(*) The x1700 is shipped through national postal services registered service. Price also applicable for Canada, Mexico, Switzerland, Turkey and Switzerland. For a specific quote for your country, please contact us.
Tools required:
You just have to remove a single backpanel. Before you do that,
remove the battery as a precaution. After that, you can lift the panel
with your nail. Notice that there's one screw that is longer. Make
absolutely sure you place it back in the correct hole, labeled K/B,
when closing your notebook again. Failing to do so will destroy your
brand new card
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When the panel is removed, you'll have to remove all screws
indicated with the yellow circles. Make sure not too touch parts of the
motherboard, as ESD cán kill your notebook. Make sure to
discharge yourself every now and then on a well grounded item (water
pipes,...) If you have a stone floor, another option is to work
barefoot and keep your feet on the floor.This will allow you to
carefully remove the heatsink assembly. Make sure to disconnect the fan
plug first. Once again, your nail is the primary tool for this job. I
took the time and opportunity to apply AS5 on the CPU, but that is
obviously optional. AS5 can also be ordered from MXM Upgrade.
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Amilo m 3438 with nVidia 6800
(heatpads not original) |
Amilo m 1437 with ATI x700 |
The heatpads that were on the memory chips will either stick to the
card or the heatsink. You should be able to remove them. As these are
not so critical, some tears or degradation is perfectly acceptable.
Two more screws keep the MXM on the motherboard. Remove them and
then take out the original card. Click the new card in place. Place the
recovered heatpads on the memory chips. You will have received two
fresh heatpads which should be used on the GPU die. The yellow one is
an intermediate solution which you should use until you are 100% sure
you have everything right. At that time, the pad should be replaced
with the gray one which will offer better thermal performance.
This is the perfect time to clean out your notebook. Dust buildup on
fan, radiator and grill will reduce thermal performance by quite a bit.
Best way to do this is to use a can of compressed air but there are
other, old fashion ways to blow out he grill...
All the cards we currently sell have correct mounting provisions. On
the CPU side, you may wish to apply a fresh layer of thermal paste. If
needed, we can sell a tube to you when you place your order.
So all that you have to do now is to close the notebook again. Keep
in mind that some screws are longer than others. If you mix them up,
you risk destroying your brand new card.
Most likely, upon booting your notebook, Windows will be asking for
a new set of drivers. You can find them here for ATI and here for nVidia cards.
The ATI installation is pretty straightforward, the nVidia drivers
require a tad more attention (see below). Both sites have done wonders
for mobile drivers and the amount of data served is mind-boggling for a
non-commercial activity. So, if you can, donate something to those
sites and help them to continue their invaluable service. Donate for
laptopvideo2go here and
for the Omega drivers right here.
The HD3650 is not supported through Omega drivers. An alternative way of getting installing suitable drivers can be found here.
For the nVidia drivers you will need to download both the actual
driver and a modified .inf file
After downloading the driver, extract it and copy the other file you
just downloaded in that folder. After this, just run the setup file and
you'll be good to go!
Scenario 2: The heatsink modification
While the mechanical outlines and many other parameters of MXM cards
have been fixed, the height of components on the board and their
positions tend to differ. This is most obvious when switching between
Types, but even when sticking to a certain size differences may occur.
Most often, this is related to the power circuit, more precisely the
switcher coil.
These coils may interfere with "plate" style heatsink in some
Amilo's.
If this is the case, the interfering material on the heatsink must
be removed.
Enter the Dremel. Actually, there are more ways to do this but this
is the most subtle and "cleanest" solution. Basically, this can be done
with a variety of power tools. You can even cut off a piece of the
heatsink altogether. It just doesn't look as good. Don't do this close
to your notebook. Aluminum particles and electronics don't play nice.
For the same reason, remove the heatpads from the heatsink (unless you
appreciate fireworks and the sweet smell of grilled silicium).
Once you're done, your heatsink could look like this... (more
pictures to be added) Try the card on again for size and repeat until
all spacers make contact with the heatsink. Once this job is done, you
can proceed with scenario 1 but here it is even more
important to use the yellow heatpad for first trials. If the heatsink
doesn't fit 100% yet, at least you will have another shot and you will
not have destroyed the good gray pad. When, after testing, you remove
the yellow pad for installation of the gray pad you should see that the
GPU core made a "print" on the yellow pad.
Scenario 3: The fan doesn't react!
Most Unwill notebooks have one single fan for both the GPU and CPU
cooling. Both have a heatpipe and both heatpipes are connected to the
radiator. The radiator is blown through by the fan. In a normal
situation, the fan will react to both CPU and GPU temperature.
Different temperature thresholds will result in different fan levels.
This is actually a constant tradeoff between noise and heat. ODM's are
know to make the wrong choose here, resulting in overheating notebooks
even when they have fan-power to spare..
Unfortunately, things may even get worse when tossing in a new card.
If the system bios is not capable of retrieving temperature information
from the new card it may simply not react to GPU temperature. This is
not really a problem for the low end cards (the fan will react to the
CPU and that's good enough). Midrange cards will normally be a bit
hotter during regular desktop activities but should be cooled
sufficiently while gaming (when the CPU is also pushed). High range
cards will overheat quickly without proper fan support.
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Unfortunately, we do not have the 'weight' to ask major
manufacturers to revise the system bios on a product they do not even
sell anymore. And so we are on our own on this one. Best we came up
with so far is a script for NHC (Notebook Hardware Control). So first
task: download NHC. After
installation, download our modified ACPI files.
Lookup the directory of NHC under the program files. There should be a
directory "ACPI" there. Extract the files there, overwrite whatever the
PC asks to overwrite. If you now restart you will note the the ACPI tab
is now available. Please note we currently do not have a ACPI file for
all notebooks.
You should enable only one setting of the fan. For high-power cards,
setting the fan to full speed is absolutely mandatory. For
non-intensive desktop tasks, setting the fan to a lower speed is ok.
For mid-range cards, NHC is an optional.
The script doesn't really solve the root problem but rather finds a
way around it. It writes a fake CPU temperature back to the system
which then assumes the CPU to be very hot. To cool it down again, it
will rev up the fan, automatically also cooling the GPU. Unfortunately,
this also means that you loose the ability to read the 'correct' CPU
temperature. You will only see the fake temperature (or an average
between the fake and real temperature).
