Installing New Mobile Graphics Cards
Before we move on to the upgrade process, here's an older shot that should give you a feel for what's happening inside the X7200 chassis.
One of the three hard drive bays is found above the battery, while the other two are adjacent to it. Eurocom offers a custom-manufactured bracket to support a fourth hard drive in the optical drive bay.
The CPU and chipset share one complete cooler, while each graphics card gets a cooler of its own. Today’s conversion did not require the removal of the CPU cooler.
Hardware swaps don’t get much easier than this, with four screws holding each fan to its heatsink and four screws holding each heatsink to its graphics module.
With the heatsinks out of the way, we find two screws holding each graphics module in place. Removing these two screws allows each module to be tipped upward, away from the motherboard, and pulled from its slot.
Note that even though MXM standards were originally developed by Nvidia, Eurocom worked extensively with AMD to develop these Radeon HD 6990M parts in the appropriate format.
Though the heatsinks appear almost identical, differences in the height of certain voltage regulator components compelled Eurocom to modify the version intended to mount to the AMD boards. Eurocom includes two of the Nvidia-specific sinks in its GeForce GTX 580M upgrade kit. Also included are replacement screws, the GeForce GTX 580M modules themselves, and the mandatory SLI bridge.
The SLI bridge wraps around the back of the left (master) card, its ends clipping to the white connectors on the right edge of each card using push-on connectors.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
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