I currently own a Dell XPS M1710 Laptop. Although i despise dell, and would rather throw it into the dumpster than try to get any more problems fixed with it, I was wondering about the video card in it to maybe give it a last stand before I set it aside forever. I want to upgrade the video card because the one that is set in it right now is a 7900Go. Is there any type of guide i should look to in upgrading a laptop video card? or will any video card work in it? I've tried searching online for video cards specially made for laptops, but i can't find any sources that tell me that. So basically my question is, when updating the video card, can i upgrade it with any video card, or does it have to be a video card specifically made for laptops? (it has a PCI x 16 Express slot for the video card) I appreciate any reply or help that someone can provide to this.

Sorry, but you're pretty much out of luck. The best you can do with one is a Geforce Go 7950GTX, which is likely to be expensive and not worth it, and is also quite hard to find as a separate component. Also, depending on your current card, it probably wouldn't give a huge improvement either (is yours a Go 7900 GTX, or 7900 GS?). You'd honestly be better off building yourself a desktop, or if you must have a gaming laptop, getting a new laptop.

Can't some of the new PCI expansion technologies allow him to upgrade his video card? Such as the new magma PCI expansion?
http://www.magma.com/products/pciexpress/index.html

It may be possible to use one of these, but they only support a transfer rate of 2000Mbps (pci-e x1 speed) so they wouldn't be able to support a modern GPU and furthermore the cheapest one that can support a full length card is $750, making it even more unpractical.

I'm going to agree with cjl. Laptops tend to be pretty difficult to upgrade aside from adding more memory or different hdd's due to the scarcity of available parts and the relative high price of mobile components.

In my opinion trying to cram a high performance system into a laptop package is just a bad idea. I've yet to see one of these "desktop replacement" laptops that can adequately cool itself during heavy use and have seen many of them have the motherboards fail prematurely (usually just after the warranty period ends).

Isn't 2000Mbps a PCI-E 4x interface? anyway that's besides the point. I agree with what Just_an_engineer says, unless you really must have a laptop (which in that case I suggest you just get another), just get a desktop and be happy with it.

According to this chart it's around x1 speed, but of course this chart could be wrong.


The magma connector lists it's theoretical maximum speed at 2000 Mbps / 250 MBps

hehe howstuffworks... a great site! learnt how the names of all the components of a computer and how most of the parts work from there!