MXM-Upgrade

Note (24 january 2008): The x1900 currently on offer is physically exactly the same as the x1800 and consumes exctly the same power, so this tutorial is also valid for the more powerfull x1900.

By Paul B. Philipp

I purchased the Shuttle X100 due to its size and performance. At the time I was looking for a powerful computer that was small so I could put it under my HDTV. After looking around I discovered the Shuttle X100. This computer had decent specifications but it was first introduced with the ATI X1400 MXM card. Will I was disappointed with this card I decided to purchase the computer because I believed that I could purchase an after market card as an upgrade. As many people have discovered the MXM cards are almost nonexistent. If I had known this was going to be the case I would not have bought the computer.

The Shuttle X100 has been on the market for over a year and it still only comes with the X1400 MXM card. Shuttle did come out with an X200 computer but it is ever more of a dog with an integrated graphics.

I discovered that I could upgrade my MXM card at MXM-upgrade. I tried to find other sources for MXM cards but none seem to exist.

My first concern was the different types of MXM cards. Shuttle does not tell you what type of card that they installed. I was able to find a review of the X100 on the web where someone determined that the X1400 MXM card that shuttle installed is a Type II. Not the best news since all of the better MXM upgrades are Type III cards or the Arima Special. Ultimately, I had to open my PC to figure out what types of cards would fit. Turns out that the Shuttle X100 has the space available for the larger Type III and Arima MXM cards.

As a result, I decided to upgrade to the ATI X1800 from MXM-UPGRADE.

I didn’t want my computer to be down for long so I purchased a few things in order to be prepared.

1. a flat facing router bit (to machine the heat sink as required)
2. Thermal Tape
3. Thermal Grease (Antec Formula 5 Silver Compound)

I also tried to find some thicker thermal pads but I had no luck.

MXM-upgrade sent a piece of 1mm thermal pad with the X1800 MXM card.

Here is the process that I followed.

First I read through the general guidelines that are posted on the MXM-upgrade web site.

MXM-upgrade recommends that you uninstall the card drivers before you upgrade your MXM graphics card. I did not do this. I don’t really know how to uninstall the ATI drivers and the though of unloading seemingly necessary software makes me nervous. More on this later.

Opening up the Box.

Turns out you only need 1 tool, a small Philips head screw driver.

The Top plate of the Shuttle X100 is held in place by three small screws. With the screws removed the top cover can be removed by sliding the cover aft about 1 inch. A little force is necessary at first. Note, Shuttle does put a tamper proof sticker over one of the screws so they can void your warranty if you open the computer your self. A lousy trick for a computer manufacture.

Once the lid is open the heat sink can be removed. This is held in place by 8 screws. A small plug for the fan also needs to be unplugged.

Here is a picture of the open computer with the heat sink already removed.

 

The ATI X1400 MXM card is shown in the top center in the red dashed box.

This picture doesn’t show it well but Shuttle uses some sort of thick thermal grease/past for the thermal interface to the heat sink.

Also take note that shuttle uses some sort of light blue thermal pad on the MXM memory module. This pad is about 1mm thick and it is spongy. This blue thermal pad is used in several places on the heat sink.

Here is a picture of the heat sink.

In this picture you can see the thermal grease that shuttle applies where the intel processor goes but I already cleaned the spot where MXM processor goes.

The exiting X1400 MXM card has two tall components on the card. The heat sink has machines spots for these components and Shuttle uses the blue thermal pads to dissipate heat from these components into the heat sink. The original location of the pads is show in the picture above.

For some reason the new ATI X1800 card has moved these components. This was my main concern from an upgrade standpoint. With the Heat sink out of the computer the first thing that I checked for was an interference with the MXM X1800 card and the heat sink. To my surprise there is none. The X1800 processor contacts the square copper heat sink pad with no interferences. In Addition I could not see a gap between the heat sink and the X1800 processor.

The only change that I did was to clean off the thermal past that shuttle uses and I moved the two blue thermal pads to the new locations corresponding to the tall components on the X1800 card. These thermal pads do not have any adhesive material.

The next step I remove the large blue thermal pad from the X1400 cards memory. See first picture. Shuttle used a large piece here so I cut it into 4 pieces and put them on the memory of the X1800 card.

I also outlined the tall components in red. They get blue thermal pads as well but I moved those on the heat sink as noted above.

The original X1400 card is shown in the next picture. This card has a piece of black tape or film. I am not sure what purpose this serves. This tape is stuck to the X1400 card with some adhesive. I’m not an electrician but the components under the tape looked similar enough to the components on the X1800 card so I moved the tape to the same location on the X1800 card. Due to the shape and orientation of the processor on the X1800 card I had to cut out a notch of the black tape to get it in the correct spot. See figure 5 below.

At this point, I installed the X1800 card into the Shuttle X100 PC. One in the slot 2 screws hold the card in place.

Before I put the Heat Sink back into place I cleaned the interfacing surfaces for the MXM processor and the PC intel processor. Then I used Antec 5 for the thermal interface for both of these components. I followed the instructions for applying thermal grease that came with the Antic grease. I used a razor blade to spread the grease evenly over the surface of each processor.

Finally I reinstalled the heat sink and put the top back on the X100.

Black Tape re-applied to the X1800 card with notch

After the Computer was put back together, I still had to load new drivers.

The Computer starts in a default mode with basic resolution of 800x600. This mode cut off the top and bottom of my display since I am using HDMI as my input into my TV. As long as you know where the menu is you can get things to work.

After the PC is started it detects the new hardware and a Microsoft help wizard pops up. Ignore this for now. An additional window also pops up to tell you that the ATI Card is not responding. Ignore this as well.

At this point I went to the web to get the Omega drivers. If I were to do this over, I would have down loaded the drivers before starting the modification. I normally prefer a CD with the drivers on it. You can download the driver program. After you install the upgraded card all you need to do is run the driver update program that you already downloaded from the web.

Once downloaded, I installed the drivers. I was a little concerned because my computer appeared to lock up during this process. I’m not sure what happened but the problem cleared after several minutes.

I rebooted my computer after that. The first reboot crashed or locked up for some reason and I had to do a forced shutdown. On the second try it booted up but it took about 20 time longer than normal. This appears to have been a one time thing due to the driver update and I haven’t had a problem since.

Not much to it really!