Re: 18 R1, need advice for upgrading (noob here)

Question

I would REALLY love to hear how you got an RTX 2080 to work in an Alienware 18 R1! I have an AW18 R1 produced/purchased August 2013.  At the time I got it 'Maxed out', with an overclocked 4th Gen I7 4930MX, 32GB Dual Channel DDR3L, Dual GeForce GTX 780M in SLI, and an 512GB mSATA, and 750GB 1200RPM 'Spinner' Hard Drive, all running Win7 Ultimate 64Bit. I have been researching an upgrade to dual GTX 980M's for a while know, and have found that it seems to be about a 50/50 proposition as to whether it 'just works', or it turns out to be one problem after another. I am already prepared for it to be a total pain, and if I go the Eurocom route, I'm already looking at somewhere around $1,500.00.  They also offer a 1070 Mobile card (just the card) for a little over $800.00. If I could get an RTX 2080 to work in this beast (as you have), it would be years ahead of what it is now.  I would jump ahead 4 generations of NVidia technology, and end up just one generation short of what is currently available (The 3080s). The only thing lacking would be the CPU at 4th Gen, vice the current 10th Gen's. I even found an upgrade for my AC7260 WiFi/Bluetooth card to an Intel AX200NGW 802.11ax using an NGFF M.2 to Mini PCIe slot adapter. Any help and advice you could offer would be GREATLY appreciated. PS: I'm not afraid of performing a little technical surgery if appropriate and required. Thanks in advance!

mattyb3 · Answer

I'm also still interested to know how the upgrade was done. I've spoken to many guys who have a lot of experience with the M18x and 18 and they've all said that the Clevo RTX 2080 will not work in these machines so if someone has got it to work then it's a pretty big deal.

We've been waiting for standard MXM form factor 2080's to be released but the only option right now is the Clevo

A51-06 · Answer

I had to modify the heatsink since the original configuration came with the dual 980m from factory, The reason for this modification is that the VRAM modules are placed differently than a 980m per say and those things require cooling so I had to do the cheap way which is placing a thermal pad on the VRAM modules that weren't able to touch the regular heatsink and hot glue in a kinda clean manner to the sides where the heatsink didn't have anything to cover. Then its a compatibility issue as stated by mattyb3 which means that the cards aren't verified to work on their but it does work since its the same slot design that can handle 200w of Power draw as the cards rated for that. I mean, people actually used to put a desktop 980 if I was correct which draws much higher amounts of power than a mobile variant so that's why its compatible. When I booted the computer everything ran fine but 1 of the fans wasn't spinning and it was the GPU Fan probably since I didn't install the driver for it and everything on the screen looked stretched. Anyways, I install the Eurocom RTX 2080 Graphics driver on there and..... nothing. I waited 15 minutes while the screen was black and it finally works. It said in the Device manager: EUROCOM RTX 2080 8Gb This driver successfully installed but requires a restart to finish up.

mattyb3 · Answer

Thanks for the info.  Is this what your 2080 looked like? How did you get the card to physically fit as it's wider than a standard MXM card?

A51-06 · Answer

Have you heard of Eposaurus yet Mattyb3?

He managed to fit the wider version of the 1080 that was wider than normal in his and you know what me and him have in common?

We both cut some parts out to fit the new card as it works just fine but its just that size constraint that I had to work on.

Alienware

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