Upgrading to a 980m cost?

I am looking at the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M; 8GB DDR5; MXM 3.0b; 100W; Upgrade Kit with X-bracket, screws, thermal pads, ICD7 Thermal Paste [$817] for my M17xR4.

Are they really that expensive 2 years later, especially with the new card on the market now? Do mobile graphics cards ever go on sale?

 

hey,

mine was $825 Canadian plus tax and shipping so $900. unfortunately I don't think you will ever see a sale as they are mostly being sold by smaller or private sellers. in the grand scheme of things it is a lot less then a new laptop, especially with the new rip off card machines coming in at almost $3k

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Go to rjtech.com and have a look. You will see that even grossly obsolete cards haven't dropped a penny. It is the way it is with mobile graphics cards. The only way to get a better deal is in the used market.

Sent from my overpriced smartphone

 

true story. a 780m wasn't all that much cheaper then a 980m for my laptop.

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They don't mass produce mobile card for consumer upgrades to their laptops. That is one reason they are soo expensive; supply and demand. Your best bet is buy used on auction sites like ebay from trusted sellers. 980ms fetch about $600 on ebay; still pricey.

 

980M is the last best MXM3.0b card that provides so much upgradeability to so many machines across brands. And now the 3.0b is almost dead- AMD RX480-85-90 Polaris MXM cards are there but no LVDS marks end of an Era. with the new proprietary B$ from MXM machines likes of Clevo/MSI

Expect the Maxwell MXM cards to become rare, they are run cooler than that volcano 10 Series. Since the production seems to be stopped iirc...grab a good one and pamper it until we see a successor from AMD VEGA, NVidia won't they are super greedy and consider the gimping of the 980M step by step...

Volta comes with HBM I bet all the MXM slotted machines will be SOL. The vapor chamber heatsink designed ones like 870DM3 and forget the MSI propreitary B$ design they also backed off against their previous campaign such shame and the 77xDM will also get rekt they have this unified HS design which is useless asf in current scenario let alone upgrades..., the 870DM2-3 have these contact points and what can Clevo do if the HBM comes, the VRMs and the VRAM modules will get shifted and also the power phases.

Pay around 2-3K for the 1070-1080SLI and get rekt when Volta/Vega hits. Clevo build is having too much of flex I didn't expect that and so many machines are heating with over 80-90C Nvidia's push is great for the real desktop chips but instead they could have gone for the same 1080M class reducing some power by 30% and giving MXM3.0b would have been better and cooler for the laptops. The tweaking that has to be done to damn 3K Pascal machine by 30-40% is too much or get the future ripped off MSI, Clevo alteast has the information that this is their new standard...

I can't just stand to the rip-ff game they are playing now what a sadness the Dell's Privatization is the cause of this massive anti consumer B$ Propaganda from Intel and Nividia dropping MXM, Also that MXM pricing is insane, Forget it get the 980M and wait for the Skylake X and get a HEDT hardware and enjoy limitless power & upgrades.

The only issue is I may keep moving so I cant really bet on the Desktop and afford to move them across America, BGA is no go not all, the Intel BGA chips are so pathetically binned and that soldered gunk in my notebook is something I can't even imagine.

So I may end up with a Clevo (I won't support that fallacy MSI) or a HEDT at some near future..

Edit -
1060 is not worth at all. It offers just 15-20% improvement and the cost is skyrocketing plus needs an eDP and also the vBIOS don't expect it to work at full clocks with MSI vBIOS on an Alienware, Prema won't mod it atm See this post.

You can mod the heck out of the Alienware 17 R1 like at the German Forum here -
CPU, GPU and make them work but loooooong shot to make Pascal work and It's hell of a job to do.

It's over the good days are numbered now across Laptop gaming, PC - Windows, Android.
Liberty is being chipped off slowly.

 

Actually this MSI 1060 is still a true MXM 3.0b and a few users have reported it working on their alienware 17s. Benchmarks put it slightly above a 980m. This will be probably our last possible upgrade unless Eurocom will figure something out.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/MSI-NVIDIA-...511588?hash=item4656c5c224:g:kbIAAOSw8gVX~MEL

Also there is the 980 desktop variant which performs better than the 980m

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Alienware-1...583b3b9&pid=100009&rk=1&rkt=2&sd=302103511588

 

I'd rather buy new than paying for those exorbitant prices tbh.

 

Nvidia pricing strategy is never to reduce price on older GPUs after new GPUs are launched so we always pay the same price even if the GPU is 2 years old. Keep also in mind that you get new GPU and not previously used.

 

Do you know if there will be option later on to upgrade the alienware 17 r1 to the new 10xx series from you guys? I plan to upgrade in maybe a year or two.