laptop graphics cards

[kupo]

stay with me here, im kinda an idiot when it comes to updating/changing computer parts. the other day i installed windows on it (ive had linux on it pretty much from the start) and was all giddy about being able to play mmo's again i tried installing FFXI and everything (thinking it was an old game..it should be ok) was all gravy until i logged onto a server and got the infamous blue screen of death. apparently my graphics card is really bad. my computer is meant for being more of a business computer than a gaming one.
is it easy/possible to change out a graphics card on a laptop? it sound easier said than done and ive looked around online and i saw lots of 'its not worth it', 'just get a desktop' and so on. imput anyone?

[Merlin]

This is one of those cases of "if you have to ask, then you can't do it". There are some laptops made by the custom makers that could possibly be upgraded given the right skill set, but the vast majority of laptops, it would be a no. Laptops aren't currently designed to have their parts upgraded, other than throwing in some extra RAM. You're pretty much stuck buying a new one.

Don't listen to people who say that getting a desktop is the way to go... Buy the type of computer that fits your needs, whether it is a desktop or a laptop. Intel/AMD are driving PC enthusiasts insane with their constant shifting of socket/chipset designs every bloody year. If you want to upgrade in today's age it means gutting half the system or more and replacing those pieces. You can't just pop in a better processor and keep going. Well you can go from like an i7 930 to 950 in the same socket type(careful the ones coming out soon are NOT compatible even though they have the same name! ), but it would be rather stupid, as it wouldn't be that much better. Need more power? Time to shell out the big money. /sigh

Secondly, don't ever get a computer without a dedicated video card. The built-in Intel graphics, etc is NOT designed to play games. They may claim it can, but it will never be as good as having a dedicated Nvidia or ATI graphics card in it.

And finally, FFXI is not a video-card intensive game, it is a processor-intensive game. If your processor sucks, the game will play badly no matter how good your video card is. Same goes for FFXIV. I've got the best video card on the market and it still plays like shit because of my old processor(waiting for the new ones to come out soon).

[kupo]

ah ya, thats what i was afraid of. thanks for the advice merlin
it was weird cause i met all the minimum requirements for FFXI except i wasn't sure about the graphics card would hold. oh well....
i had gotten the laptop as a graduation present from my parents a year and a half ago; im convinced they kept the processor/graphics to a minimum as a subtle hint that i should stop playing games and try to be a "normal functioning member of society". alrighty, well sounds like i'll have to wait a few years

[Sean]

90% of market laptops in the sub $1000 price point do not have any sort of dedicated video processing unit, it's just an integrated intel chip.

On a normal laptop (read: 99% of them) if the video chip dies, it would take an entire motherboard replacement to repair it. This also means you're better off buying a brand new laptop, because laptop motherboards, being proprietary in design for each individual laptop make and model, are insanely expensive.

As far as I know, to date, alienware are the only ones fully adopting the laptop equivalent of pci-express for the video cards in their laptops. (Though, it's Dell now, but still) By that, I mean, their video cards are swappable/updatable/replacable.

That means that regardless of which laptop you buy, the video card is typically ALWAYS a chip integrated to the motherboard (i.e. not upgradeable) and does not have it's own dedicated memory like a GPU in a PC would (which means it's taking slower RAM off the board)

It's not necessarily a bad thing, however, as you can still find laptops with built in nVidia or ATI chips which still perform massively better than the Intel chips. We found my fiancée a $500ish laptop running an ATI chip; it still uses the normal system RAM for it's video memory, but it runs less intense games just fine (like WoW on lower settings)

Hell I have a 4ish year old Dell as my HTPC that has a 7 series nvidia built in. Just upgraded the RAM and it's playing high res movies in 1080p, and can still run WoW.



However; your bluescreen could've been unrelated to the graphics processor. Do you remember exactly what it said? Just because FFXI was opening when the bluescreen happened, it could've been a host of other things, the biggest coming to mind would be RAM, since the graphics chip has to store it's data somewhere, and it's putting it in your RAM.

RAM, on a laptop, is easily (and cheaply) replaceable/upgradeable.

[Howling Wind]

Well, Laptops don't actually have graphic "cards" in a sense. They are just GPUs (Graphic Processing Units) that are stuck to the mother board for good. Well, most of the time.

For example, the new iMacs have PCe GPU's that actually unplug from the Motherboard but because its laptop parts and nobody sells GPU upgrade for laptops because most of them in laptops can't be removed. Basically, you just have to buy a new laptop =/

Also, the BSOD is probably not from the video. It could be a bug in the game or you don't have enough RAM installed.

Example, my mom's Macintosh (MacBook Pro) From 2008 was 2K and it came with 2 GPUs. One for better battery life, a 9600M Nvidia with 256MB that shares the RAM and a high performance card for graphic arts and such which is a 9600M GT with 512MB vRAM.

Some games do take down a whole computer operating system when a shared card (like the 9600M or the Intel AGC) when it runs out of memory (or the game asks for too much) so it could be the video card. But its rare and it more likely is either you don't have enough RAM or the game has a bug where it is sending illegal commands to the kernel O.O


/nerd post done