Inside Acer Aspire V15 Nitro Black Edition (VN7-591G, GTX 960M) – disassembly, internal photos and upgrade options
Acer updated its popular among gamers Nitro line with the new GeForce 9xxM GPUs and made it one of the most wanted gaming laptops, once again. There appeared to be little doubt that it would take pole position, given the awesome price tag and the fact that the new V15 was the first GTX 960M notebook on the market. Now there are some more great alternatives, but none of them could match the price of the new Nitro.
We already showed you the notebook in its full glory, in our detailed review, but now we’re going to dig a little deeper into its internals.
Aspire V15 Nitro is one of these Acer laptops, which are a real pain in the neck when it comes to upgrading maintenance. Instead of removing a little “service cover” at the bottom, in order to upgrade you RAM, you have to do a full “dissection”, which includes taking out the keyboard and the motherboard. It’s not that hard, but we still don’t recommend you do it by yourself, if you don’t have disassembling experience. And if you do – you should still be careful if you’re looking forward to the GTA 5 release but don’t plan on buying a new (working) machine.
Taking out the keyboard
In order to take out the keyboard panel, you need to remove 12 screws at the bottom and then use some kind of pry tool to lift up the palm rest. Be careful here – you should lift it just a little, so as to get access to the attached cables. There are three – for the keyboard, for the backlight and for the touchpad. Then you can carefully remove the keyboard panel.
HDD, M.2 SSD, Battery, Fans
That gets you access to some of the components which require frequent service – the 2.5” HDD, M.2 slot, battery and the dual fans. Be sure that you’ve disconnected the battery, before going any further.
- The battery is AC14A8L (52.5Wh / 4605 mAh, 11.1V).
- The M.2 slot (in our case it’s free) is 2280-sized, SATA III with B&M key.
- The Wi-Fi card is Qualcomm QCA6174 802.11ac Wi-Fi 2×2 MIMO
Removing the motherboard
If you have to remove the motherboard, disconnect the card reader cable and remove the cardboard, disconnect the Wi-Fi antennas, remove the WLAN card, disconnect the speaker cable and remove the motherboard screws. That way you could remove the motherboard and get full access, including to the two ram slots. This is the “backside” of the motherboard:
Don’t forget to read our detailed review on the updated V15 Nitro:
http://laptopmedia.com/review/acer-aspire-v15-nitro-black-edition-vn7-591g-gtx-960m-same-body-more-powerful-internals/
Great and detailed job guys!
We’re happy to hear that, Marcos. Thanks for being our reader =)
It’s nice that you made this awesome website, but I’d be even more happy if you update news.laptop.bg daily, or should I leave it and follow only laptopmedia.com ?
First of all, thanks for the kind words. We would also be extremely happy if we could support both the Bulgarian and the international media constantly, but LaptopMedia.com is the project we dreamt about for many years, and now that it’s finally online, we’re going to stay focused on it. This doesn’t mean that we’ll cease paying attention to the Bulgarian media. We received many requests to continue the support of our original blog, which is a clear sign that it means a lot for the Bulgarian users, and we’re happy that we’ve managed to be useful. The thing is… Read more »
Simeon, a question. Is there going to be an option with gtx 970M in the laptop.bg online shop?
Unfortunately, Acer aren’t going to make a GTX 970M version of Aspire Nitro (at least for the time being). The only 970Ms in laptop.bg’s online shop are ASUS G751:
http://laptop.bg/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=gtx+970m
Thank you a lot for the quick answer Simeon. Another question is about this Acer, is the GPU a removable one, something like the MXM standard or anything that can be changed without too much problems in the future?
Unfortunately, it’s soldered.
Simeon, I hace changed some components of my old laptop so I know more or less how to disassemble a laptop I ask you if the CPU is relatively to change, if I decide to go for An i5 and some time ahead i could decide to change it for the i7?
what is the screw size to secure the m.2 ssd?
It’s a standart one, though I can’t give you a exact numbers, sorry. ):
Hello. How do I get my OS onto the M2 SSD? I installed the SSD and the BIOS sees it correctly, etc. I can’t get the system restore disk I created to let me direct it to the news SSD.
Great guide here either way. Thanks in advance!
Hey guys which RAM fits the laptop reviewed in this page.
ANY amazon link?
Please help.
Thanks
Great teardown, thanks for this Simeon/LaptopMedia. I was wondering, is there anyway you can give me an estimate of the clearance between the “bottom” of the motherboard and the case? I’ve purchased a variant of this laptop and am looking to improve the cooling with additional heatsinks and possibly reinforcing the heat exchanger pipes to address heat concerns. While copper ships, thermal paste and heat exchangers aren’t a concern, the heat sinks with prongs are. Don’t want to order things I won’t be able to use. Thanks!
Thanks for the teardown guide here! I don’t know if I would have been able to swap out the HDD for a SSD without it… however my model seemed to be slightly different with the HDD having some sort of plastic coverattached to it which again was attached to the keyboard… basically it made it so there was one extra wire to disconnect and the HDD was attached to the keyboard and came out as I lifted it up… it was a bit harder to get to all the wires as well as you couldn’t really lift the keyboard much… Read more »
Hi, there! Great disassembly 🙂 I was just wondering where the speakers are? I tried to seee them on the pics but I failed to do so 😀
Are you sure this is a b and m key?
I went over this website and I believe you have a lot of superb info, saved to bookmarks (:.
Have you testet which modes the M.2. Slot supports?
The photos indicate that it is an M-Slot ( compatible with B ).
But you only stated that it is SATA 6Gb/s.
Did you try to use a PCI-E module?
I would also like to ask how was the application of the thermal compounds for the acer v15 black edition? I heard the company did a horrendous job in regards to this matter.
mine started making this buzzing/interference sound (seems like the sound is coming around the center towards the left). any ideas parts might cause this? thanks
That’s definitely a sound related to the HDD. We’ve tried the notebook with an SSD and the scratching sound went away. This is an issue not only with the 15-inch version but also with the 17-incher, since they both have the same supplier of HDDs.
thanks for the reply Rossen. do you know if this laptop can support double ssd? I might take out the HDD if that’s the problem
Is it possible to add an SSD on top of the already existing HDD?