M18x R2 GPU upgrades

[Siplast]

Did anyone try the Quadro 5000 yet on m18x r2? I am looking into this upgrade. I currently run two 980 mxm in sli and I am looking to upgrade to gtx 1070. Really great that one of you seems to have upped to rtx 3080. Any info on the 3080 upgrade would be appreciated. Used to be at tech inferno and did the a11 unlocked bios a while back. Any info on above would be appreciated. Thanks

[Siplast]

Really interested in trying this upgrade for M18x r2. Not sure If anyone follows this topic anymore as it seems 2022 was the last entry. I will lay this out and see if anyone is still willing to jump in and help a newbie on this site. Really hope ssj92 might jump in as he seems to be the founder of this upgrade, what a great success and cudos to him. I understand the unlocked bios, the info mod for NVidia drivers and modding the heat sink. What I was  hoping to hear back about is whether there was a power lock at 50w or did the install go smooth. No black screens or error 43? I believe from what I have been able to glean that the vbios that comes with the xvision card limits the card to 115w and is more stable in this set up even though it has the potential to 135-150w. My understanding is that the set up was straight forward without having to do any further steps such as jumping the pins for backlight ( only needed to run peg but wont work on this system) and that the handshake is handled by optimus for the lvds display. I dont recall that any edid injection or registry fix's were needed. I am running a 3940xm with 2133hz ram at 32gb capacity. I use a standard oc of 4.4 on the cpu. Thanks for any clarification. 

[Siplast]

Long Live Sockets and Slots!! ( courtesy of Mr. Fox )

[Siplast]

Sorry, It would seem that I did not place this In the correct thread. I have now found the proper thread and gotten the answers that I needed. 

[Maro97]

On 7/12/2026 at 5:24 PM, Siplast said:

Did anyone try the Quadro 5000 yet on m18x r2? I am looking into this upgrade. I currently run two 980 mxm in sli and I am looking to upgrade to gtx 1070. Really great that one of you seems to have upped to rtx 3080. Any info on the 3080 upgrade would be appreciated. Used to be at tech inferno and did the a11 unlocked bios a while back. Any info on above would be appreciated. Thanks

You can send to @ssj92 a PM he try many gpus with AW m18x R2

[SuperMG]

On 7/12/2026 at 4:24 PM, Siplast said:

Did anyone try the Quadro 5000 yet on m18x r2? I am looking into this upgrade. I currently run two 980 mxm in sli and I am looking to upgrade to gtx 1070. Really great that one of you seems to have upped to rtx 3080. Any info on the 3080 upgrade would be appreciated. Used to be at tech inferno and did the a11 unlocked bios a while back. Any info on above would be appreciated. Thanks

Hello.

 

The RTX 5000 and RTX 3080 will only work in Switchable Graphics. So you need a modded BIOS to change the video's option to SG (Switchable Graphics)

 

Turing and Ampere GPUs do not have any LVDS PEG capabilities. They can only do eDP output.

 

Yes these cards work with iGPU SG, not in PEG on that laptop.

 

These cards work in PEG eDP only with the M17X R4 120Hz eDP version + backlight mod.

 

If you're limited by the iGPU, you can overclock the display to 75Hz using CRU software. But please be careful with that.

 

For the drivers installation, just use the NVCLEANSTALL software, it's easy.

 

For the cooling. For the RTX 3080, you need to find a custom heatsink for that offset.

 

I tested so much Turing to Ada MXM cards on more than 10 systems.

 

I do have one RTX 4070 MXM available, still has warranty.