Laptop upgrade |
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It works!39 viewsI was surprised that it worked afterwards, I heard that an XPS BIOS was required to get the card running, but apparently not. Now off to some benchmarks and gaming! The 7800 used to idle at 58-63 C and load at 83-88 C, the 7950 gets down to 45 or so with both fans forced on high.
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Getting it back together35 viewsGot the 7950's heatpipe squared away and the palmrest mounted. Now it's just the LCD, video/WiFi cables, keyboard, and the power button panel.
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45 views...which look like this. First my dad used a table mounted grinder to remove the tab to the right of the vent. I later found out that the heatpipe was hitting the left side tab and was preventing me from putting everything back together, so I had to tear it down again and break off the left tab with some pliers. It looks ugly and most likely voided my warranty, but it works.
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Cooling installed55 viewsThe 7950 uses two heatpipes instead of one with the Go 7800. The Inspiron chassis blocks the left heatpipe, so I had to do some modifications to get it to fit...
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Laptop motherboard54 viewsThe laptop's motherboard. The CPU is the green thing off to the left, the chipset (945PM) is to the right of that, the thin brown thing to the right of that is the proprietary PCI Express x16 slot Dell uses for their video cards, and to the right of that is the southbridge.
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New card taken apart61 viewsThe 7950 taken apart. It has 512 MB of video RAM, and the core's 90nm, vs 110 for my old Go 7800. Hopefully that means it'll run cooler and run longer on battery.
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The CPU53 viewsCore Duo's are fricking tiny and weigh nothing. Pretty amazing that in that tiny chip that there's two cores and 2 MB of L2 cache packed in there.
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Disassembled55 viewsThe beginning of the project. It's not as hard as it looks, it took me less than 10 minutes to get it to that state.
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New card45 viewsThere's the new video card (GeForce Go 7950 GTX), with a CD for scale. It's about 14.5" wide, or about 37 cm.
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