External Graphics Card?

J

j4ke002

New Member
Hey everyone I am new to the computer forum.

So, I have a laptop with 256mb of Graphics memory and a desktop computer with 512mb. I am pleased with the computers graphics and the laptops graphics, however, the graphics card inside the laptop heats up VERY quickly and there is no way to prevent this. I have bought an external fan to try and cool everything down but it does not work. I tried cleaning out the heatsink but has no success.

I have used an external WiFi adapter and sound card in the past and these have helped keep the computer heat down, so I was wondering, would it be possible to run games on my laptop using an external USB graphics card?

My laptops graphics card is an ATI Radeon HD 3200 card. It has shared memory, although it is connected to my Motherboard via a PCI-Express slot? I thought that shared memory means it is an integrated graphics card. Is it possible to replace this card with a newer one?


EDIT: I found out that my laptops original graphics card can work in unison with a dedicated graphics card in order to run games better.


Thanks in advance. I would appreciate it if someone could respond quickly :)
Also, I do not have a large budget, so anything cheap will suffice.
 
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Welcome to our forums, Jake.

Does your laptop have a docking port of some sort? Some, like the older Thinkpads, actually had a dock which would accommodate a better video card, so you could use the laptop as a desktop replacement at home.

Also, if you are comfortable totally taking your laptop apart, you might be able to replace the heatsink putty between your graphics chips and the laptop heatsink with a copper shim. The shim, combined with a quality heat-transfer medium like Arctic Silver 5, would probably help keep your graphics chip a tad cooler.

Frankly, though, laptops are just not the right platform for intense video processing (ie games) and there is little you can really do without making it a lot less portable (there is this Instructable on water-cooling a laptop).
 
Dngrsone said:
Welcome to our forums, Jake.

Does your laptop have a docking port of some sort? Some, like the older Thinkpads, actually had a dock which would accommodate a better video card, so you could use the laptop as a desktop replacement at home.

Also, if you are comfortable totally taking your laptop apart, you might be able to replace the heatsink putty between your graphics chips and the laptop heatsink with a copper shim. The shim, combined with a quality heat-transfer medium like Arctic Silver 5, would probably help keep your graphics chip a tad cooler.

Frankly, though, laptops are just not the right platform for intense video processing (ie games) and there is little you can really do without making it a lot less portable (there is this Instructable on water-cooling a laptop).
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Thank you for the reply.

I am not tech savvy, but I will tell you the different expansion ports my laptop has:

USB 2.0 Port x3
HDMI Port
VGA Monitor Port
Ethernet Expansion
SD/MMC Card reader

And that is it!

I will definately have a look at the instructions on how to watercool a laptop and may attempt to do just that.
 
It's an older laptop so tearing into it for modding won't be such a big deal.

Dngrswife has spasms whenever I intentionally void a warranty. :rolleyes:
 
Dngrsone said:
It's an older laptop so tearing into it for modding won't be such a big deal.

Dngrswife has spasms whenever I intentionally void a warranty. :rolleyes:
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The thing is, this laptop is just over a year old, and although the graphics are ok when playing games low graphics games like Flash games, the extra graphics seem to make the laptop overheat.

My Laptop is a Toshiba Satellite L450d-128 with Windows 7, a 2.1Ghz dual core processor and 4 gigs of RAM. I tryed playing Saints Row 2 on this laptop for less than 10 minutes on lowest graphics settings, and the game was still a little bit jerky and the laptop just turned off without warning.
 
are all your drivers up to date? and i'd recomend going into whatever graphics interface your comp has like mine's nvidia system tools and going threw the options to lower some manually, like i have all my stuff minimalized so my geforce 7050 igpu can do something, but this could keep yours from doing too much and overheating, or at least make sr-2 not jerky.
 
Hey I am not tech savvy, but I just found out that my Laptops Graphics card is shared memory. I thought this meant it was integrated graphics? The description of the graphics card (ATI Radeon HD 3200) said it is connected using a PCI-E connection?
 
Chances are, your graphics chip is integrated into the mainboard of your laptop. Shared memory means it uses some of the system RAM for doing graphics instead of having its own dedicated RAM.

It is possible it communicates using a PCIe bus, but that doesn't necessarily meant that there is a PCIe slot inside the laptop (be kind of hard to put one in there, actually).
 
Dngrsone said:
Chances are, your graphics chip is integrated into the mainboard of your laptop. Shared memory means it uses some of the system RAM for doing graphics instead of having its own dedicated RAM.

It is possible it communicates using a PCIe bus, but that doesn't necessarily meant that there is a PCIe slot inside the laptop (be kind of hard to put one in there, actually).
Click to expand...

I found a couple of pages for my graphics card and my laptop.

ATI Radeon HD 3200: Here

Toshiba Satellite L450D-128: Here

On the ATI Radeon HD 3200 page, it says that my graphics card can communicate with a Dedicated Graphics card in the HD 3000 series of Graphics cards. I do not know how this is possible, but I also used a program called SIW (System Information for Windows) and it says that my Motherboard does have a single PCI slot in it, but nothing else.
 
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FuryRosewood said:
you really cant, honestly would be cheaper and less messy to buy a whole new system with a card that is better onboard
Click to expand...

I have found out that I can use another graphics card in unison with my current graphics card, since my laptops graphics card uses a sort of Hybrid technology to use another dedicated graphics card for games and use the current onboard graphics card for office applications.
 
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