[LAU] Suggested video card

david gnome at hawaii.rr.com
Tue Aug 14 05:47:11 EDT 2007


Arnold Krille wrote:
> Reply-Forwarding another "private" answer to the list. (Dear Admin, either 
> reactivate ReplyTo-Munging even if it is not RFC-compliant or explain the 
> reply-to-list to _all_ members in detail...)
> 
> Am Montag, 13. August 2007 schrieb Joshua D. Boyd:
>> On Mon, 2007-08-13 at 15:01 +0200, Arnold Krille wrote:
>>>> Yes, please, my laptop has onboard Intel video and it steals 64MB of
>>>> system memory that I'd rather be using for other things.
>>> Your laptop can be expanded with a pci-/agp-card?
>>> I have the very strong feeling that you are fixed on your graphics device
>>> as I have never seen a laptop that could make use of an extra video card.
>>> Except with a docking station that has a pci-slot...
>> I've seen several laptops where the video card is a removable piece that
>> can potentially be upgraded.  However, as there also seems to be no
>> standard for laptop video cards, that would mean that upgrades would be
>> limited to getting compatible cards from the same company.
>>
>> Most notably Dell is like this.  I've seen many reports of uses of the
>> Inspiron 8x00 series of laptops upgrading their video cards, which I
>> believe went from a fairly lowly Rage to a modest Radeon or Geforce 4MX.
>> I also saw a newer Dell laptop (forget the model number, but it was a
>> centrino with a pentium-m) that had Intel graphics on the motherboard
>> but could take (and this one had) a seperate card that had (in this
>> case) a Radeon X300 on it.
>>
>> So, depending on the laptop that "schrieb david" owns,

That's me. My laptop is too low-budget to have expandable video 
capabilities.

>> he very well may
>> be able to somehow upgrade it's graphics, albeit not with a PCI/AGP
>> card.  If it was a common brand it may be worth looking for doner
>> laptops to scavange for video upgrades.
> 
> Hehe, the guys name is only "david". The "schrieb" means "wrote" and as I am 
> note "Arnold Krille wrote", he is not "david schrieb" but "david". :-)

Hee hee! Reminds me of my high school German days ...

>>> You should get more RAM for your laptop so the 64MB of the graphics
>>> don't make a high percentage.
>> That would certainly be worth doing.
> 
> Even more so if you plan on extensive recording or playing with big soundfonts 
> (like the rather good steinway sf2). For these reasons I got my wife to 
> pre-approve new mem for my main desktop (still running on 512MB).

I'm not planning to do any such heavy-duty work on the laptop. By the 
time I have fluidsynth with a sound font loaded, jack, and Rosegarden 
going, doing anything else with the system while playing a composition 
is sufficient to interrupt the audio momentarily - particularly if I'm 
playing from the Score editor. I blame it on the Intel graphics 
hardware. Or maybe a 1.5GHz Celeron just hasn't enough oomph to do it 
with Intel graphics around. And I'm not even using any kind of effects 
or filtering.

I'm planning to move the music work to either my Sempron 3000 box 
(currently being our network server) or the "newest" addition to the 
network, a box with a 1.8GHz Athlon (the old style "significant 
contributor to global warming" processor). The old server box has an 
NVidia GeForce2 MX display adapter, and 1GB of RAM. The Athlon box will 
end up with another NVidia GeForce2 MX adapter and have 1GB RAM. They'll 
both have much better audio cards than the laptop's Intel HDA audio!

I wonder if it would be possible to somehow use the other computers' 
audio hardware from the laptop as MIDI devices over the network???? Just 
dreaming ...

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community



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