Help upgrading (slightly off topic)

[FBKampfer]

Sorry to lean on you guys, but you're all damn fine tech support.

So I've got an HP Laptop I primarily use for work and travel that I'd like to upgrade, handle a bit of medium-weight gaming without having to haul the tower I'm building around.

Its currently running AMD A12 quad core processor, with their "dedicated" R7 440MX GPU.

My understanding being that it's nominally an independent card as opposed to a chip integrated in with the CPU, so it must have common connectors with at least some newer/less awful GPU's.


While my knowledge of newer cards like the 1050Ti, 1080, etc has expanded greatly as I build my new tower, I'm not familiar or knowledgeable about these wierd things seemingly built on their old integrated chip set.

I harbor no illusions that I can cram a GTX 1080 into my laptop, especially with the optical drive in place, let alone meet the power supply in any reasonable fashion, I just wanna see if I'm going down a dead end.

[Skuzzy]

Laptops are usually, "you get what you get" and that is all.  I would suggest contacting HP as they are the only ones who will be able to tell you if it can be upgraded and to what it can be upgraded to.

[Bizman]

What Skuzzy said, and further: Even if a brand PC is upgradeable, the options may be limited to what was available at the time of the original build. Even worse, HP is known to whitelist compatible parts in the BIOS, so even if the hardware would allow for quite a good and up-to-date upgrade, the BIOS would prevent it from working.

[FBKampfer]

Damn. Alright, thanks guys!

[Bizman]

Damn indeed. That's why I don't like smart phones, tablets and gaming laptops: They outdate real quickly without any chance to upgrade a single component. Talk about sustainable development... 

[AAIK]

Its a shame you dont have a newer laptop. They have external GPU enclosures these days if you want an upgrade path. You probably need thunderbolt for it.

[Bizman]

Its a shame you dont have a newer laptop. They have external GPU enclosures these days if you want an upgrade path. You probably need thunderbolt for it.

And upgrading the video card to said enclosure costs as much as a gaming laptop, or that's how I remember the article I read about them... Hopefully I'm wrong, though. It may have been that the enclosure costs almost as much as a new laptop?

[FBKampfer]

Its a shame you dont have a newer laptop. They have external GPU enclosures these days if you want an upgrade path. You probably need thunderbolt for it.

Lol, if I were going to do something external, I'd probably just fabricate the housing myself, and solder the connections for whatever I needed myself.