my mobo, I don't think there's a way to get them. The alternative is just picking up a new motherboard entirely, but I don't know what GPU is on this one and it seems like a waste to get a whole new board when I have an ostensibly compatible one sitting in front of me.

Does anyone know if those extra boxes and transistors are essential to functioning properly, and if so where I could find an OEM graphics chip compatible with what I have there?

RTFM

This is not the place you want to be getting hardware modding advice from, Tiel.

Yeah, probably not. I already made a post on tomshardware but I just wanted to cover my bases here.

Ooo, apparently the board I was looking at is packing a Mobility Radeon 5850. For 250 bucks? :suspicious:, but it could be a great bargain. I think I'll just get that and then transfer the parts from my old mobo to it. Now I'm just worried about two things, the PSU and cooling. In my laptop there's a copper element connected to the heatsink itself that covers the CPU. But since I'm just getting the board with the graphics card it'll be essentially without any sort of heat-removal. I don't know what to do about that. The chipset card on the laptop has a little copper covering on it, but an HM55 is going to generate a lot less heat than a 5xxx series graphics card.

And also not sure whether the power supply in my laptop can handle a discrete GPU...it's supposedly designed for just the i3 350m, after all.

Ah, excellent! I found a video of a guy doing what I plan to do on an Acer laptop. Not the exact same model but the core concepts remain the same.

Try hitting it with a hammer

/ban Prototype

Just hit him with a hammer. That usually works for me.

I'm going to have to buy a whole new heatsink, one that extends the covering to the GPU, apparently. It's gonna be hard to find, but outside of that I should be good to go; everything's compatible.

You suck at finishing projects. Also people are shunning you here because it is a laptop not a desktop. But still, why doesn't anyone care to help out the bird? Is it because he is a laptop supporting AMD *?

Why buy a heat sink, just stick the whole thing in the fridge.

I don't think people are shunning me as much as not replying because they honestly don't know. Proto's just being a moron. But, again, I was just double checking here. I'm fairly confident after 2 days of relentless googling that once I buy the motherboard and transfer my i3, RAM, and heatsink over everything will be good to go.

I thought only your desktop had an i3?

I'm not shunning Tiel, I have no idea what he is talking about, I'm sure he would do the same if I started talking about my motorbike repairs.

Although you seem to think it will all work perfectly, if I know anything about building stuff, it's that if you think it will work, you're missing something.

That's all the helpful advice I can give here