GPU upgrade and Dell

[just_tryin_to_keep_up]

I called Dell lastnight to order a new laptop. A sweet sounding southern bell from Tennesee was the Dell sales rep. (if they could only keep the sweet sounding tech's here in-stead of Bangalore India... WAKE UP!) Sorry.. Any how she told me that I could upgrade the Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950 at a later date if I wanted too, and that it was a seperate chip leading me to belive it would be easy swap out for a new one at a later date.
My question is this, is she yanking my crank to get a sale or just dumb, or is she right? I have read that the gpu's on board laptops are soldered to them unless it has some sort of MXM or pci which is rare.

How the heck do you know what questions to ask. If I get the laptop mother board they will be using will that tell me?
It will be a E1705 core2 T7200 and the choices are the Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950 the 256MB ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON® X1400 HyperMemory for $99 and the 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ Go 7900 GS
OFF TOPIC
Is NVIDIA That good? to warrant a $300.00 add on?(does it also fold your cloths?) I see people all over the forums rant about frame speed and OBLIVION and FEAR. Have these people heard of XBOX or Playstation platforms? I'm not trying to demean someone's plat form but I just don't get the wide gap in video cards.

Back on topic..
I know what your thinking. What are you using the laptop for?
ADOBE Premiere 2.0, internet, age of empires and sims.

That being said, if they come out with a game that I can virtually lift the skirt seam up on Sharon Stone and finally verify the contents compounded with a virtual scent of a woman(al pacino) SORRY, Back off topic

WHAT EXACTLY SHOULD I ASK TO VERIFY IF THE MOTHER BOARD GPU CAN BE REPLACED?????????????????
Thanks and sorry KILLERNOTEBOOKS for the abstract long winded nonsense. It's just fun to mess around somtimes.hehahehaheha, :lol:

Simple in a nutshell and long winded responses ok. As well as a link with a precurser saying a sarchastic msg like "dude we covered this already, do your own research. you lazy bum!" :roll:

P.S. What is MXM or XMX or what ever anyway?

 

[I]

It's a similar situation to any desktop mainboard, you have the chipset integral video currently (soldered on and non-removable chip) but if you buy the upgrade video card (or the system came with it), installing that card disables (only) the integrated video function of the chipset.

As for "that good", have you looked at what mid to high end video cards cost? There's no reason to think it would be any cheaper for laptop.

So if you want fast current-gen gaming support and a little reserve for further games, you'd better consider the high-end video. For less demanding gaming including older games, the middle choice would suffice. The intel integrated is fit only for extremely old games, DVD playback, general purpose uses. If you aren't an avid gamer (which seems to be the case), go with the integrated video as it will also use less power, longer battery runtime and lower heat.

Since I don't play age of empires or Simms, I dont know what to tell you but that you should at least get 1GB of main system memory and consider the X1400.

There's nothing you need to ask, if the same model of laptop comes both with and without the video upgrade then it can obviously be replaced- but if you don't buy it now, expect to spend significant time and money later. Frankly, I would not think about replacing anything, buy it now or never.

Best advice is to look for benchmarks of the Intel Extreme video to see if it can play your games at what you consider an acceptible framerate. It WILL be the bottleneck, not CPU, providing you have at least 1GB as mentioned previously.

On the other hand, if you're spending over $1300 on this system, it starts to make sense to go ahead and get the 7900 video card, it'd be a mismatch to get high-end everything except the video.