M9700 Upgrades... - Page 2

Possible, but unlikely regarding cooking the charging system. The PSU doesn't force power/current into the system; the system BIOS controls how much power is allocated to certain parts of the system.

I just looked at the PSU for the M9750 and the M9700. The main difference I see is with the current: M9700's PSU is rated at 7.89A while the M9750's PSU is rated at 9.5A. Both PSUs are also rated at 19V (Hence the M9700 being rated at 150W (19V x 7.89A), and the M9750 PSU being rated at 180W (19V x 9.5A))

The same issue occurred with Dell Inspiron E1705 owners who upgraded their GPUs to a 7900 or 7950 GTX. The original PSU was a PA-10, which is rated at 90w (19.5V x 4.65A) and when owners used their machines with the GPU + the PA-10, their performance was marginalized (downclocked) because the system couldn't draw enough power. The PA-13 (19.5V x 6.7A), which came with the Inspiron XPS models and Precision M90 were used on these systems and were able to fully run the replaced GPUs along with having no issues with overheating, bad charges, etc. Matter of fact, when I had my M1710, I bought a PA-15 (19.5V x 7.7A; from the Inspiron 9100 that consumed more power, XPS Gen 1 and XPS M2010) for it and my system worked fine for a year, till I sold it.

Now in terms of fit and cooling adequacy, again, the cooling system on both chassis are similar (both accomodate MXM-III GPUs), and the structure of the GPUs are identical. When I took out the 7900GS from the M9700 to sell, it looked identical to the 7950 GTX in the M9750. But if the system is able to draw more available to the GPU, then it would as a result of a higher power GPU.

If anyone wants to do this exchange of a nvidia 7900 gpu to a 7950 gpu than I will give them a thumbs up for the attempt even though it will not and I do mean it will not give them a bump in graphical power since they will have to update their bios and risk botching their system. Especially since I do not think that they chipset that the m9700 comes with will accept a 7950gtx card. I haven't seen it in documentation since I've been posting here on these boards and I've read a bunch of posts for it. Also I've never gotten a positive response from anyone at Alienware whether or not the m9700 is upgradable to the 7950 or above gpu's and yes I have asked many times in different contexts.

Good luck. I just don't think that the MB or CPU and PSU will handle the upgrade GPU. Since that the m9700 was the first dual gpu mobile platform I don't think that alienware were ready for an upgrade in GPU since they went from 256mb cards from the onset of the platform to 512mb cards within a few weeks and even then they were hard pressed to release the first batch on time.

In the end I would ask one of their (Alienware) employees whether or not you are able to upgrade to a 7950 gtx gpu. They will give an honest answer.

alienware has their support in miami not in India like Dell...

and how do u come to that conclusion... because you think that dell owns them that there CS is in India also...They sound cuban instead of Indian...

the dude i talked too 3 months ago was differently american he spoke better english than me..

if you call at night then you might get transferred to India but during the day hours I always get people who speak really good english with no Indian accent by any means...Even though dell owns Alienware they are still separate companies and separate CS...