Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Any laptop graphic card upgrade? 3

Status
Not open for further replies.

lightning15243

Technical User
Mar 9, 2003
4
US
Are there any good video cards that can possibly plug into a port outside of your computer? This I know is a dumb question, but I need to know if there is any possible way whatsoever to upgrade the graphics card for my laptop. I need to know if I need to buy another computer or not.
 
All of them suck? man that is dumb. are there any decent ones that would perhaps be totally external including their our cooling source or maybe even it's own power supply that would plug into some port like a PCMCIA slot?
 
There certainly is room for improvement in this area, with new protocols like Firewire and Serial ATA. I'm sure one day somebody will come along with a USB 4.x GeForce XPortable, which simply plugs into the USB port and takes over 3D graphics seamlessly.
One day, but not tomorrow.
The hard truth is that the only upgradeable components on a laptop are the memory (up to a point) and the hard disk (up to a point). For the rest, PCMCIA modules are mainly of the commmunication kind, although there are card readers and security systems (think biometrics) that are available.
And everything is expensive.
I have never heard of a PCMCIA-adaptable graphics card though. Without the link from pddxr, I would have said they don't exist.
 
On TechTV, I seen a show that talked about this, and they had an ATI rep showing off a there new graphics chip for laptops. The ATI rep said that they were working on a way to upgrade graphics cards on laptops.
 
I have been silently wondering the same thing myself, as my laptop always seems to be 'just-out' of the cutting-edge requirements for these games coming out now...

I'll have to buy a new pc to play Homeworld2 if things stay like they are right now.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top