Graphics Card

dvdfan

Hi,

A mate is looking to buy a new graphics card for his laptop, he wants to play championship manager however it needs a 128mb card and he has a 64mb. I went to dabs and komplett but i dont see anything that differntiates PC's from laptops, is there a particular type of card i should be looking for and also is it like a memory card where it needs to be compatible with the motherboard and if so then is there somewhere i can type in the model of the laptop and find compatabile ones and then look for them on dabs or komplett?

Happy New Year

h8red

It's almost impossible to buy a replacment graphics card for a laptop. Although it very much depends on the make/model of laptop. I would say that none of the graphics cards on Komplett/Dabs will go into a laptop, that's why they don't differentiate. They're all for desktops.

If you can tell us make/model of laptop we can tell you more.

Happy New Year to you too!

Cuddlesworth

h8red wrote: »

It's almost impossible to buy a replacment graphics card for a laptop. Although it very much depends on the make/model of laptop. I would say that none of the graphics cards on Komplett/Dabs will go into a laptop, that's why they don't differentiate. They're all for desktops.

If you can tell us make/model of laptop we can tell you more.

Happy New Year to you too!

Just validating what he said.

dvdfan

Not looking good so, its a Toshiba Tecra M2 and i presume if it was dell i might have had a chance. One of the guys in click told him its possible to get a grapics card that plugs into a USB port, anyone heard of these, are they compatabile with this model?

Overheal

the throughput of a USB-video processor is poor at best.

AlmightyCushion

There is a graphics card that plugs into the express card slot. It's made by asus. Don't know if they ever released it or what the price would be (very expensive no doubt). They aren't a great option though as the bandwidth is very limited because it's using the express card slot.

Overheal

well it depends on the card and the slot.

Expresscard (USB 2.0 Mode) - 480Mbits per second
Expresscard (PCI-e Mode) - 2048Mbits per second

PCI - 133Mbps
AGP - 2133 Mbps

This might be of interest to you though:

wikipedia wrote:

Potentially External PCIe could give a notebook the graphic power of a desktop, by connecting a notebook with any PCIe desktop video card (enclosed in its own external housing), however, only one finalized product and two concept products exist. All three deliver the power of the video card to external displays only, and all connect to a notebook through an ExpressCard interface which limits the bandwidth from an inserted x16 video card (4 GB/s in each direction), to just x1 (250 MB/s in each direction): Magma ExpressBox Magma. Luxium by MSI TheInquirer, CustomPcMag. XG Station by Asus Asus, VR-Zone

Additionally, Nvidia has developed Quadro Plex, external PCIe Video Cards that can be used for advanced graphic applications. These video cards require a PCI Express x8 or x16 slot, for the interconnection cable.[8] AMD has recently announced the ATI XGP technology based on proprietary cabling solution which is compatible with PCIe signal transmissions.[9]

You could try searching for any of those card models online, but I highly doubt you will find them, or if you do they will be comparitively expensive to just buying a newer laptop.

here: XG-Station: 8600GT Docking Station - $385 and only compatible with a few select models of laptop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XG_Station

AlmightyCushion

The amd one is the best of the lot as it has a lot more bandwidth and I think it lets you put in your own card. It's only available on the newer laptops though. Hopefully it becomes standard.

Overheal

I think I have an ex2.0 slot though. I will definitely have to try that with my 4850 whenever it hits the market.