December 14, 2004

7:04 AM

Can you upgrade your laptop's video card at all? I was curious as I have a 32mb NVidea card on it however I'd love to upgrade it. Is this possible or is there a way to enhance it's performance? (I'm 99.9% the answer is "NO" but I thought I'd ask)
posted by Hands of Manos to (11 comments total)

You're right: Nope.
posted by jaded at 7:06 AM on December 14, 2004

That said, you might be able to squeeze a bit more life out of it by playing around with the drivers and whatnot.
posted by ph00dz at 7:12 AM on December 14, 2004

adding more ram would help too, yes?
posted by Hands of Manos at 7:13 AM on December 14, 2004

I'd think so, especially because a lot of laptops share the main system ram with that of the video card.

Do you have a particular goal in mind -- like a specific game or something like that?
posted by ph00dz at 7:20 AM on December 14, 2004

There are a small handful of laptops which use regular AGP video cards in them. You'd know if you had one, because you would have gone out of your way to locate such an obscure thing, and paid a premium for it. So: no.
posted by majick at 7:39 AM on December 14, 2004

yeah sims2 is what I'd like to be able to play a little more decently
posted by Hands of Manos at 7:40 AM on December 14, 2004

The Dell Inspiron 8000 series places the GPU on an upgradable daughter card, but your choices are limited to what Dell offered during the lifetime of your machine.
posted by b1tr0t at 8:23 AM on December 14, 2004

I have seen pcmcia graphics cards, but have no experience with them.
posted by mecran01 at 8:33 AM on December 14, 2004

to second b1tr0t: the Latitude C8xx series are the same way (since they're largely the same machine). however that does not mean you can transplant cards between lines in the series, if that makes sense. I tried to put an Inspiron 7500 card in a 7000 once and was greeted with an unbooting machine. (if it does work this way then it'd be really cool. unfortunately I think the most you can get on such a machine is a geforce4go 440.)
posted by mrg at 10:39 AM on December 14, 2004

I've got a PCMCIA video card (Margi 4MB Display-to-go) and it's great for work, but I don't know what it's like for gaming. Unfortunately it's at work and I'm on holiday, so I can't test it for you. I don't think it has any 3D capabilities...

I'm currently trying to squeeze gaming performance out of a Fujitsu 6659 (1.1GHz P3m, 384MB RAM). It has an Intel 82830M. I'm testing with World of Warcraft, but my 10-day guest pass has expired and everywhere is out of stock, at least for a couple more days.

Since I had a friend log on for me to see if it worked at all, I haven't had a chance to see if my software changes have increased the frame rate above 6.5FPS. I cleaned out a bunch of useless junk running in the background, upgraded the video driver, defragged the hard drive and even cleared the wallpaper. I've bookmarked this thread, hopefully it will still be open after I get my account back up.

The laptop does use shared memory I think. It has 384MB installed, but Windows only says 376MB, leading me to believe that 8MB is reserved for the video card. I'm hoping that it just expands that as necessary, but I haven't tested extensively. I'm going to see if I can reserve more in the BIOS.
posted by krisjohn at 3:14 PM on December 14, 2004

Okay, I finally had the chance to test my "upgrades". Looks like I've scored 1-2 FPS more. And it climbs to 10 FPS in low detail areas. So, if you want to boost your laptop's gaming performance by 30%, try new drivers, a defrag and cleaning all the junk out of statup.

Same goes for any PC really.
posted by krisjohn at 6:21 AM on December 17, 2004