Should I swap my laptop GPU for a FirePro MXM card?

janas19

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jan 20, 2012
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I am considering whether to buy a Dell Precision M4600 laptop from another forum member and swap the factory GPU with a FirePro M4000. However I'm concerned about thermals. My experience with AMD cards is that they are somewhat finicky with cooling.

Also, I'm less than knowledgeable about AMD's drivers. My impression is that their drivers are not fully finished and problematic. Do you think I should do the swap or not? Are FirePro good cards?
 
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Not sure what kind of deal your getting, but if money matters I just know these kinds of projects can end up costing you more in the long run than finding an out of the box solution.
 
Hmmm, I could have phrased that better. I'm not worried about compatibility of the hardware as the swap has already been verified to work on other forums.

What I should have asked is how good are these FirePro cards at gaming? Can anyone endorse them? My experience was with one FirePro card where it would randomly freeze every 15 minutes when gaming. I'm not sure whether it was the drivers or the cooling.

Notebookcheck says the M4000 is equal or slightly slower than the 7750M. Link. So I would be very satisfied with that, but I would like to hear an endorsement of that performance before I make the plunge. Also posted this question to Notebookreview where lots of members do MXM swaps.

Thank you guys.
 
The Firepro m4000 can game at lower settings decently and older titles do run better on them. I wish I seen this last week I literally threw out a bunch of older laptop gear and I know that I had a few Firepro m4000s around. Maybe I will check tomorrow and see if I still have a couple I might be able to send your way. As for being happy with this card my suggestion would be to go with a k2000m, which offers more performance. Most of the m4000s I have are from Elitebooks such as the 8770w and 8740w. Luckily with Dell Precisions I usually end up with Quadro cards. Anyways I know the Dell Precision m4600 you have can only take a MXM 3.0a card and the A in 3.0a is important since it is the smaller MXM gpu card standard. Actually I just remembered the Firepro M5100 works in m4600 and they are around 50 US dollars I would much prefer one of those instead of the m4000.

I have to add something since I realized I rambled a bit. The m5100 will work with your current heatsink and will be plug and play. I believe you are upgrading from the m5950?
 
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