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I got myself an MSI GL62M 7RD-265 back in 2017.

For the graphics card, it has the GeForce GTX 1050.

It has the i5 7th gen Kaby Lake 2.5GHz processor and HM175 chipset.

I am thinking about upgrading the graphics card to like a 1070...or even one of the newer 1650 or 1660ti cards.

Is it doable, in your guys' opinion?

That particular model has the CPU and GPU soldered so swapping them is pretty much impossible. What you can do in order to speed it up a bit is add a second RAM module and a M2 SSD.

Generally speaking, customising a laptop is a genuine pain in the arse. If that's your jam, buy a desktop. The miniaturised nature of the components and habit of soldering everything to everything else means you more or less need to be a professional to start tinkering inside a laptop to any substantial degree.

"Upgrading laptop GPU...doable?"

No. Don't need more than the thread title to answer it.

At one point Nvidia was trying to work on a standardized form factor and specs but they abandoned that a decade ago. It's almost always impossible and that's not going to change; there isn't really any profit in it for the OEMs, and there is a lot of specific engineering that goes into laptops in terms of power and thermal considerations (did you know the 1070 pulls twice as much wattage as the 1050, for example?).

Most of the time you're lucky if you can change your GPU with the exact same mobile GPU from a compatible laptop motherboard, honestly.

Well gak.

Guess I will start saving for a new one then.

As an IT professional, every time I'm asked for recommendations for a 'gaming' laptop I just tell people not to bother. Invariably the budget is about £500 and I let them know that they'll be disappointed in any 3D performance (if not straight away then certainly within 1-2 years) and be unable to improve it.

I'm sort of surprised laptops are still a viable market for home consumers (although a few manufacturers have pulled out) - I have 2 myself but only as they were decommissioned work pieces that I use if I've got an issue with a rig and I need net access nearby to fix it etc. I would have thought most people who don't need Word/Excel etc would have made the tablet switch by now.

There's still enough things that don't work properly on tablets for that to be annoying - I always have trouble renewing my Amazon Prime subscription on Twitch, for example, as that only seems to be an option on the non-tablet/mobile version of their website. Plus, typing anything more than a short SMS or tweet is annoying.

"Sort of"

Something I've thought of, and these guys seem to be very into it

https://egpu.io/

Solutions range from "You need a very recent type USB and a box to slot the GPU into" to "You must hack holes in your case, take out the wifi card and replace it with another bit of hardware that then links to your GPU, and will only be able to use that on an external display"

Have a look on the forums, e.g. https://egpu.io/forums/expresscard-mpcie-m-2-adapters/stability-problem-with-exp-gdc-beast-v9-0b-m-2-and-dual-hdmi/

There's a good chance that somebody there has tried to do something similar to something like your laptop.

 TheMeanDM wrote:
Guess I will start saving for a new one then.

A good time to ask yourself, then - do I actually play games remotely? Because I bought 2 great gaming laptops in the last 10 years, and pretty much never used either - I use my desktop. Those were objectively not wise purchases. Right now I use my beefy 1070 laptop to copy STL files from my nas to my 3d printers, this is a job a Rasperry Pi could probably handle without breaking a sweat.

So, if you don't travel or go to lan parties... maybe you want a desktop instead? Maybe not, obviously... but something to think about.

 TheMeanDM wrote:
Is it doable, in your guys' opinion?

Depends. Do you have a compatible card (or an identical copy salvaged from elsewhere) and experience soldering tiny surface mount components? Easy enough, just remove the old card and swap in the new one. Is your knowledge of computer upgrades limited to swapping cards in and out of their sockets on a desktop PC? Not a chance.

If you want a computer for gaming, do NOT go with a laptop. ever. I'm assuming you're using it for gaming since there wouldn't be any other reason to upgrade a part.

Laptops are only useful for people who need a computer on the go to do stuff with documents and email that can't be done on a phone. For gaming they are pretty much useless. They wear out faster because of the thermal stress and can't be upgraded. Even if you buy a "gaming laptop" its a waste of money because it just doesn't have enough cooling to keep from getting fried within a couple years.

Save up and build yourself a decent gaming desktop. It'll perform far better and you'll be able to actually upgrade it when the time comes. If you do have to make it smaller, they do make small PC towers that do away with a lot of the empty space inside a normal tower, but those do usually require a more robust cooling system.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Even if you buy a "gaming laptop" its a waste of money because it just doesn't have enough cooling to keep from getting fried within a couple years.

wait what

My niece is still using my 2007 era gaming laptop for garry's mod, dawn of war, and minecraft to this day.

Must be lucky. I fried my first, and only, laptop back in 2009. The motherboard and video card got so warped that they actually peeled apart. I did tend to run it for 10ish hours at a time of course, plus it got used for schoolwork too. So I was running it into the ground.

Of course another reason not to get a gaming laptop is the price. You'll get way more computer for your buck with a desktop.

None of the gaming laptops I've owned have fried themselves.

An advantage of a gaming laptop over a desktop is the portability. Not just for playing on the go but also the freedom to set it up wherever you want it in your own home with minimal fuss. You can set it by the tv and plug it in with an HDMI while you sit on the sofa with your gamepad, you can have it on the coffee table in the lounge, you can get a little foldout table thing like a dinner tray and play it while you sit in bed etc. And when you set it up on your desk, you only need one plug socket rather than two.

My current laptop is an MSI I got around two years ago. Was a discontinuing line with an NVIDIA GTX970 as all the new ones were switching to the 10series gpus. Still running perfectly fine, still keeping up with the games I want to play (Cyberpunk 2077 is probably going to be the big test for it).

Before that I had a Dell XPS15, still runs fine, just fell behind the GPU curve once the PS4 and XBox One came out (when it couldn't run Dark Souls 3 I knew it was time to upgrade) and now also has a linux partition which I used for all of my MSc work including simulating black hole x-ray observations.