How to Change Gaming Laptop Graphics Card In 2023!

 How to change gaming laptop graphics card? Let’s find the right way to change your laptop’s GPU to enhance performance.

Starting off, PC gaming is one of the fastest growing types of entertainment in the technological world. However, not many people know that you can take your already well-built and expensive gaming laptop to an even higher level just by upgrading your graphics.

However, there are some who would argue that doing this research is a waste of time. Why bother finding out whether blowing a wad of cash on a GPU from eBay will actually work? And what’s the risk if it breaks after only a month anyway?

Table of Contents

• How to Change Gaming Laptop Graphics Card – Temper your Expectations
• Meet the Eurocom P150EM
• How to Change Gaming Laptop Graphics Card – The actual upgrade
• What about the CPU?
• The GPU matters more in gaming
• Remove the heat pipes
• Use caution when installing the GPU heat pipe
• No more reference drivers
• Performance-testing my upgrade
• Doing the math

Enter Eurocom, a company based out of Canada. Although they’re a laptop vendor, they are offering their customers the chance to get more life out of their gaming laptops by performing these upgrades themselves.

Also, as an added bonus, these upgrade kits include instructions on how to do specific things with other brands such as Alienware! If one was considering upgrading a laptop but had been stressed over it because they didn’t have any experience in performing these kinds of procedures then they will be pleased when they take time to examine the many benefits that come from getting started today with the Eurocom Upgrade Kits .

How to Change Gaming Laptop Graphics Card – Temper your Expectations

If you’re wondering if your four-pound, thin-and-light gaming laptop can handle a newer generation GPU, the short answer is no. A slight distinction is that it will likely mostly depend on which generation of GPU can be considered to be new territory and whether or not there’s room for physical modification (via user replacement) inside said device.

It’s almost as if there is a rule in place that prevents laptops from weighing less than seven pounds from being upgraded.

Upgrade options vary depending on the manufacturer of your laptop (e.g. Aspire, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo etc) and you must know that your Clevo notebook probably has the highest chance to get upgrades later on because it’s one of the mainstream manufacturers so there are many resources out there for finding upgrade solutions for your machine.

There is a very large number of companies within the gaming notebook computer industry. However, there are only two types of brands that we should concern ourselves with when it comes to the overseas sourcing of computer hardware.

Those brands are Clevo and POJ. The former is responsible for producing roughly 50% of all gaming company laptops while the latter produces up to 75%. Although they may produce these same parts, each gaming PC brand uses these components in slightly different combinations accounting for what can often be small manufacturing differences between them.

Meet the Eurocom P150EM

“For the upgrade, I’m using an Ivy Bridge quad-core in a Clevo P150EM Racer laptop. The laptop also has an 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a Seagate HS HDD hybrid system along with a GeForce 675MX”

Although the GeForce 675MX doesn’t have built-in Bluetooth, it is a faster model than its predecessor. The faster GPU allows you to play most games on medium or even high graphics settings with few problems.

However, I didn’t feel like gaming that way so Eurocom loaned us its newer GTX 980M add-in graphics card and now I’m no longer turning down for what. The only thing with this card is you will have issues installing some video apps because the stock fan configuration has two fans off and the other two on (the correct setting is all four fans on). A simple setting change in the included software fixes that however!

How to Change Gaming Laptop Graphics Card – The actual upgrade

You could opt for a physical upgrade if you need to change your device quick and don’t want to waste the time of uploading an app instead.

When looking for a particular piece of computer hardware, start by checking Eurocom’s VGA showroom to see whether the company carries the GPU that you need.

Here you’ll find information on peripheral devices compatible with units made by Alienware or Clevo so that you can decide whether the hardware from Eurocom is what you’re looking for. It’s important to note that additional requirements for installing components such as a BIOS and power brick may be needed depending on what model you have in mind.

You’re going to want to start by updating the notebook computer’s BIOS. After that, make sure you remove the Nvidia graphics card by uninstalling its drivers (note: please be sure to make a backup of all important files before doing this!).

The next step is to power down the system and unplug the battery. Having sensitive components properly grounded is an important part of any build, so we recommend making sure you’re using an ESD wrist strap – but it’s always a good idea to discharge any built-up static electricity off your body before touching sensitive elements of your computer!

