upgrading graphics on my laptop

chuckshriner

Baseband Member
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i have a gateway nv54 series laptop and it doesnt have the graphics capabilites to play games well, so i was wondering if there was ANY way to upgrade the the video card or any way to push out more fps.

thanks for any tips,
Chuck
 
Graphics on laptops is different to graphics on a desktop.

Along side the USB, ethernet, firewire etc ports that are external ports seen on both laptops and hard drives, desktops have internal expansion ports, such as PCIe, PCI and internal USB slots. Laptops have nothing like this, what you buy is what you always have. You can upgrade your hard drive, you can upgrade memory, to a certain extent you can potentially upgrade your CPU, graphics however, 99.999% of the time (in your case as well) the graphics are integrated, meaning they are a chip on the motherboard, they are soldered on there and they can not be removed and replaced.

In short, no, you can not upgrade the graphics on your laptop I'm afraid, your only way to get better gaming performance is to get yourself a new system. If gaming is your thing, a desktop is the way to go. If you don't have the room for that, or if you require the portability of laptops, unless you are able to fork out a small fortune for not all that great gaming performance, whilst losing out massively on battery time, you won't be able to
 
Laptops have nothing like this, what you buy is what you always have.

This is incorrect. An increasing number of laptops actually have removable graphics adapters in them. The model quoted here does not obviously, but it's not safe to give general sweeping statements like this anymore. My m1530 at home for example does have the ability to upgrade the GPU. The 99.9999% applies to mainstream laptops you buy for pennies on the dollar. Laptops in the $800+ range are far easier to upgrade. Just as they are with Desktops.

If gaming is your thing, a desktop is the way to go. If you don't have the room for that, or if you require the portability of laptops, unless you are able to fork out a small fortune for not all that great gaming performance, whilst losing out massively on battery time, you won't be able to

There are notebooks from vendors even as big as HP and Dell that are made for gaming. You do have to put out more money for them, but I disagree that a desktop is the way to go. For some people, especially those with space concerns as was touched upon, you don't always have to give up performance in a game when you get a laptop. The battery life obviously however, does suffer.
 
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