A8 nVidia cards upgradeable to 8400, 8600

Ok ive just taken a good look at the somewhat new A8SC series laptop with the 8400 card. The physical dimensons, the mxm spec and the location of the gpu over the heatsink ALL match up.

So normally i would definetly assume this would work but recently i was trying to download the bios from my nVidia7700 via Nvflash in dos. I tried all different parameters but everytime the eeprom was extracted with an error, and came out at 0bytes. I couldnt understand why i couldnt downlload the bios. Then i stumbled upon a mac forum that had already got the A8JS completely functional on OSX8, by downloading,extracting, and hex editing the bios. These guys were very smart. They seperated the nvidia bios from the system and even overclocked it. I know very little about osx or macs, i feel like im talking to someone from a different country.

So their is just a very limited bios on the nvidia card that i couldnt read with any bios extractors i have. So for someone wanting to upgrade their A8's 3d card the MXM spec is there, the heatsink is lined up its just the bios needs to be changed. Now their are multiple ways of doing it, Dell users were able to get the newer XPS 3's 7800GO GTX working on their older XPS 2's 6800UltraGO equipped laptops by hacking a bios upgrade meant for the XPS3. They made it so the upgrade could be applied to the XPS2 which would then allow the 7800GTX to work with XPS2. The laptops were physically similar so the bios hack worked no problem.


I'm thinking the same thing could be done to one of the newer A8/F8/G1 laptop's with an 8600GT, which will most likely line up physically. IS anyone versed in hacking/reading/extracting bios's? A bios udpate rom file which would most likely contain the entire pc/3d card bios hopefully be modded to be applyable to another model A8 (with similar specs) that has the 3d card bios. If that isnt possible because of the difference in motherboards and chipsets then possibly extract the 8600 bios from the newer A8 and swap it with the bios in the older A8's rom update.

well, i guess we need to wait for the 8600 cards to come out for an F8 or A8 or G2 or if i could get my hands on an 8600 for the C90.

Ive seen the new 8800 GTS laptop cards, they look like a slightly extended version of our 7700 MXM cards. The connection pins all look like they would line up, possibly fit but then theirs an extra blank slot... so physically it doesnt look like it would fit.

im having a problem overclocking my 7700. ive used coolbits 2.0, tried all types of things but i cant get the overclock to hold. Ive tried RivaTuner 2.06 and Ati-Tool but the overclock never sticks it always reverts back to the stock state.

i just won on ebay an ASUS G1S-X1 with a broken lcd. The seller a huge clearing house for busted pc stuff, listed as local pickup only on mistake so the auction only hit $400. So if i buy the lcd which i can get for around $225 shipped the WSXGA+ lcd i could have myself a nice newer laptop.


However my original reason for purchasing was to try and retrofit the 8600GT to my A8JS. I'm somewhat confident for a few reasons, first the G1S-X1 is exactly the same as the G1S-AK### laptop that has a nVidia 7700 in it, that 7700 is the same card as used in our A8JS. So those two G1Ss are almost identical except for their GPU's and a few other system specs but they look like theyre physically the same. I'm almost positive the reverse-mxm spec lines up and the gpu heatsink is lined up right over the GPU, same with the screw mounts so physically it works.

Now heres where it gets tricky, the 3dcard bios is not saved on the card its saved in the system (im not sure if the 8600 is the same but i bet it is) and no one here seems able to seperate the two. However the Mac community is, they have successfully edited the system bios and extracted the 7700's bios from the system modified the 3dcard settings and re-applied the 3dcard bios to the system bios. One of them is helping me now to set an overclock to my 7700. Hes just as interested in an upgrade solution as i am, our A8JS have plenty strong upgradeable processors and the GPU is very strong as well but if we pop an 8600 in it that really increases its longevity in terms of gaming power.

Anyways im going to try it, ive got nothing to lose i'll keep everyone posted.