Raymond Luxury Yacht on 17/10/2011 at 10:49
Am I correct in thinking that laptops do not have a separate GPU? I was unable to find anything at newegg regarding a discrete video card.
I ask because my wife's laptop is almost four years old, and has an Athlon 64 dual core processor, 1.8 GHz, with GeForce7150M/nForce 630M graphics. It scores a whopping 2.5 on Windows Experience in graphics. I was curious if I could upgrade the video a bit more to play some newer stuff. It played Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines if I turned off almost everything else in task manager, but I'm not holding my breath for it to run much newer than that. I will assume I'll be in the 1999-2002 era of games; that's the bulk of my collection anyway, but it would be nice to replay FEAR or even Thief 3 if I wanted. I'm not too keen on replacing the processor/GPU if that's what it takes, but if there are any tricks to boosting graphics performance I'd love to know what they are.
Matthew on 17/10/2011 at 11:24
Some do have a separate GPU on the motherboard, but it's not usually a replaceable GPU if you know what I mean.
Ostriig on 17/10/2011 at 14:57
(
http://www.mxm-upgrade.com/Check.html) MXM-standard laptop GPUs were replaceable, but I had a quick search over the listings and didn't see any 7150. I don't think there's much you can do to squeeze more graphics power out of that system, I'm afraid.
Aerothorn on 17/10/2011 at 23:00
I found the 7150m (
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html) here - it's pretty low-end.
As noted, I think laptop GPUs can be pretty hard to upgrade, and honestly if the laptop is four years old it might be better to just get a new, cheaper one; gaming laptops can be expensive, of course, but if you get one with a sandy-bridge processor (i5 or whathaveyou) that should be able to play older games pretty well just off the intergrated GPU.
That said, Bloodlines isn't a good benchmark; it was horribly optimized and runs much worse than comparable games (for instance, Half Life 2 should run better than it).
lost_soul on 18/10/2011 at 00:50
I have an old laptop from around the turn of the century with 192 megs of RAM and a 533 MHz CPU. I would also like to put a decent graphics chip in it, like a Voodoo 3. Since it is a laptop though, I'm stuck with the integrated chip (which is pathetic). This thing could make a great win95/win98 gaming machine if I could put a decent retro GPU in it.
I even searched for PCMCIA 3D accelerators, but they don't make them. I guess the tight space and ventilation constraints would cause problems. Maybe now they could make GPUs for an express card slot.
I also saw somebody mention using a docking bay that had a PCI card slot to use an external GPU. It all depends on how desperate you are, I guess. By doing that, the machine would no longer be mobile and the performance would still be terrible because of PCI.
Vernon on 18/10/2011 at 10:09
Quote Posted by lost_soul
PCMCIA 3D accelerators
rofl
Raymond Luxury Yacht on 19/10/2011 at 02:47
All right #332 out of 379!!!
Monkey Island, here I come...
