Upgrading Y550 video card & hard drive?

[Mythdefied]

I wanted to upgrade both the video card and the hard drive on my laptop, but when I go to the Lenovo site to see what cards are compatible, I can't get any information. After putting in my model number, it tells me that I may have an older machine and directs me to the comatibility guide. A guide that makes absolutely no sense to me and appears to mention the Y550 exactly nowhere.

Can anyone here tell me which video card are compatible, and if I need a compatible hard drive or if any laptop drive will do?

[ortegaluis]

The Y550 uses the standard 2.5" laptop hard drive with a 9.5mm height. I believe the discrete GPU is some sort of MXM solution. However, I don't know if there are compatible upgrades available.

[seeker_moc]

You can't upgrade the GPU in a laptop.  They're generally soldered on the motherboard, and even if you could switch out the chip, it probably wouldn't work.  Some large gamer laptops have an 'MXM' slot for upgrading the GPU, but I hightly doubt the Y550 is one of them.  I've only ever heard of them on Clevo and ASUS laptops.  And even if it did have MXM, which was a great idea when it came out a few years back, so few of the supporting laptops were sold that nobody ever bothered making upgraded GPUs for them, making the slot kinda useless.

[Willbur73]

The y550 uses Intel Integrated graphics as far as I understand. So it would use a portion of your RAM and processor to render graphics.

[XBrav Guru]

The higher end Y550 (mine) has a dedicated nVidia GPU. It looks soldered in though.

[mmaaddict78]

I figured I'd ask this question here first before cracking her open to look for myself.  

Does the Y550 have a soldered in GPU or does in use MXM card format?  I've searched the forum but found conflicting post and haven't received a conclusive answer.

The mobo in my laptop is the Lenovo KIWB1 with a P7450 CPU(will be upgrading to a Q9100), 4GB RAM and gt 240m GPU with 1 GB RAM.

Any help would be appreciated.

[yigit]

lets say it's possible. here's the issues:
- for example if you want to upgrade with gtx 580m, the power requirement is much more, so laptop can not support more power.
- the graphics card is almost as costly as the new laptop. so it's easier to buy new one.

ps: as i know, it's not possible.hope this helps.

[Richard_01]

Hello there,

lately i have been facing some problems with my Lenovo ideapad y550 with nVidia Geforce G 130M graphic card ( 512MB memory ) after almost 3 years of use,  for the past 3 month windows get to  freez  from time to time also when waking up from sleep,  no specific reason to be found ,,, laptop keeps running quietly but not responding all i can do is a hard shutdown ...

so i'm pretty sure its my graphic card  , after trying a lot of solutions... updating drivers , new windows installation , reinstalling graphic card from device manager , updating bios , checking card's and cpu  temprature i can only think of replacing it ....

so my question is can i replace the graphic card installed ? i know its not built in but can it be replaced ???

[velenoso666]

If your graphics card is failing you can't just replace it, you'll have to replace the whole motherboard. I'm guessing that would cost are $300 minimum if you can't do it yourself, seeing the only motherboard I've seen for the y550 was $205 2nd hand on ebay.

[kostadinbal]

I believe that you can replace the GPU only with the same model, not a better one. I have seen it on Toshiba Satellite with damaged ATI GPU (overheated) and the service changed it with the same ATI from another laptop. Its quite expensive to replace a component, you should save money for a new laptop