Taking of the back cover is a breeze and exposes the insides. Some odd choices here. Selecting a desktop processor indicates you are either looking at folks who need a lot of processing power or gamers. The addtition of a 8600GT points to gamers. Then why a midrange card? With no expansion possibilities? And with the thermal design for the MXM card so clearly of secundary importance over the CPU?

The odd choices don't stop there. The not-too-big radiator-heatpipe-heatsink assembly has a copper landing pad where the GPU core goes, which is good. Then why did they design an intermediate aluminium plate in between? All it does is hinder the thermal transfer.

This is actually a testament to the good intentions of the design team: they designed it so that the heatsink assembly is a universal part so that only the internmadiate plate needs to be changed with a card upgraded.

Now, on to the first problem: the recovered bracket does not fit the mounting holes of the HD4670. The odd thing is that the 8600GT from Asus is an exact copy of the referene design... except for the mounting holes. Seems to me they made things harder for no good reason but oh well...

So, what do you do when the holes are too small? You make them bigger. To the left you can find a picture of a victim of The Good Cause, one who Took One For The Team, A Hero of the MXM Realm, a..

You get it. The card no longer booted.

So do *not* make the holes bigger. It won't work.

So, what then?

Firstly, we send Mathias home. We were sure we could solve it but a bit more time was required. We put a little thought into it and in the end the solution was simple. If we can't use the bracket, we might as well use our soldered spacers for the job. And actually, why do we need the intermediate plate again? The captive screws on it are too big for our spacers soooo.. we tossed it, creating a bit more thermal headroom as well.

Your purchase will include a heatpad for the GPU core (one of our 17W/mK pads) and 4 for the memory chips as the original pads are only paper thin.

When we put the entire thing together, we were lucky that all components on the board did not interfere with the heatsink even though one component passed it with nothing to spare. As the drilling of the holes is a bit rough in terms of positioning you may be as lucky.. or not. In which case some minor 'surgery'on the heatsink might be needed.

In the picture the heatpads....

Thanks to Bagzzlash, Derschlambi, W1zzard, vanquish, anddill, jimmyz, Divegge, VuurVOS!

You can find pointers for driver installation in the FAQ.

Power states on this card are a bit mixed up which is why it is limited to 400MHz core frequency when we ship it. When your notebook is altered as described above, it will work fine at this setting. It will actually even be cooler if you set the CPU to overclocked mode. If you are happy with that, you can stop the tutorial here....

If not: onwards brave soldiers! Grab a copy of Radean Bios Editor and ATIWinflash. Follow the tutorial here.

.The stock fan won't be able to cool the card when it runs at the full 675MHz clocks. At first we hardwired the fan to 12V, which we took here..

We cut the red wire close to the fan, but not too close so that both sides can still be stripped and soldered the fan side to the 12V line.

This allows the card to run comfortably at 675MHz. Unofrtunately, that's pretty much the only comfortable thing about it. The downside of powerfull fans, especially those small in diameter is that they make a *lot* of noise. Hardwiring to 12V enables that noise all the time. We found this to be too much of a discomfort Enter a switch.

We bended the outer legs and cut the middle one.

We isolated the motherboard below where the switch will be to avoid shorts.

We drilled a hole for the switch (which will be included with your purchase, btw).

And wired one side of the switch to the original fan lead, the other end to the 12V and the middle to the fan.

Make sure to isolate all exposed connections with electrical tape and.. well, that's it.