New Laptop :D

[Archaon]

If it's soldered on then you're pretty much screwed - it would be extremely hard to cleanly desolder and remove the old one and solder a new graphics card in. Also chances are you'd have to source a nerfed motherboard from a higher model to remove the new card from (and hope that the graphics card works and something else is nerfed). If it's integrated then you're completely screwed. If it's just hidden because Acer are tight and/or don't want people playing then you're fine - just be careful when you take the laptop apart as the last Acer I worked on was like working with thin cardboard once it was disassembled and lost it's structural rigidity. Mind you that was a cheapo model (think £300-350 tops and that was probably out of PC World) so yours may be better, but still.


In terms of MXM, it is PCIe in a different form factor rather than its own format. In fact I just looked it up to double check I wasn't talking out of my backside and apparently MXM stands for Mobile PCI Express Module. I guess MPEM wasn't funky enough so they went for MXM?

Similar cards are quite common in other areas. For example in blade servers you don't normally have space for big chunky PCIe cards so the blades use special little plug-in cards to add various things (like MXM they're normally PCIe, but not in the standard card format). HP call them mezzanine cards, IBM have a few different types depending on the card such as CIOv and CFFv (I think one of the IBM types is still based on the older PCI-X interface rather than PCIe).

PS - I didn't look beyond the first page but the majority of those eBay results are MXM cards. There's a few weirder ones but for all I know they could be older MXM cards that I don't recognise, or MXM cards in a proprietary riser-thingy that makes them look different and so on.