Upgrading Video on a Laptop

[tharef11]

I own a Toshiba Satellite 1905-S277 (http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1603) and quite frankly the video card sucks .

Would it be possible to upgrade the video card by either swapping it or adding another card onto the motherboard somehow? Like through the AGP slot? The card I had in mind was the GeForce4Go 440. If this is not possible how can improve my video performace aside from swapping the CPU. TIA,



Rob Fields

 

[ai42]

In this pic

http://www.anandtech.com/showimage....stem/laptop/Toshiba/1905-s277/MB_back_big.jpg

The silver chip in the center is your video chip. So it is obviously soldered onto the board, and while is may be possible to replace it would requires EXTREMLY high end percison soldering skills (almost to the point where a human could not do it by hand), and also a chip that would exactly compatable to the previous chip.

So for all practical purposes no it isn't possible.

You can add a PCMCIA video card (they are rare and hard to find) but I promise you they will not give you performance better than what you already have. Also it would somewhat defeat the purpose of what your trying to do as it would require an external monitor and such. You only expansion slots on a notebook are Mini-pci and nobody would dare make a Mini-PCI Video card as the heat genearated and such would throw an entire system into a mess, SODIMM (ram), and CPU (sometimes, but in your case it is upgradable). Finally upgrading the CPU will give you very little graphics performance.

 

[MWink]

The only laptop I know of with an upgradeable video card is the Dell Inspiron 8x00 series.