07-04-2010, 06:07 PM

(I have a black macbook from 2008. It has a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of DDR2 SDRAM)

My optical drive broke, so I got a cheap external and want to make the best possible use of the unused space. I was going to put in a second hard drive, since it would be easy and useful...

But what I REALLY want is to add a graphics card that would make it possible to rotate my internal display, since I am seriously considering going modbook (Axiotron Auto Forward). Ideally, I'd like to put a combination of graphics card and battery or hard drive into the space where my optical drive used to be.

I have no idea how to go about doing this, or if it is even possible, but this article (Would You Ditch Your MacBook’s Optical Drive For A Speed+Battery Boost? | Cult of Mac) suggests that it may be...

Has anyone tried to do this? Can anyone point me in the right direction?

07-04-2010, 06:09 PM

Not possible. There are no expansion slots within this machine that one can plug a graphics card into.

07-05-2010, 03:22 AM

Is there a way to add in a slot? In another thread (Macbook Graphics Card [Archive] - Mac Forums) a user said "So you have to hack the machine to create a PCI-Express slot and add a GPU where it likely won't fit. Really, messy." It doesn't sound like anyone would recommend it, but if there is any way at all to do it, I'd like to find out as much about it as I can.

07-05-2010, 09:30 AM

Given accessibility of an SMD workstation, considerable experience in soldering SMD components, a schematic of the logic board, pinouts of the chipset, access to a micro PCI Express card that is supported by OS X, the ability to reprogram the EFI to make it coexist with the integrated graphics, and several days of work, it might be possible...

Or for a fraction of the cost involved, you could just buy a MacBook Pro.

The moral of this story is that *anything* is possible, but you have to consider whether it's practical or economically viable. And will the finished project be worth the effort and expense. In this case, it wouldn't be. Even if you did, the end result would likely be a very flakey and unstable machine.

Notebooks are particularly difficult to perform this kind of a hack on, since the tolerances of the cooling system are extremely tight, given a limited amount of space to work in.

07-05-2010, 02:53 PM

Oh well, at least now I know it's infeasible. Thanks for the info.