Acer Aspire 7720g: help upgrading to nVidia 9600M GT

[Jack.Straw]

Hi. My nVidia 8400m card recently went bad. I've been nursing it along with hair dryer treatments to the GPU while I wait for the new card to arrive. I purchased a 9600m GT from ebay (THIS ONE) and it should arrive today. I've been researching this site for what i need to make this work. Would one of you smart folks take a look below and make sure I have this right?

I've downloaded modified driver version 257.21 with matching INI file from laptopvideo2go.com, so i'm ready to:

1) Uninstall the old drivers
2) Shut down, remove battery, and replace the card.
3) Boot up & install modified drivers.
4) Replace the INI file with the modified version.

My questions:

1) My BIOS version is V1.19. Do I need to upgrade this?

2) Will I need to update the vBIOS? I read something about a MXM version but wasn't able to find it, and am not sure I need it.

3) Where does the INI file that i need to replace live in Vista?

Thanks for your time and assistance! -Scott

[niffcreature]

Ahh, good old GFSI

I worked for this company for a while before they told me it was too late to refund me on a bunch of stuff I bought from them a while back. Not to make you regret your purpose, you'd have Ebay on your side here.

No need to do anything really, the 5720g is a nice machine - I have mine running here with a resoldered heatsink and a MXM 2.1 III 8700m GT jammed into the chassis. It deals with cards very well without any BIOS updates.

Don't jump at the opportunity to update your vBIOS - it will more likely damage the card than provide any benefit whatsoever.

Step 1 when you get the card should be inspecting it for physical damage. There will be blank spaces on the card where it may look like a chip was broken off, but all of these should be like that intentionally. If a component has really broken off the board due to bad handling (which I've gotten with a large number of cards from GFSI) it will look a little different. The solder tracks will be rough, not nicely rounded, and not as shiny as the others.

Lastly, just an FYI, that card is probably ES (engineering sample). Test it thoroughly of course but its probably nothing to worry about. You might get a strange boot message you've never seen before when you turn the laptop on.

Oh and one more thing, thats actually a 9600m GS, but its a good choice because its ddr3 and faster than the ddr2 version of the 9600m GT.

[allantin4tw]

Hey mate! I recently bought a nvidia geforce 9600m gt ddr2 1gbram but i wasnt able to make it work. My lappy did not recognized the card. I updated the latest bios (1,45) and i went to nvidia drivers download site where i downloaded the latest drivers for 9m series --> Here (they have a newer driver version, i had 296.xx. I suppose it will work as good as mine

After i flashed latest bios i run the nvidia setup. I had an error that the driver setup wasnt able to find my gpu. Dont worry because a great great member of this forum gbrown69 sent me this link with details what to do and it worked! So try THIS SOLUTION!!

[Jack.Straw]

Thanks Allantin4tw, but my install was fortunately much easier.. (thanks to these forums!). Hopefully your post here will help someone else down the road though..

[allantin4tw]

Hope so, i ve had helped here, so someone might get help from me (not that i solved a hard problem or something, i just c/p'ed!)

[.NetRolller 3D]

BIOS v1.19 is definitely too old. Upgrade to v1.45.

[niffcreature]

Was it an ES card like I thought? :P

[.NetRolller 3D]

The eBay photo is definitely an ES card.