New Video Card Help

[Mettelor]

Ok, I know very little about computers, just going to make that known.

I bought my current laptop with the help of my friend who knows a little more than I do a while ago. I expected it to run a little bit better when I play games on it such as WoW. I suspect that the weak point of this computer is it's video card. I intentionally made sure to buy a laptop that said it was able to change video cards on it because my previous laptop had the same issue except the video card wasn't able to be changed, which was very frustrating.

What I'd like to know is what kind of video cards are compatible with my laptop, and which ones are better than other ones and things like that.

What kind of specs do you all need to know and where could I find them? All I know is that my computer is an ASUS K52J series, 500GB HDD, 4GB Memory, I have Windows 7 and I don't really know where I can find my video card.

Thank you for helping if you help.

 

[foothead]

I have never seen a laptop where you can actually swap in a new video card.


Check device manager to see what GPU you have.

 

[Mettelor]

Intel (R) Core (TM) i5 CPU M 450 @ 2.40 GHz

That what you were looking for?

Also, I thought on a laptop it could be a dedicated or integrated graphics card. If that doesn't mean able-to-be removed and not-able-to-be-removed than I made a bit of a mistake.

 

[iPwn]

You will find the video card under "Display Adapters" and from what I've read online, you should have an ATI 5470 1GB video card.

 

[Mettelor]

ASUS K52 Series K52JC-X2 NoteBook Intel Core i5 450M(2.40GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory DDR3 1066 500GB HDD 5400rpm DVD Super Multi NVIDIA GeForce 310M

Is how the laptop was labelled on Newegg.


I think I have

NVIDIA GeForce 310M

1G DDR3 VRAM

Dedicated Card


EDIT: I'm impressed with the automerge, I haven't been on any forums that did that automatically.

 

[foothead]

Okay then. Your laptop has two GPUs. One is an intel HD (Epic fail graphics) and the other is the Geforce 310M (mid-low end graphics). Make sure you're using the Geforce, not the Intel HD.

BTW, the video card is not removable. It is still part of the motherboard.

 

[Mettelor]

How do I set it to use one or the other?

I get around 10 FPS in WoW.

 

[foothead]

Have you installed the newest drivers? That's where I would start.

 

[Mettelor]

Install the newest drivers for what? Is there a way to just tell it do install them for everything or do I have to go through by hand one by one?

 

[iPwn]

How do I set it to use one or the other?

I've never used switchable graphics, but from what I've found online, you can click on your battery icon and then it will have the Switchable graphics in the popup window.
Example: