Guide on how to replace the graphics card in the Acer Aspire 7520G

By Dirk Oliviers

Welkom to this guide on how to change the standard, not so great/fast, Geforce 8400m G video card in your Acer 7520G machine. 

For those of you who’ve purchased one of those machines you’ll be glad to hear that it’s actually possible to change the standard build in card (the Geforce 8400m G) due to the fact that it’s a seperate card (as opposed to the embedded graphical chipsets found in most laptops). The card is placed in a so called ‘mxm type 2’ slot and that one is compatible with an array of faster GPU cards, like the ATI Radeon Mobility 3650 that we’re going to build in now.

Ok ready? Then let’s get started!


Here you see the external view of the 7520G’s bottomside.
The red X marks the location of the cover part we’ll be removing to get to the video card.

On the following 2 pictures you see, indicated by the red circles, where the 4 screws that keep the gpu cover in place, are located. The fourth is a bit higher on the left side (indicated by the red arrow). Take them out.

As you can see I also placed a piece of soft cloth on the side of the laptop so I wouldn’t damage it when I placed a screw driver under the forseen lid opener space and GENTLY plied upwards until the cover loosened. There are special nylon tools available for this sort of work, but since you only need to do this plying once you can safely do it in this manner.

Once you have made the first clip jump out you can open te rest of the cover by hand. All you need to do is to pull gently until the cover clips snap open one by one. Don’t use brute force, the clips are strong enough to withstand a gentle and continued pull and will snap open.

After you’ve pulled the lid off you will see the inner works of the area around the video card, the cooler unit and the CPU (processor marked by a blue X).
Marked by the red X is the location of the video card (it’s still hidden beneath the metal heatsink at this point so you cannot see it yet).
Around the ventilator (the black plastic thing, on the upper side) you can see a total of 4 red circles. These indicate the location of the 3 screws to from the ventilator and the location of the tiny powerplug for the ventilator unit.

All of these will have to be loosened in order to be able to remove the GPU’s metal heatsink and the video card thereafter.

In the following pictures you can see the one of the cooler screws getting loosened (you evedentily must loosen the other two as well), the ventilator powerplug unplugged and the CPU’s heatsink getting loosened.

Remark: you best loosen the screws from the CPU heatsink in a diagonal way to keep de down push of the CPU’s heatsink evenly spread over the CPU’s core.

Once the screws of the ventilator are loosened and its powerplug pulled out, you can remove the cooler from its place.

After you’ve loosened all the screws of the cooler unit and the CPU’s heatsink, you can start by pulling it out.
You’ll notice on the picture that the CPU’s heatsink is connect by a copper pipe (heatpipe) to both the CPU’s heatsink and a dustport. This is ONE part and you must pull it out in ONE part. It’s not that hard to do, just start by lifting up the heatsink part (it will suck a bit down due to the cooling paste that’s on the CPU’surface). Once this comes loose the rest of the heatpipe/dustport will slide out as well.

Remark: it might be a good idea to remove any dust that hangs on the ventilator/dustports at this time.

Okay, the next part we’ll be loosening is the video card’s heatsink. As you can see it’s also thigtened by 4 screws that you need to loosen. Best way tot do this is by loosening them diagonally to make shure the heatsink’s push down force is evenly spread over the GPU’s core).

 

When the heatsink is loosened you can pull it out in one part just like you did with the heatsink/heatpipe  from the CPU.  It’s the same mechanism with the copper heatpipe connected to the heatsink and the dustport. Just slide it out gently.

Here you see the video card (red), the CPU (blue) and the chipset (green) uncovered.

It might be a good idea to take a look at the state of the cooling paste on the CPU’s surface at this time. In my case there was too much of it on the CPU die so I cleaned it with a soft piece of tissue and then re-applied a premium thermal compound kit (with silver in it) and smeared it out very thinly. On the following pics you can see what it looks like.
In my case there was no need to clean the chipset die since it was covered by a small heatpad.

 If in your case there is thermal paste applied and you think it’s a bit of a dried out smurry, then you can best re-apply that too in the same manner as depicted here for the CPU.

Okay, the next thing to do is to remove the old video card. This is held in place by 2 screws, indicated here by the red circles. You’ll notice that the video card will lift up by itself when the screws are loosened. Keep them aside as you’ll need them later on the keep the new video card in place.

Next lift it further up as shown in the pictures here and then gently pull it out.

 

Now it’s time to put the new video card in place. 


Take the card and place it at the same angle as shown on the picture.

Make shure that the pin alignement is as shown on the picture (marked by the red arrows) when you place the card in the MXM connector.

Remark: in essence it’s impossible to enter this card incorrectly due to the plastic orientation pin in the MXM slot and orientation hole in the video card.

Then you gently push the card forward until it slides completely in the MXM slot. After that you push it down (it stays it bit levered by itself) and you turn the two screws back in (they’re the same two screws that kept the old card in place).

MXM-Upgrade delivers one high-quality heatpad for the GPU die (as shown in the picture) and 4 regular ones for the memory.

The easiest way to apply them is to carefully take them of the strip and lay them on you finger tip as shown on the pictures and then place them neatly on all surfaces that need covering.

 

Okay, now it’s time to do some ‘reverse’ work ;-)
The first thing to do now is to re-enter the heatsink/heatpipe for the video card. You basically do this in the same way as when you removed it. Slide it in sort of sideways and align the openings in the heatsink with the ones on the videocard (as indicated by the red markings) . After that enter the screws and thighten them in a diagonal way (to make shure the heatsink’s push down force is evenly spread over the GPU’s core).

Remark: we are lucky with this notebook’s GPU heatsink.  It doesn’t need to be adjusted in thickness and can be used ‘as is’ on the new video card (there is more than enough room between the heatsink and the lid cover when all is closed up again).

Same story for re-entering the heatsink/heatpipe from the CPU. Enter it sideways en align the holes in the heatsink above the holes of the CPU socket. Then fasten the screws diagonally.

After this you re-enter the ventilator. Easy as cake, just align the openings on the ventilator (red circles) with the openings on the motherboard (green circles) thighten the screws  and make sure to put the powerplug back in (blue circle).

After the re-assembly you should have something looking like this ;-)

All that’s left now is to put the cover back on.
Place the lid as shown in the picture and then push it down gently. You’ll  have to push a bit with controlled force to make the clips of the cover plate snap shut again. Now turn the four screws back in and you’re ready!
 

Driver installation of the ATI 3650 in windows (XP and Vista).

At this page: http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool.php  you’ll find very detailed instructions on how to do this, much better than I could ever explain, so just have look there, follow the detailed step by step instructions and you’ll be on your way in no time.
Do make shure that you first uninstall all the drivers from you old video card before beginning to install the new ones. Also get the drivers you are going to modify (don’t worry, it’s all explained on the page of driverheaven) from ATI themselves:  http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp  and choose either the full software catalyst suite (recommended) or the bare bone driver.  Latest driver version at the time of writing was 8.12.
Remark for Windows XP only: it’s possible that after the driver installation of your new ATI 3650, you’ll find a new device in the Windows hardware list called something like ‘audio device on bus for High Definition Audio’ and that you are unable to install anything for it. The driver for this can be found at the following location: http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/ , then click on the ‘High definition audio codecs’ link, accept the agreements and then in the drivers list choose the one called ATI HDMI AUDIO DEVICE (it’s written in red too). Download and then install it.
In Windows Vista this device is automatically installed during driver installation by Vista itself.

I’ve also included some synthetic benchmark and game results I got with my new card.
I don’t play that many games, don’t have Crysis to test out…, just World of Warcraft and sometimes a bit of DOOM 3 and Command & Conquer 3. All these games run a comfortable speeds with graphical settings ranging from medium to high and my monitor set to it’s native 1440*900 resolution.
My card came with a stock speed of 500Mhz for the core and 700Mhz for the memory.
I also overclocked it to 700Mhz core/800Mzh mem to see how it would perform. The speed increase was quite noticeable to me.

The temperature was still within reasonable boundaries, knowing that I’m using standard cooling.

The old Geforce 8400 also gave a warmer airflow (coming out of the back ventilator openings) when I played 3D games on it, than this card in overclock, so I think that it’s heat generaton/output is well within boundaries. 
So I guess that this card can be overclocked quite nicely to get some more performance out of it.
Remark: do note however that your particular laptop might give different result and if you don’t want to take any risks then I strongly suggest that you refrain from overclocking!

Note from the MXM-upgrade team: We couldn't agree more. In fact, overclocking is not covered by our warranty...

3Dmark 2005 resuIts:  7494 (standard) and 8775 (overclocked)

3Dmark 2006 results:  3297 (standard) and 4613 (overclocked)

World of Warcraft:

Monitor resolution is set tot 1440*900 (its native resolution)
With the card at stock speeds, Taxi test (/timetest in wow chat window)gave an average of 31 fps  with graphics set to Highest.
With graphs set to medium, and stock speeds, the results are higher averaging out on 44 fps.
With the card overclocked to 700/800 and graphics set to high the framerate averaged out on 51 fps (show on picture).
Doom 3:
No screen shots here.
A couple of years ago a still major breaker for the midrange/ top video cards at that time, so I guess it can still serve to give a good impression of a video cards 3D performance??
Settings: 1440*900 in widescreen mode (via special config file settings), all settings for first testing  on high and after that ultra high. The fps meter in the top right corner of the screen was showing 60 fps continueously.  Screen update was fluently during both quiet and action packed scenes.
Command & Conquer 3
This game has a build in fps limit cap of around 30 fps, so they don’t mean much here. I set the resolution to 1440*900 and the graphics for the first test on hig (AA set to 2), for the second on ultra (with AA set to 2). Frame updates was fluent during gameplay. When lot’s of units where put on screen there was some minor slowdown. That resolved completely (in both high and ultra mode) when AA was turned off.
So, that’s it for testing out the graphics. It’s not much, I know, but as said before I’m not a real benchmarker nor do I play enough games to have a very thorough insight in this kind of testing. But for me, as an average gamer, the ATI offers a very nice upgrade from the standar build in card (8400m G) and my games run smooth enough for me.
As a final note on this… my thanks go to the great team of MXM upgrade (http://www.mxm-upgrade.com) and their great assistance in getting my video card to work again.
I’ve had a serious problem with a bios flash in my card (purily my fault due to a mistake I made while trying to edit the bios) an ended up with a dead one that would give me nothing but a black screen and a useless laptop.  I send the card to the wonderful people at MXM Upgrade and they managed to restore the card  Thanks guys!
So, we’ve reached the end of this guide. I hope it will be of some use to you who’s trying to replace his/her card and remember…
Have fun!

Dirk

Note from the MXM-upgrade team:

We would like to thank Dirk for a marvelous upgrade guide. If any of you are thinking about writing one for the site, we couldn't think of a better example.

We have the same card Dirk describes in stock and sell it as a "Buy Now" Paypal item. You can find the links below. We actually also accept bank transfers, please contact us for details.

The below link may only be used for the Acer 7520G with 8400GS notebook. If it is used for any other platform, we reserve the right to refuse returns or warranty.

Your purchase includes the actual card, thermal material, shipping (registered regular postal service for EU, DHL for US, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland, Turkey and Switzerland). If you need a specific quote for your country, please contact us.

Acer 7520G HD3650 - 150€
 Tube of AS5 - 8€
 
Acer 7520G HD4570 - 110€