Computers & Networking

[icychill0912]

Alot of my friends are telling me laptops have un-upgradable video cards. Is this true?

[hockeycanuckjc Trusted Contributor]

99.9999999999999999% Is true that you cant upgrade the video card. The fraction of those that can be upgraded are not worth the cost of doing so as it is. 

[Rrrrrrr]

Most cant. There are some that you can but they are very $$$ laptops to start with.

[Neihn Valued Contributor]

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icychill0912 wrote:
Alot of my friends are telling me laptops have un-upgradable video cards. Is this true?

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As Hockey and Rrrrr has said as well as what i told you in your other thread. Most laptops are not GPU upgradeable the only ones that are, are the very expensive gaming class laptops from companies like Alienware, Sager, and Falcon Northwest.

[Entropy]

General rule of thumb:

If it has Intel GMA integrated graphics, it is definitively not upgradable.

If it has NVidia or ATI discrete graphics, it may be upgradable, but this is getting rarer and rarer.  Even if it is, it is almost always not economically feasible.

As an example, the Dell Inspiron 8000 series (8000, 8100, and 8200) all had interchangeable video cards.  It was actually economically viable to take the GeForce 4 MX designed for an I8200 and put it into the original GeForce 2-based I8000.  However, the I8200 was last made back in 2002 or so.  Newer Dells don't have the interchangeability that older ones had.