Laptop video card?

i just got my Dell inspiron and realized i got a crap videoo card 32 mb
i want to play games on it and its jsut not possable right now.
i would like to know since dell cant change it now since its integrated whatever that means, if i can buy an external video card anywhere to use on laptops.
any suggestions are appreciated.

is there any way i can upgrade my video card through an external video card for a laptop?

take a look at this http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/avcards/805c/

Intergrated means that the graphics on your machine are developed by a combined effort of the CPU and Mobo Chipset [ can never remember if its the Northbridge or Southbridge - anyone ?! ]. Anywho, in normal turms, it means your laptop doesn't have a chance in hell of running any graphical games, text based may be a push aswell.

The opposite of intergrated is dedicated [ what most desktop computers have ], basically the graphics are developed by the GPU [ Graphics Processing Unit ] leaving the CPU free to do more important tasks.


As for external graphics cards, as far as I am aware, nothing like this exsists. You won't find a USB external because it will be limited by the bandwidth avaliable. The same will apply for PCMCIA. Other than that I cant think of any other way to connect a exteranl graphics adaptor.

i think its northbridge. and theres usually not much you can upgrade on a laptop, especially a laptop from dell. some pc manufacturers which offer extremely high end laptops do have user replaceable parts such as the cpu and vid card. some of the manufacturers include widowpc and voodoo[i tihnk[

Dell notebook video card upgradability

http://www.bay-wolf.com/videoupgrade.htm

//edit - of course figuring out how to open the case to get to it is a whole other topic *lol

nVidia and ATI have both decided to go and develop a standard GPU bus slot for PCI-E cards, so hopefully in the future we will be able to upgrade the GPU's on any laptop.

How 'bout Mobile Intel 915GM/GMS? This card is killing me. Although it has 128mb of shared graphics - it's good-for-nothing. Any chance to upgrade? Or replace? USB 2.0 is too slow for graphics, any Firewire enabled GPU?