Lay down the P150EM and remove four screws. Remove the bottom cover off of the computer and you’ll see another door that covers the data storage options inside.

If this were a full upgrade, I might ditch one of my current hard drives for an SSD, or at least also slot in a mSATA SSD into the available port to improve upon my drive access time. With just the external hatch open though, you have full access to your graphics card as well as all of your other hardware components.

What about the CPU?

Much to customers’ agitation, a lot of up-and-coming streamers really don’t need to buy the most powerful graphics card if “all” they use it for is gaming. If you’re concerned about battery life or host live sessions on your stream regularly, then yes, you might need the latest and greatest GPU. The ones we sell are quite decent: The AMD Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition has one gigabyte of video RAM with 320 gigaflops of compute performance.

Have you been thinking about a new CPU to upgrade your older laptop? As of now, Haswell certainly looks to be a great candidate. Just in case you were wondering, however, the older Ivy Bridge CPUs still have plenty of life in them.

Moreover, it’s incredible what some overclocking can do to get around the limitations of a sluggish generation or two earlier! In pure multithreaded performance, that is really what makes a difference because real-world day-to-day usage is not always as multithreaded as most benchmarks need it to be! The Core i7-4720HQ is about 8% faster than the older Ivy Bridge PH3740QM in the EuroCom P15em.

So just leave it alone. Need a project? Add an MSATA drive or more RAM to the P150EM.

The GPU matters more in gaming

I wouldn’t say the same for the GeForce GTX 675MX. It’s not a GeForce GTX 980M. The GeForce GTX 980M upgrade kit is more expensive and it has an 8GB frame buffer. You’re unlikely to need all that RAM at any given time but you’re glad there’s room for future resource-hungry applications to take off without having to worry about memory constraints.

Remove the heat pipes

To get access to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), you have to remove 3 screws from the heat pipes on the GPU core and another 3 from the heat pipes on the voltage regulators and rambus memory. Heat pipes, for those who aren’t familiar, are cooling mechanisms that wick heat away where cool air can blow through it to make it go away.

Once all seven screws are removed from the two heatpipes, you use the paper tabs on the heatpipes to pull them off gently . The heatpipes may actually be stuck to the GPU from the melted thermal paste, so don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t budge. At the same time, use common sense on how much force to use to remove it. Gently rocking it around a bit may also help break the seal of the thermal paste. 

With both heat pipes moved, you now have access to the MXM module. Two hex-shaped nuts need to be removed that are securing the MXM card, which acts as a giant RAM Card and fits snugly into the slot. You can use small tools like a box wrench, crescent wrench or pair of pliers to unscrew the nuts and remove them using your fingers.

Inside the box was a Mobile PCI Express Module (MXM), two heat pipes, screws, and offsets for the GPU. Many of the other parts were similar but new in appearance and I decided to use them for precaution’s sake. The heat pipes were reportedly ready for the card.

Like any product, trust is key. In fact, it’s critical to success in business and technology. Security tools will only ever be as good as the people using them

OK, now we’re going to get started with reassembling the computer. The first thing we’ll do is put two hex nuts back in place using our needle nose pliers. Then, instead of tightening them up too much, only tighten them very slightly or else they might come lose again.  Next, we’ll install the heat pipes but make sure not to cover the thermal paste with any plastic packaging just yet – that part comes later!

Use caution when installing the GPU heat pipe

When attaching the heat pipe to the graphics chip, take care not to be overzealous and press too hard on it. Unlike CPUs which are fitted with heat spreaders, GPU cores are exposed directly for optimal cooling. Damaging the core by pressing down too hard will destroy it. The heat pipes use fairly small screws and it’s tricky to damage the chips themselves, so be careful here!

With everything installed and set up, it’s time to put back the bottom cover. Install the battery and plug it in. Power up. If you’ve done it all correctly, then it should power up and boot into Windows. However, bear in mind that laptops often have integrated graphics, meaning that it will boot using the IGP (the Integrated Graphics Processor) before using the discrete graphics card. You’re not quite out of the woods yet!

At first I was able to use drivers from Nvidia’s website for the GPU upgrade but those drivers would not recognize the new GPU and refused to install. It was really a head-scratching moment. I contacted Eurocom to find out what the heck is going on here, and yes, they solved my problem! To be honest I probably would have solved it eventually but I’m thankful that they told me exactly what I needed to do.

