Dell Inspiron X1400 Vid card upgrade

The alternative to me buying a new computer to replace my 1.5 year old one is to replace the vid card in my Inspiron 6400. I know how to take it out/put it in, but I don't know what to upgrade to or where to get it. (What about an external card? ) I dont't know, I'm just thinking. Anything to avoid buying a new laptop will help, maybe overcloking/volting. Any help I would appreciate My notebook is the one in the my sig

 

The X1400 was the most powerful GPU offered on that notebook, so there is no upgrade available for it.

 

oh, ok. What about external or overclocking?

 

The only video cards for the E1505/6400 were the nvidia 7200, 7300 and the Ati X1300/X1400.
The X1400 is the fastest of the video cards which will run in your machine.

You can overclock the graphics card with software such as powerstrip. I know on my E1505 I was able to get the clock speeds from 432Mhz core and 391.50Mhz memory all of the way up to 490Mhz core and 460Mhz memory. I could not get 3dmark stable at higher clock speeds.
However, it is not advised to overclock, since you can and most likely will destroy your graphics card. I was only testing to see what mine could do.
Also if you plan on overclocking, you better install i8kfangui and force the fans to full speed so that you do not burn out your graphics card.

Side note, the overclock only raised my 3dmark 06 score by 500points.
Stock it was 1130marks, and overclocked it was 1550

K-TRON

 

Thanks alot for the advice and recommendations I'll try them out and tell you what I think.

 

Thanks a lot again. I tried out the programs and I'm stable at 525mhz core and 495mhz ram. That could be because I have a laptop cooler on the bottom which helps a bit. I actually get a 100% increase in fps on COD4. I now can actually play close to native resolution . Thanks again for your help

EDIT: Do you by any chance know any programs to overclock the processor by chance? Thanks

 

Check the link in my sig for details.

 

Thanks for the link to the guide. Now that I've read it, does anyone know what the PLL generator is for the Inspiron 6400, or do I need to find out myself? Thanks

 

The PLL in the E1505 (same as inspiron 6400) is made by cypress technologies, but it is not listed as supported by clockgen, setfsb or other random overclocking utilities I have tried.
I have tried overclocking with every PLL generator, and none of them gave a successful overclock. So dont waste your time. It took me about 4 hours to test every program to see if I could overclock. It cannot be overclocked.

K-TRON

 

Ok, so is there anything else I can try to up my computers performance?

By the way ICS932S401EGLF (the second one on the list) seems to work and correctly displays my clock, but then again I don't really know what I'm doing.

 

You can undervolt your processor with cpu rightmark. That will help keep the processor running about 15-20F less.
Their is nothing you can really do to increase performance other than buying a faster processor/harddrive.

The harddrive is a standard 2.5" 9mm thick sata drive.
the processor is a socket M, so you can upgrade to a T7200, T7400, T7600.
The T7600 is the fastest Merom processor for the laptop.

You cant upgrade the memory, cause the i945pm chipset only supports 2gb on my system. It fails to recognize 4gb of memory even with the latest bios update.

K-TRON

 

Ok thanks alot. I'll take a look at the undervolting guide thanks alot for the advice you have given me !