External GFX cards for laptops?
Community Forums/General Help/External GFX cards for laptops?
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| Do they exist? My laptops doesn't have an upgradeable GFX card. It's an Nvidia 9600GT M 512. Good card and very capable but what in 2 years time/ Or will I just have to shell out for another laptop. I spent £670 on this laptop. Not bad. It's faster than my desktop and I really am not interested anymore in having the latest tech so it was a good buy. I have tried googling but haven't come up with much. Lots of links to phantom gfx cards etc but no direct link to something already available or in the pipeline. Ta! |
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| the only way to 'upgrade' the video on a non-upgradable laptop, is if the laptop supports a dockingstation with expansion bays -- which are few and far in between. You can forget about any of the USB video devides and such, those are horrible compared to all but the worst built-in video interfaces. |
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| There are pleanty of externals to choose from, but the problem is they are rarely fast enough for gaming use. I personally use this one with a notebook: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0003NFY1E/ref=asc_df_B0003NFY1E802009?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&linkCode=asn&tag=cnet-1985-20 Buying a notebook with an upgradable graphics card is nice, but those can be hard to find. You do have a decent graphics chip in yours and it is not like notebooks are known for being gaming machines anyway. |
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| From the comments about that device on the page you linked to: "On the other hand, this can't match the quality of a standard video card, and motion will look somewhat choppy." "DirectX 3D windows (including any DirectX9 window) won't work. This means that some games can't display if you drag them to the attatched monitor. " These things are NOT in any way or shape intended for 3D gaming -- all they do is enable a single-screen machine to go dual-screen by USB... They're good at that, but that's not what he appears to be looking for here. If you're worried about the quality of the built-in card, then you're not going to find anything better over USB. (In general: USB = 480Megabit of bandwidth. A PCI Express card can handle many gigabyte per second (the exact speed depends on the of the bus used) |
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| These things are NOT in any way or shape intended for 3D gaming -- That is what I said:they are rarely fast enough for gaming use |
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| For some reason I glanced over that. :-? |
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