No more reference drivers

Nvidia GPUs will not install if they are not checked with hardware signatures first. Nvidia ensures the validity of the code that it distributes by making sure they aren’t letting people use any old drivers, and that’s why you can trust them any time you go to update your drivers in the future without having to worry, because Eurocom goes all out to make sure their customers are provided with official driver updates.

Eurocom is a trusted vendor when it comes to gaming laptops – since timeliness is super important for gamers, I asked Eurocom how quickly after Nvidia does releases their drivers. It turns out that their mods for 64 cards take around 3 days which means you won’t have to wait long when switching to or from one of Eurocom’s laptops!

Once I had the proper video card drivers installed, it was time to start testing it to see if I’d installed it correctly. To do that I used the tech demo for 4.0 by Unigine which puts a heavier than normal load on the GPU while also displaying its temperature during testing.

Eurocom said that I should be seeing 90c to 95c temps at idle or high graphics loads and mine were at 84c+… so I opened up the unit and just barely tightened down the screws on my video card (a little extra pressure will make a big difference even though you don’t think it’s much) and retested again with a lower 84c temps which meant that my unit was now running perfectly fine!

Performance-testing my upgrade

To find out how it would perform, we compared real-world benchmarks we took before and after swapping out the old GPU with the brand new GeForce GTX 980M. We also threw in Origin EON15-X, another mid-range laptop with similar specs to use as a reference point. There was an average drop of 10fps but that could have been down to the newer Intel Core i7 CPU in the Origin as well as its better cooling system. However, overall there was an improvement over their previous card of nearly 300%.

These awesome little laptops are not just for kids. If a gamer is on the go, or if they need to travel, these are great options even without a video card to game on the side. Take Grand Theft Auto V as an example.

With those games that utilize graphics units more than others, I saw an increase in performance of around 200% with some titles like Tomb Raider going from 10 fps during normal gameplay up to 30 fps and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor – which went from running at around 15 fps on the core notebook processor all the way up to well over 60FPS!

Not only do these devices help make your gaming better, but they also bring a level of convenience to your busy day-to-day schedule. As consumers become ever more budget conscious it’s important for companies to come out with products that provide value and performance yet don’t put too much of a financial burden on the users; That is where you find notebooks that can deliver top tier performance whilst being extremely cost effective.

Doing the math

When we first saw that Eurocom’s Sky X9E2 could potentially give laptops a performance boost rivaling that of desktops, our interest was piqued. Valve has already helped Linux gaming achieve better performance by designing some tools that have allowed Steam to provide games and an operating system that both perform well.

We wanted to take this one step further as we installed a 980M into the Eurocom’s flagship machine to find out. While the difference in performance is definitely noticeable, there are other concerns like cost vs. value to worry about which you can learn more about in our article.

Analyze the options. If your old laptop’s GPU wasn’t up to snuff, you might have to buy a new one. To get into a laptop with the GeForce GTX 980M graphics card, expect to spend at least $2,000. So spending $1,000 on something that delivers the best performance right off the bat saves you some money ($1,000) if we look at it from a certain angle.

While you could try selling the laptop and using the proceeds to fund a new one, we see that you’re limited in terms of what you can get in return. On average vintage laptops go for $700 on eBay, but yours might not fetch quite as much at auction given its age and overall condition.

To acquire a more reliable replacement with similar features, you should expect to spend more than $4,000, which doesn’t even take into account the time – at an hourly rate of $20 an hour – it takes to research machines of this ilk on the secondary market (we recommend spending no less than four hours). That adds up.

Another option is to sell the GPU. You can easily sell a used desktop GPU on websites like eBay or Amazon, which will net you anywhere from $50-$300 depending on its functionality and features. However, if you have a mobile GPU, you are in luck! The GeForce GTX 675M makes around $700 online if in good condition.

One more thing to bear in mind: Eurocom offers six months warranty on the GPU. If you have any issues that stem from upgrading your laptop, then Eurocom would be there to help you sort it out as quickly as possible!

We know that most people aren’t even going to start working on their laptop, that’s why they need to know “how to change gaming laptop graphics card”. Even with its high price tag and risks, however, there are some valid justifications for doing a graphics upgrade on your laptop if you know where to look and are willing to work hard because it will be challenging trying to get the right services done!