HP Elitebook 8570W - is it still good ? Hardware modifications

[GuitarG]

Little upgrade, after dissasembly of panel I put some thermal pad for big IC of DC board - I cut out plastic foil between lid and IC. Now panels seems to be cold, previously it was very hot to touch (especially on lower bezel). Will test more with higher brightness, but seems to help somewhat - I though previously that RGB backlight of DC screen was scorching.

[MODDER1]

Hello All, crazy stuff on this thread and tremendous work by everybody, insane amount of informations, so a big thank you first! 

Second, i'm very new (n00b) to modding, and i got a 8570w also (gift) since 2-3 years, and from what i read, we can do a lot of upgrade with this elitebook, and since day one, i really wanted to push this beast to a build with a lot of potential. For now, i just updated the stockage to a SSD kingston, replace the heatsink (the laptop was overheating everytime with slightiest use) by the a spare one, and still dealing with the original cpu and gpu (quadro k2000m). I will definitly upgrade the CPU with the Core i7-3940XM (pretty simple task) but then come the gpu part, and all the mods il will have to do. I saw that  @Daedalus had the same desire regarding his 8570w, did you manage to finally install a 980m on it ? 

[Daedalus]

On 7/8/2026 at 7:04 PM, MODDER1 said:

Hello All, crazy stuff on this thread and tremendous work by everybody, insane amount of informations, so a big thank you first! 

Second, i'm very new (n00b) to modding, and i got a 8570w also (gift) since 2-3 years, and from what i read, we can do a lot of upgrade with this elitebook, and since day one, i really wanted to push this beast to a build with a lot of potential. For now, i just updated the stockage to a SSD kingston, replace the heatsink (the laptop was overheating everytime with slightiest use) by the a spare one, and still dealing with the original cpu and gpu (quadro k2000m). I will definitly upgrade the CPU with the Core i7-3940XM (pretty simple task) but then come the gpu part, and all the mods il will have to do. I saw that  @Daedalus had the same desire regarding his 8570w, did you manage to finally install a 980m on it ? 

Welcome MODDER1,  good to see your on the similar journey. SSD's definitely help the machine catchup to newer generations. Currently running 1TB samsung Sata SSD in mine with a 500gb Msata secondary drive. i do run the i7-3940XM CPU with my current k1000M GPU. I have the 980M SLI (same as KBX on here) card ready to go in, but am currently working on Chassis mods to allow dual fans (980M is a hot beast) to get the heat away so not yet running the card (KBX has his running and working on 1070M). The 980M mod requires the 8770W sink mod as its a "B" card and 8570W only ever shipped with "A" cards from HP, so to go 980M or any more powerful card you'll be collecting alot of parts 🙂

The 980M is the best you'll get without dreamcolour screens, others on this post have DC screens and have done more awesome mods and more powerful cards.