What to do? e1705 video card - Page 2

300, 500 in awesome condition and with warranty

I tried the E1505 ATI in but I think I damaged the board when trying to drill it a little so it would slide in (one of the card holder was obstructing by about 2mm, usually PCB's signal aren't routed that close to the edges (other than VCC and GND which covers the whole thing so chipping out a few mm wouldn't hurt), so basically I think I shorted the board...

So after giving up, I checked on ebay once again to find out that some hong kong guys are selling 6800s that are modded for the E1705, for less than 200$, which was the price I was willing to pay to get this laptop back in the first place... so I ordered one... (heck, even has a warranty... some are selling up to 180 days!)

Should get it this week... can't wait to plug it in.

Dell are idiots, the heat sink on the 7900GS is aluminum only!! while the 6800 has copper on the GPU portion... go figure why they all blew up.... one or 2 heat sink wouldn't have done much difference if the main interconnect was aluminum... This is really retarded from Dell, save a penny and get everybody angry.

I loved dell for so long, but they really started screwing up badly since 3-4 years...now any of their laptop branch is not competing with anything... their Alienware is shit for the price compared to the ASUS'S core i7 series, their mid-range studio are overpriced for no features other than raid, low performing ATI cards, and days of deals that are a waste of time.

Even ACER got their act together and are selling killer desktrop replacement laptops.

DeLL sucks? Call the press!

Ugh, sorry that some of the people here were rude to you. This is a great place to learn stuff and asking questions is the way to get juices flowing. From the pics I've seen, it looks like the card should fit, if not the heatsink, but that can be modified, possibly with the proper heatsink.
The biggest thing for stupid dells is bios support. It "should" work. But zzpulp is the true guy who knows this stuff, I'm still learning lots. I've switched out some videocards and harddrives mainly, my biggest thing was resoldering pins on a mobo and getting an mxm card to work in that laptop. I've never done what you're suggesting but I'd go about it exactly the same. Good luck and hope it works so other people can know in the future!

I don't really mind people like powerpack; been around since the BBSes on C=64 so got my share of that type with time .

Well I can tell you that the 1505 ATI doesn't fit directly, you need to cut off the screw holder between the two top holder (or use a dremel to somehow modify it so that the card goes through it about 2 to 3mm) and also I cutted off the bottom left screw holder for the video card because the mount at a different position. I still got 3 connectors for screwing the video card in place so it should have worked. Like I said however, I think I might have killed the card. Even if I wouldn't have the right bios, the LCD should light up it's fluorescent, which it does not so I drilled too far into the board.

Another thing to note if someone would want to take this project further (I might once I have cash back with another friend's laptop) the cable won't fit, you will need to route the LCD data+power cable differently (little too short).

If someone else wants to try out and has any questions, feel free to ping me. I'll update once I get my 6800 in it and fire it up...god I miss my laptop... and the only replacement worthy is that asus core i7, but I still want to wait for a company that makes a GT260 with DDR5 at a decent price point.