HP EliteBook 8770W mods/customizations

I was able to change the multiplier on my old 8540W with the 940XM. Figured it'd work on 4th gen elitebooks.

I don't want another app on my laptop, just one more thing to run at startup.

 

Oh really? For some reason I thought the 8770w allows TPL control for the 3940xm. That's a shame. At least it's 55W, which does give more room for performance but those chips get hot as hell. With some mods to the heatsink, it's still the best final upgrade, especially if you can get it for cheap

 

Not worth it over 3840QM, believe me. For 1-2% performance gain, you add 25% more TDP, resulting in 10C hotter CPU.
Temps around 90+C would be a norm with 3940XM.
Let aside the price difference...

 

I don't really use the CPU for that much, I use Blender Cycles with Quadro.

But my desktop has dual GTX 1080s and 7820X at 4.6Ghz on all 8 cores so my laptop is for casual gaming right now, but when I travel for work it;s useful. I'm an architecht.

 

For me "casual gaming" is playing WarZone where the CPU (3840QM on Liquid Metal) goes all the way up to 86-87C.
3940XM would reach 95+ for sure in CPU-intensive games...

 

Good thing I don't play Warzone. Most of my games are GPU bound.

Only thing I might be able to use a better CPU for is streaming, but I could use EXP-GDC for extra GPU encoding.

Anyone tried eGPU with this laptop?

 

someone tried using eGPU to work with r9 290 (or r9 280), or maybe HD 7970, and everything works fine. on YouTube it’s kind of like there is a video about it

 

Sorry to necro this thread but there is a lot of valuable info here.

Not really viable unless you build something that takes the internal gpu port and connect a desktop gpu to it. There was an initiative some time ago that wanted to kickstart the production of these cables but it did not succeed. There is lot of pciex16->mxm adapters for desktop pcs so I don't think it's super hard to implement. Otherwise, you can connect gpus to the smart card slot or to the msata but its super slow and would create a bottleneck anyways.

Regarding the eDP-lvds issue: adapters for these cables exist, maybe if someone has both type of panels could try one if it works. If you dont populate both 2.5" bays the adapter board would easily fit. I cant find much info about these connectors besides lvds is a 30 pin and eDP is 40 pin(but i can find 30 pin variant from the edp too).

Unlocking the bios, as far as i know, is impossible so the extreme cpus are useless here sadly. The cooling solution would hold up as @mirage_bg said.

 

This will soon be a very relevant topic for our laptop, since LP173WF3 will soon disappear from sales, even from the supplier) They will surely rise in price until an affordable LVDS> eDP for a display appears, which will be similar in characteristics to our DC2.

 

Useful info. I bought a used 8770W with a DC panel and unfortunately it has a recent bios which has the spectre fixes. On which bios did the Spectre fixes get introduced and can you revert back to an old bios or the only way is to solder a new bios chip?