Alienware 17 R1 980m Upgrade - Which variant to buy?

[mattalienware]

Hi, this is my first post here.

 

I have an Alienware 17 R1 (Ranger) laptop.

It currently has the AMD R9 m290x / 8970m graphics card and the 1080p 60hz matte screen.

 

I want to upgrade the graphics card to a NVIDIA GTX 980m 8GB.

 

1st question - Is buying from AliExpress okay? Have people had good or bad experiences buying MXM GPUs from there? Should I get it from somewhere else?

 

2nd question - Is there a particular variant of the 980m that is known to work with the 17 R1 laptop? Or is any fine.

 

3rd question - Should I just spend a bit more to get the GTX 1060 6GB? I don't really wanna spend more than $200 AUD on the card.

 

There is a good AliExpress sale coming up in a few days that I want to take advantage of.

 

Thank you!

[Eban]

I bought a 980m from Aliexpress about 2017ish...lasted until 2020 then suddenly died. Apparently the VRM's are underpowered on these models. I really should look at repairing it but I don't use my Ranger much at all 

 

Aliexpress listing will say if it has vbios for Alienware!

 

I skipped the 1060 and tried an MSI 1070m...requires cutting your chassis a bit.