Dell M4700 REBUILD #5 - I Bought An **IMPOSTOR** Graphics Card!

The TaoBao Impostor Video Card

In my ongoing efforts to bring CRAZY, my Dell PRECISION M4700 laptop back to life, I decided that swapping out the video card would make a certain amount of sense, if only at the right price.

Not knowing much about this type of Graphics Card (MXM TYPE A), I looked at the AMD GPU processor model (216-0834044) on Dell OEM MXM TYPE A Graphics Card (#3YF07) model number, 109-C42251-00A.

This card identified in Windows as an AMD FirePro M4000 with 1Gb of RAM.  So, I then performed a search for a card of that type on the source of cheapest stuff I know of, TaoBao.  For those of you who don't know what TaoBao is, it's kind of like a mashup of eBay and Amazon in China.  It's by far the largest eCommerce marketplace in China, and it is owned by Alibaba, the monster company started by Jack Ma in 1999.  Alibaba is the biggest eCommerce company in the world - bigger even than eBay or Amazon.

Anyway, looking around in TaoBao for an inexpensive MXM TYPE A Graphics Card, I came across an interesting listing.  The low price made buying it easy (¥76.00 / USD10.91), so I went ahead with the order!

Once the item arrived, everything looked OK.  The card came very well packaged, and the seller was thoughtful.  They even included a dab of thermal grease in a second bag, just in case I didn't have any on hand.

Even though it looked the same as the Dell OEM card - it had 4 x Hynix H5GQ1H24BFR and the same AMD GPU (#216-0834044) as the Dell Laptop Graphics Card I had previously taken a blowtorch to - this card turned out to be a little bit of a mystery.  The first thing I noticed was that it had these red-colored brackets around the GPU, and a different model number (# 109-C56351-00_02):

Eventually, using its model number, I was able to determine that this card was actually an OEM card produced for the HP Elitebook, the 8770W, and maybe only had 512Mb onboard, which meant that while it looked all the world like its Dell counterpart, in reality it had only 50% of the video RAM and was therefore (gently) an IMPOSTOR Graphics Card for my MXM TYPE A compatible Dell PRECISION M4700!

Well, we shall see if the Dell PRECISION M4700 likes, recognizes and configures the 8770W, and is able to use this card as it could its OEM Graphics Card, which was physically (but not technically) identical to this replacement. Installation was a snap, because the two cards share the same form factor.