I built a dual Xeon machine back in 2004, and earlier this year it was finally reaching the end of its useful life for me. It was big, loud, and hot, and I was using an old Dell laptop I bought for $200 more and more. I wanted to consolidate into just one machine, so a few weeks ago I bought a brand new Lenovo Thinkpad T410s, which is one great laptop!
Notebookcheck Review - T410s
Now, this has the Intel integrated graphics, which works great for most of my tasks, but I do like to play a game every once in awhile. Certainly, the integrated graphics on this new laptop actually offer better performance than my old computer, but still not good for gaming at all. The game that gets most of my time, EVE Online, could run but only with every single graphic option turned to "Lowest" or "Off." Not pretty.
I wanted to have better gaming performance while in my home office (I don't game "on the go"). I thought about building a small gaming desktop, but that would have added another computer back into the mix and I really liked the idea of just having the one machine with all my stuff on it. So, I needed to upgrade the graphics performance of my Thinkpad.
Luckily, some members of the community over at
NoteBookReview have been busy figuring out how to hook up desktop graphics cards to laptops. Using a couple parts from a Taiwan manufacturer called
HWTools, it is possible to connect a desktop graphics card to the laptop using either ExpressCard or internal mPCIe connectors (or both). An external power supply is also needed.
Some caveats: an external monitor is needed - this will not run the laptops internal screen. It is not a mobile solution - this is great for people like me, who game at their desk with external monitors. PCIe bandwidth through ExpressCard or an mPCIe connector is not 16x like on desktop PCIe, it is only 1x. This limits the performance of the card to only 60-70% of its full potential if connected by 16x. Still, it is a tremendous improvement over the integrated graphics! The part from HWTools will allow for an x2 link on some laptops if you use two physical connections (i.e. ExpressCard and mPCIe or two mPCIe). This allows performance at 80-90% of 16x. Final caveat, this thing can be a major pain in the *** to get set up. It is not plug and play, with many (most) laptops requiring custom boot disks to handle memory and pci allocations issues that prevent the setup from functioning until taken care of. Fortunately, just today NBR member nando4 released a
new bootdisk package that introduces some much-needed ease to the configuration process.
So, I ordered a Sapphire 2GB 5850, an Antec 550W PSU, and the necessary parts from HWTools. Spent today fiddling around with it, setting it up. Luckily, the T410s did not require any fiddling with PCI, IGP, or memory allocation to get working. Most machines need it, so yay for me. On the flipside, however, I did find that an x2 link is not possible for my Thinkpad at this time. My two internal mPCIe connections are not numbered correctly for this to happen. I will wait to see if any workarounds are developed in the future.
Still, even on an x1 link, I am extremely pleased. With x1, it is very convenient to hook up the 5850 - just dock and sleep the laptop, plug in the vid card to ExpressCard, switch monitors to vid card input, and wake up - now I have real gaming performance! I can now run EVE Online at full 1920x1200 resolution, 8xAA, 8xAF, with every graphics option set to full at 100fps. I know EVE is not a graphically demanding game by today's standards but it is a shocking improvement to me who is used to playing with all graphics options set to poop-like quality. I have been out of the "hardware scene" for years, so I do not know what benchmarks people like to use today, so I ran 3DMark06. With the integrated graphics, my score was 1,720. With the 5850 hooked up, I get 12,765! Very wonderful for me and now I can try all sorts of new games that I couldn't before.
So, I will post my full system specs and a few pictures below. Please let me know if you have any questions, and please let me know if you can suggest any benchmarks that I could run on both IGP versus the 5850 that people might be interested in seeing.
Lenovo T410s
Intel Core i5 520M 2.4 GHz
4GB DDR3-1066
Intel X18M-80GB G2 SSD
Sapphire 2GB ATI 5850
HWTools PE4H v2.0 PCIe Adapter and EC2C ExpressCard Adapter
Antec BP550PSU
Here's the 5850:
And the PE4H v2.0 that the vid card plugs into:
http://i.imgur.com/AbwfT.jpg
Then hook the ExpressCard adapter between the PE4H and the laptop:
All hooked up! Maybe I'll build an enclosure some rainy day...
http://i.imgur.com/85gMx.jpg
Makes my desk look kinda hi-tech!
