External Video Cards
http://live.pirillo.com/ – There have been rumors of external graphics cards floating around the Internet for years. Recently, though, some of these rumors may have credibility.
With so much heat and power consumption – as well as the growing demands of dedicated PC gamers – it's a real possibility to see external graphics cards hit the market.
CES 2007 introduced an external graphics card for laptops by Asus. One of Chris's friends has it and loves it, since he can now upgrade his graphics card on his laptop.
Is going with an external graphics card a good idea? Yes and no.
Having an external solution offers a lot of possibilities for upgrading and increased power within the GPU. Of course, the average user doesn't want to bother with an external component to output video.
What do you think?
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5 Comments
Jonathan Politi
July 30th, 2007
at 4:44am
Hi Chris.
There are 3 external video solutions that I know of for laptops.
The VTBook fits the PC Card slot and has 32 megs of video ram, allowing a second or 3rd monitor (depending operating system, you can add 2 monitors with an adapter) in addition to the LCD and the built-in external VGA output.
Matrox puts out 2 external boxes called “DualHeadToGo” and “TripleHeadToGo” which plug directly into the vga port and then split the signal, allowing you 2 or3 monitors off of a single vga signal. It works on both laptops and desktops.
All three will work with OS X, Windows, and I believe Linux as well.
Thanks.
Jon.
Jonathan Politi
July 30th, 2007
at 4:44am
Hi Chris.
There are 3 external video solutions that I know of for laptops.
The VTBook fits the PC Card slot and has 32 megs of video ram, allowing a second or 3rd monitor (depending operating system, you can add 2 monitors with an adapter) in addition to the LCD and the built-in external VGA output.
Matrox puts out 2 external boxes called “DualHeadToGo” and “TripleHeadToGo” which plug directly into the vga port and then split the signal, allowing you 2 or3 monitors off of a single vga signal. It works on both laptops and desktops.
All three will work with OS X, Windows, and I believe Linux as well.
Thanks.
Jon.
david
October 21st, 2007
at 1:56pm
yo is their a way to use some of your hard drive as video ram in ubuntu?
tom
November 2nd, 2007
at 8:32am
I have been using the VT Book with my ThnkPad T60 with VERY poor results. The card seems to freeze up my system from time to time and I am forced to reboot. I have tried to email their support but they are based somewhere in Europe and their responses have been very delayed (took me 2 weeks to get a response) and the support did not resolve my issue.
I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND VT BOOK. Especially not if you are using it in a mission critical environment (stock market trading).
I wish the ASUS product would be on the market…still waiting for it to appear in the retail environment!
Any thoughts?
Logan
December 17th, 2008
at 11:31am
I wasn’t aware that any external video cards were already being sold. At least none that inhance your gaming visuals. The only ones I have seen for sale are ones that just allow you to add more monitors, not inhance or upgrade your graphics. Does anyone know the names of external video cards that would make gaming better?