Hopefully I'll fully disassemble the laptop soon to check out the video card interface and see if it's MXM III or not. I wanted to put some artic silver 5 on the gpu but so far I haven't had the need to. The gpu temps are pretty good and overclocking the gpu is not needed for most games yet.

I have a feeling the the video card is a proprietary one since it is not very accessible. My old Gateway 8510gz had a MXM III card and it had an accessible cover on the bottom.

Well, I just placed my order! I got the Gateway P-171S FX, same as the P-6831FX except for a 2ghz Core 2 Duo and fingerprint reader.

Congratulations on the new computer.

And yea, hopefully the GPU is upgradeable.

I'm still skeptical about the slot load drive on the P-171 series. If you go to Gateway's site and zoom on a side picture, it still has a tray drive. Then again it doesn't show a finger print reader also so I'm betting it's just a picture of the P-6831FX. I guess we won't know until someone gets their shipment.

I had a Pioneer slot load drive once and it was great. I had to sell it because it would scratch up my blank taiyo yuden dvds for some reason. I think it didn't have a good load clearance; especially if you have CD/DVDs with labels on the top.

Oh by the way, the stock optical drive gave errors at 8x during the end of the disc. I had to burn them at 4x to reduce the errors.

Said the hell with it and canceled my order... went to best buy and picked up my own P-6831FX. Best Buy does price matching and it goes on sale this weekend for $1199.

I would like to say the screen is really bad however. Ton of light leakage. What screen did you replace it with? I think that will be my first upgrade. It's so bad the windows task bar looks all washed out. But for $1199.......

I put in a Samsung WUXGA LTN170WU-L03

What did you pay for it and where did you get it?

Yes , but, for $1199, with that kinda problem (the Screen Leakage) $1199 is WAY over priced, and a rip-off as far as I'm concerned , you shouldn't have to upgrade or replace ANYTHING for that price tag, in about 6 months to a yr. it will probably be sold for around the $800 to $700 price tag range, witch is probably all it's worth anyway

For the GPU alone it costs probably $500 already. So, I don't think it's going to go for that low anytime in the future.
And, this is not a rip-off. It's a great bargain. Where else can you find a 17" with a 512MB 8800GTS lappy that costs this much? Show me, I'd appreciate it.

I agree - the only reason I bought this model was for the great GPU. Everything else in it is socketed or replaceable anyway.

I've already replaced the hard drive with faster drives (2x200gb, 7,200 rpmers), and am about to replace the CPU with a faster one (T9300).

I have a 1,920x1,200 Dell screen that I have laying around (pulled from a Dell Inspiron 9400) that I might to try swapping out as well to fix the screen issue (the stock screen isn't really that bad - It's not great - but it's not that bad).

The point I was trying to make is: you shouldn't have to upgrade or replace ANYTHING , the fact that you do ,makes it LESS of a value

He's right about the GPU though. Find the next cheapest laptop with an Nvidia 8800GTS and you're going to spend $1,000 more for it. Unless the leakage is horrible I can live with it for $1,000!

The point is, for $280 to buy a screen added to the $1190 say... $250 to up the cpu. Thats $1720. The same laptop to buy from Gateway would be well over $2k and Dell... $3k easy.

This is the perfect laptop for people that want to upgrade things. Yeah the lcd that it came with sucks, but I'm sure if I pushed I could have a one that doesn't bleed so much. But I never wanted to keep it anyway. So why bother.

It's the same with my Gateway 22" LCD. A lot of reviews I read complained of bleeding, but when I got mine it was fine. Frankly I'm not anticipating any problems with mine at all. And if I do I'll make Gateway fix it.

This laptop just begs to be upgraded. I kind of see it as a barebones laptop straight from Best Buy and it is a lot more fun building your laptop to the specs you want rather than going to a website and having it built for you. As far as I know Gateway doesn't do custom configs and if you want to make it a cheaper upgrade, you can sell the stock parts to get some money back.

For those to plan on doing all the upgrades like me, make sure you stress test the hell out of all the stock components first to make sure everything is fully stable since you will be out of warranty. If you do sell your stock parts, you won't be able to return it back to stock for a warranty claim if necessary.

By the way, the wuxga screen I have now is from a Dell so they should work fine. I'd also appreciate it if we keep this thread about modding and upgrading and support about modding and upgrading so we can extract the full potential of these laptops for the enthusiasts. Everything else probably doesn't belong in this specific thread so people can use it for info only.