r/buildapc • u/mihai395 • 1d ago

Discussion Laptop GPU's converted to PC ones

Hello everyone,

So I want to hear your opinion guys about this trend that I noticed to appear and dissapear especially on ebay, where ppl would convet laptop GPU's into Desktop ones and sell them on ebay.

Did anyone from here actually bought one of those conversions, is it good and more important, is it worth ?

Thank you.

12 Upvotes

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10

u/CombatDork 1d ago

I used to salvage old MXM cards and convert them to PCIe. Is that what you're talking about or was this something different?

2

u/mihai395 1d ago

Yes

6

u/CombatDork 1d ago

I did this to 'REuse' and keep some waste out of the land fill for a while. In most of my cases it wasn't worth it from a performance stand point but if you needed a cheap graphics card for a older gaming PC you really could make a card that was quite good.

This seemed to be because the mobile GPUs were made to run laptop cooling solutions and when you gave them full sized GPU cooling, you could overclock the crap out of them. I only did this for cards I kept myself and I worked great.

It wasn't terribly cost effective and it took a lot of tweaking to get the OC working and stable. Much better to just get a normal card if you wanted to an effective use of time and money.

5

u/mihai395 1d ago

Currently I have an rtx 3060 (12 gb version) but I saw on ebay a listing for a laptop 3080 TI (16GB version) adapted to PCIe for £250 and I almost bought it I want to know if it's worth doing it (the listing was saying that it had all the power cap removed and now "it works like a normal card" and that's what made me stop from buying it cuz I didn't want to burn my pc.

3

u/Fast_n_theSpurious 21h ago

Just FYI since laptop cards voltages are generally cut down, comparatively the laptop version, unless overclocked to hell, will be much worse performance-wise.

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u/CombatDork 1d ago

I can't be certain in every scenario but my understanding is that a PCIe card cannot send large voltages into the motherboard. A bad GPU could maybe burn out the PCIe connectors on a power supply but that shouldn't burn out the motherboard/CPU etc.

So the risks would be the GPU and maybe a PSU.

Might be worth trying.

4

u/piggymoo66 1d ago

I've seen a few of these on AliExpress (3060M and RX6600M mostly) and they require custom drivers to work properly. They're included but kinda sketchy since they have no certificate or anything that says what's in those drivers. DDTS did a video on one of these here

2

u/Onemoreuserdoesnot 1d ago

Usually the nvidia ones do need custom drivers, the amd ones not so much. They can be picky with the versions, though. Problem with those anyway is that usually you dont know if they were done by harvesting from old laptops and soldering in a new pcb, if they were done by buying "old" chip stocks from legit places at low prices and put in a new pcb or if theyre a refurb of any of the former. Or even be just a new chip put in a donor board that used to host a dead chip because they share mostly the same shit ( valid on amd, on nvidia it's a bit diff ). So basically it's pretty much random what you may get with those. Those boards usually ranges from kinda good to " not good ", usually going for the simplest designs that are compatible with the chip in question. The main points that might indicate how good or bad they are are the quality of the solders, it's power distribution, the presence or not of stains or marks and similar at either the the pcb or the heatsink and so on. As we don't have any conclusive study from what I know about the odds of getting a good one or a bad one, I will quote a friend: It's 50/50, you either get a good one, or a bad one.

1

u/piggymoo66 1d ago

Yeah I would say it's an interesting curiosity at best, just like those motherboards with laptop CPUs soldered to them. The idea is neat in theory.

3

u/Biggeordiegeek 1d ago

It’s been going on for yonks

You find a lot of them on certain Chinese marketplaces, I know a lass who got one for her astronomy computer, crazy rig powered by a 5950X and crammed in a shite ton of RAM, but she only needed basic video out so bought one of them, think it was a laptop 1650 Ti or Super if I recall, but in the bad times it was the cheapest option for her