Pulling the laptop apart was uneventful without anything flying across the room or those fiddly small connectors - which I can barely see - snapping, removing and slapping in the new GPU was just six screws and a bit of thermal paste, and when it was all screwed back together, I didn’t even have any screws left over. Switching on and debian detected it happily, nvidia-smi and nvidia-detect were happy, and apt just installed the nvidia-driver without fuss.
Other than a loud snapping noise now made when the laptop is closed and hooks into the catch thing (perhaps it should always have been like this), it was quite dull and boring really.
What kid of form factor is used for that? Is it something brand specific?
Bog standard MXM A. I could have put an Nvidia Quadro T2000 in with a little case modification - cutting away to trim the stumps that hold the card in place - but the M2200 will do for now as it’ll allow me to use latest pytorch without manual compilation and fiddling about (I already did spend weeks manually compiling for the K2100 and it was a giant pita as it limits versions of other libraries). The card was about 1/3-1/4 the price of a T2000.
I already have another laptop with an RTX 3060, but thought I may as well upgrade this chunky beast of a laptop as I still use it daily.
Huh, I always assumed MXM was a well meant but stillborn gadget standard. Neat to hear that it actually serves its purpose here and there!