Bought a D820..what graphics card?!

Hey guys and girls!

I rescently bought a laptop on ebay for a pretty **** good price i thought: http://cgi.ebay.com.au/DELL-LATITUD...yZ130753QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I've been looking for a suitable laptop in the past 3 days and i found this and couldn't resist, i wanted a laptop well suited for school and the occational COD2/WC3. I don't expect it to have a graphics card, but is there any chance?

On the specs page the seller says '15.4" TFT screen 1024 x 768' It seems weird, that resolution doesn't sound like it would be on a 15'4 screen..

One more question, are you able to take out the 56k modem to make things lighter or is there not much of a point?

 

i think warcraft 3 would run fine, but COD2 is much more demanding, you would have to struggle with it, or set rendring mode to dx7

 

if it had an acceptable frame rate in dx7 i would be very happy belive me!

Thanks for the reply!
Oh and is there any chance you can upgrade the GPU on this system?

 

Does it have intregrated 950 graphics? Or the Nvidia? Just checked Dells site and those where the only 2 options on GPU's

 

the seller does not say... i guess that means integrated 950 graphics... does that really suck?

If i have 2gb of ram could i set the integrated graphics to suck 512 ram?

 

the link doesnt work for me,

15.4 wxga would be 1280x800
wsxga+ would be 1680x1050

the gma950 wont give you much gaming at all, playability is subjective, but dont expect much, the nvidia quadro cards are workstation cards, not gaming cards, and you will probably have a few snafus playing games with them, while they share basically the same core as their gaming counterparts, they are different, and the drivers are built around accurate rendering, not spitting out frames per second, check out the gaming forum, theres lots of info there

I would leave the modem alone

 

I think the max of the 950 is 128, but setting it to 512 or 1 or 2 gig wouldnt make any difference, the gpu isnt strong enough to take advantage of it, 128 is really more than it can make use of, all those low end cards you see at best buy, like the x1300 512, its a rip off, the card cant make use of that much memory 256 would be way overkill, but people see it, and think that hey, this $500 card has 512, and this $100 card has 512, so it must be good, when its not, and they use cheap slow ram, so usually the 128 meg version will run faster,one of the main reasons the high end cards cost so much is the ram, fast stable high capacity chips are very expensive, its a shady industry to say the least, like AMD's intial ads for the power of 64 bit cpus years ago, while the average Joe still hasnt actually seen a 64bit OS in person, it was still a good chip, but 64 bit support had nothing to do with it, and so far still doesnt, sorry for the rant, been a long day

 

Thanks very much for the help iceman!!

I don't really mind having the intergrated graphics, as i will most likely concentrate on school more then games.

Perhaps in 6 months i will want to be able to game on my laptop, is it possible for this model to upgrade the GPU?
Thanks for all the help guys!

 

If you have the gma950, no, if you start with a dedicated card, then you can use any card that has been sold with your particular model, it must be a dell card, and it must be for your specific machine, the cards are also hard to find and most times very expensive, its seldom worth it