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. 

[MODDER1]

Happy to hear from you @Daedalus!

 

On 7/17/2026 at 3:00 PM, Daedalus said:

Currently running 1TB samsung Sata SSD in mine with a 500gb Msata secondary drive

Truuue, mine is also going faster (booting, lauching app, etc).

 

On 7/17/2026 at 3:00 PM, Daedalus said:

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 🙂

Yep! I was thinking about doing a modded heatsink with a copper plate (5mm), and then soldering the stock copper heatpipes on it , for better cooling on these type B cards.

 

On 7/17/2026 at 3:00 PM, Daedalus said:

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. 

exactly, with the DC being a rare pokemon, i was also thinking about installing a new standard eDP screen on my 8570w, but i know its still not fully resolved on the forum (modded cable vs nvidia drivers vs screen whitelist vs etc, ahah), and then go for and test the newest RTX cards.

 

 

[Daedalus]

Full copper GPU sink would be the way to go. Ive seen some machined ones, but never any OEM. They seem to like the Alu / berylium things we see in our machines, which are a pig to use LMP solder too.  A couple of my heatsinks dissasembled at points i didnt want to undo before the point i needed came apart. 

KBX is working on a 1070m but hes hitting DC issues too, card works but only via DP. That said his H/sink is different to the 980M as chip heights so i dont know if there is another plate available, unless you scour Ali/Google for a 1070 sink from another manafacturer and decouple the GPU. 9xx is best for 8570W / 8770W ( well was in OEM spec) our crazy minds have gone a little bit further than that here

 

[JadeRover]

20 minutes ago, Daedalus said:

KBX is working on a 1070m but hes hitting DC issues too, card works but only via DP

 

That is due to a vbios mismatch with the mxm slot regarding eDP placement on the 8570w.

 

What he needs is a custom vbios that has eDP on DP_C position of the card as that's where it is located on the mxm slot of the laptop. Most laptops have eDP on position DP_D of the mxm slot so most vbios have it set to that. 

 

He can use this Macrumors vbios for 1070m that has eDP on DP_C (that luckily exists) : https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/imac-2011-maxwell-and-pascal-gpu-upgrade.2300989/page-10?post=30799977#post-30799977

 

I discovered this when my p3000 worked with the internal display of my zbook 17 g3 (eDP on position DP_C) once I used another "Mac compatible" vbios