Hello!
As I promised, a short walkthrough the whole process… It is short, since I have found almost no obstacles on the way… Sorry for the quality of pictures, but I had only my cell phone at hand and I just couldn’t wait to try the new toy…
This my old laptop, branded Prestigio Nobile. In fact, it is just a “corps” of old Uniwil 259EA1, quite good at the time I bought it.
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See the marking on the bottom:
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To get inside you just need to unscrew a few really small screws, like 8 – 7 on all sides and one by the ventilator . Right side of the panel is also “clipped” to the case, co use a screwdriver or something to bend it a little. Inside you see copper cooler topping both CPU and GPU together.
Just need to unscrew 4 screws tightening the GPU board (on the left) and 3 on right bottom + the ones holding the sink on the CP
Just move the part away without disconnecting power (no need to do so) and you will get access to GPU board. It slides off easily. Now, the new 8600M card is little wider, just a few mm, but it will fit perfectly when you remove this little “pod” attached to it. It is glued, so just push gently on the legs and it will come off. It will not fit unless you remove it.
As I said, fits perfectly. Put some thermal tape over the GPU (center, of course) and memory chips (four black “big thingie” on sides) and screw the sink back in. Nothing else to do. No need for any adjustments, cutting the heat sink or whatever…
Fire it up, first checking the NVram will take a second or two, but it goes without a problem.
The tricky thing is drivers… I have installed like 10 versions, before I found the right ones. You have to look in the drivers “.inf” file to see if the chipset is supported (look for PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0425). There are some drivers at laptopvideo2go.com with modded .inf, but they did not work for me. So I had to look for original drivers with support 8600M card included in .inf… Automatic driver update via Nvidia website doesn’t work too. This was all done in Windows XP SP3, so I assume Vista will have similar problems… I am using 6.14.11.7808 driver now, dated 9-16-2008.
There is a little problem with overheating – the laptop is quite warm, but I also shorted a few pins on my CPU making it a 2.27@1.7 to increase the speed… Damn guys from Intel thought that can sell more chips when they downgrade them to 75Mhz buss speed and sell them for less… Good for me. It’s working stable past two years already…
Performance is much better than previous ATI X700 I had. All new games work (like F3, Crysis, Far Cry 2), quite good I would say. I have additional 24inch HD LCD attached to my laptop and both displays work simultaneously without a problem extending my desktop (1920x1200 LCD + 1680x1050 laptop). That’s about all. Hope it would help!
Jacek
