GPU upgrade on ASUS N56VZ. (Laptop)

[MadShadow]

Hello everybody, before I ask my questions, I would like to warn you that I do not know if this is the correct place to post this thread.

This is about my Asus N56VZ laptop as the title suggests. My question is: Can I upgrade the GPU?

I am aware that many laptops have soldered GPUs and CPUs, so I was wondering about my laptop. Just so you know, I do not care about voiding the warranty or the fact that it will be time consuming.

Thanks in advance!

 

[barnsley]

I'd imagine they put some sort of software lock in the bios to stop you doing that. Sorry :l.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Could check with Asus and ask them? Or open up your laptop to see if it is soldered.

 

[jamesriley94]

It will be soldered.

The only ones that aren't soldered are in £1000+ laptops, and those are always really beefy - and they have to be beefy since they need a more well rounded cooling system (pretty much always with multiple fans.

Yours will have the CPU relatively close to the GPU, and it'll be a single heatsink system to cool both of them.

 

[MicroAlex]

I am 99.9% sure it is soldered as it was with all Asus N series laptops. The best thing you can do is to add some performance by overclocking your nVidia chip and it's memory modules. It is quite easy if you follow the guidelines.
NOTE, MAKE SURE YOUR LAPTOP'S COOLING IS ADEQUATE! If you have a nice chip, you can see ~20% performance boost.

Most desktop users will advice against this, but from my personal experience its fine as long as you are sensible. I have overclocked quite a few laptops, including mine. Most recent was my girlfriends Acer laptop, but as it was a budget model the cooling is on the weak side. In result for added performance I need to do some cooling modding (might just post it on OC3D for fun).

The CPU on the other hand is replaceable, but unless u are packing a week i3, there is no point to upgrade it for games. If you are like me and do graphical work and game, then it makes sense to go from lets say i5 to i7.

Anyway, hope it helps and Merry Christmas!