[NAME] Area-51 ALX 2006 sounds pretty cool. Love seeing people doing big mods to these old laptops [NAME] it would be great if you could head over to [URL] and post what you've done and planning to do. This forum started up recently after the old NotebookReview forums were closed down and it more of a hive for laptop enthusiasts. 
 One of my friends has an AW M17x R2 (2010), and for the heck of it, I tried swapping my MXM Quadro p4000 into his laptop to see if it could work. While the internal RGBLED display did not work at all, upon disconnecting the display, and using the HDMI port instead, I was able to get a video out and boot to windows. With the p4000 being quite valuable, I simply shut it back down and removed the card for now, but I'll likely be selling it to him in a few months. I'll post again to tell you all how that goes when I do it. I plan to modify the display assembly to house an extra M17x R4 display I have, and then run an HDMI to LVDS inverter board in the space where the second GPU would normally be. This will make the device unable to run on battery because of the inverter board, but that's fine with me as it doesn't have a battery and replacements simply don't exist. I'll also likely just boot long enough to get the instance path of the GPU, then modify the drivers on another computer to minimize the risk of cooking the GPU. Just thought I'd throw this info out there to let any M17x R2 owners know their laptop might actually still be able to be pretty far from useless.
M17x R2, Pascal GPU upgrade?