Some of the readers here are aware that I often prepare answers that are useful as references. This next is the introductory portion of such an article:
The overall situation only gets worse, it seems
Again today, we have seen another complaint from someone without any video card at all in his laptop unhappy about poor performance. Meanwhile, the influence of the "Netbook" class of computing devices plus the various Tablets, is totally diluting the quality of the laptop / notebook offerings in the marketplace. The upper range of Netbooks was already close to an overlap in performance with the low-price mobile PCs, and many manufacturers have chosen to keep on using the older, lower-priced chipsets in their laptops to keep their laptops' costs down.
Netbooks' video devices are all strictly onboard chips, and at present, all are using the outdated IGPs that Intel first offered about five years ago. Too many current laptops with Intel chipsets are still using the same old-model IGPs that those netbooks do. Within the last three years, Intel had finally started to include most of the features and functions that ATI (AMD) and nVIDIA had been including in IGPs for the past 8-10 years.
Not that any of the IGPs from any of the three were truly game-capable, just that it was possible to at least "preview" what a game might look like on such a chip. The influence of $250 Netbooks extends also to causing a reduction in the numbers of laptops that would have included an actual, discrete, video card instead of an onboard video chip, because that adds quite a bit to the cost of a laptop, and the average cost of those offered has been lowered generally. There are fewer laptops available for purchase that have real video cards in them.
Cost-cutting has also affected the cooling capacity of those laptops that really do have video cards, but now many more of them get hot too quickly because the heat sinks are too small, and the cooling fans are too ineffectual. Admittedly, there had already been a tendency on the part of laptop designers to shortchange the heat sink hardware, because it adds to the weight of the PC, and laptop designers are devoted to the gods of light weight and long battery life, both being elements heavily impacted by high performance add-on video cards.
If all laptop makers adhered to the same performance standards for add-on video, game developers would be more inclined to consider offering tech support to the laptop PCs, but each designer seems to have his (or her) own standards for what level of performance degradation he / she will will apply in the name of battery life or total weight. Compared to the ATI and nVIDIA reference designs, too few even follow the (typically 10 % reduction in performance compared to the matching desktop card version) recommended specifications. The end result is variations of 10% more performance loss, to as much as a total of 30% dilution.
So, I've been discussing the average laptop seen on retailers' shelves, what is possible for upgrades? TTBOMK, only Sager still produces one laptop line in the original style of assembly that was somewhat similar to desktop PC assembly. They have it as a "desktop replacement" and it is thick, heavy, very expensive, and has very poor battery life, so most buyers will avoid it. But the graphics card can be removed and upgraded.
In order to sell laptops at the prices that they are sold for now, the producers assemble them entirely differently. When the chassis and motherboard are welded togther, there is no longer any "inside" space to access where a separate graphics card would have gone. Trying to get the two apart will destroy one or the other, and all too often both of them.
(Because I do not include any laptop video devices in the lists of ranked cards, and EA doesn't even pretend to support any of them, I tend to try and ignore this type PC as much as possible.)
Modifié par Gorath Alpha, 23 mai 2011 - 12:51 .
does anyone know how possible it is to change the type of graphics card in my laptop (or point me to where i can find out) 
Retour en haut
