Acer Aspire 8940g, trying to upgrade graphic card.

Well after some research i found that the card does not play nice with LVDS and likes eDP so I tried flashing the vBios to a firepro m5100 as after reading on dell forums found that its basically the same card, however after i flashed it the system will not boot at all I have tried to blind flash it but no dice.....So back to the m4000 until i can land on a m6700/6800 dell which should be able to see it I did backup the original vbios

 

What did you flash the Bios too? Crossflashing BIOS between different GPUs is a BIG NO NO, it will brick the card

 

It was another dell vbios m5100
I have been lurking about and it's looking like im going to have to hot swap it from a breadboard booted dos USB atiflash back original vbios
And start over
I think I shall leave it and pick up another machine with mxm slot of see about borrowing a pcie to mxm riser from someone

 

I wouldn't stay on this machine if you don't have too, too old. MXM to PCIE risers are very rare, and expensive, so its unlikely you find one that someone will lend you for such a cheap GPU

 

Well the 8935g is back on ebay and my new 'Dell m6700' arrived this morning, so I'm going to wait until the wife goes out and take the k3000m out and try the Amd card.
I know that the heatsink might not fit well but I want to see if I can get it back (working), keep it and get rid of the nvidia I am team red really.

 

Hi gents

I am happy to find a recent thread about the Aspire 8940g. !!!


I got same pc, I know it is quite hold, but I’m still happy with it, so I wanna keep using.
However, as you probably cope with, I decided for some revamping/upgrade.

Contextually I went for a GPU upgrade, and since I wish to have the less work as possible to do [], I decided for the ATI FirePro M4000 which sounds to be suitable for a Plug-n-Play installation, but only if it is directly out of a Dell (that is the GPU with a vBIOS Dell).

Unfortunately I got an ATI FirePro M4000 out of a HP (that is with a vBIOS HP), and it doesn’t work, as expected [!!!]

So my intention was to integrate the Dell vBIOS (downloaded here by OEM site) into the motherboard’s BIOS of the Aspire 8940g... !! But I couldn’t figure out how to do, even if it sounds possible to do (found here in this forum!)… I found BIOS’s MODding not so much supported as a Tutorial/guide point of view (PhoenixTool, OpROM, etc)

While I was searching for a way for integrating the vBIOS into the BIOS, I came across a BIOS Modded for our Aspire 8940g, which enables for a lot of new features (including virtualization and improving performances through overclocking etc.). Find post here; this is a quite hold thread, but should still work...



Now I have few questions (if you are still with the Aspire 8940g)

1) Which GPU are you using? Is the ATI FirePro M4000 from a Dell? How is working (P-n-P, etc?) Any news about the Dell m6700 ?

2) Which BIOS are you currently running? Did you decide to shift to a MODded BIOS and did you already tested some performance improving and/or virtualization?

3) Anyone managed to integrate vBIOS in BIOS for this laptop? This opens to a lot of more compatibility GPU for the 8940g.


Hope to hear from you soon.


Alex

 

1 - Take a look at my Video here :



2 - I run the ultimate BIOS version for this machine, no modding
3 - I didn't try this...

Cheers

 

I will be putting a firepro m6100 in my machine. If it works a thread will be on the way.

It should work but the tdp is slightly high (75w) compared to the max 50w rating of the mxm slot. I'll need a better charger then.

I'm glad back in 2010 mxm could literally utlize 2x more power with a higher watt charger, the circuits could handle it too. Just look at those clevos that can pull 280w from an mxm slot!

Edit: Doesn't matter lol, same tdp as my plug and play dell quadro 3000m!

 

Sorry to revive an old thread...

But I'm going to be testing a gtx 980m in this laptop.

I already had success with a mobility 5870 with 100w tdp, or so it says. With liquid metal the heatsink can handle the core temp which reached 75c with the fan at max. Memory thermals are actually decent reaching a max of 60c considering there is little to no heat transfer. At this rate the mxm card should survive...

I got a quadro K3100m working in the laptop too . Talk about futureproofing lol.

Also something to note:

VBioses that work with the 8940g:

Dell vbios
Clevo vbios
Msi vbios
Acer vbios

VBioses that DON'T work with the 8940g:

HP vbios - HP is trash and retarded for having non compatible VBioses.

 

also reviving this thread as I'm awaiting the first report of someone getting the quadro m2200m working on the 8940g or 8935g, and finding a way to efficiently cool it. I've come across no success stories for this laptop, but someone reported that they got it working on a Dell Precision M4800, which is only a couple of years younger than the 8940g. It only started working after the vbios was flashed:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-gpu-be-upgraded.792187/page-23#post-10832335

It seems like the m2200m is the latest and greatest of the MXM-A standard. Don't think there will be anymore type A cards. If someone can get this working it would be the ultimate upgrade.

Main challenge is probably the cooling, and the cards pulled from dell laptops are still too pricey for me, about $250 from ebay.