Is there anything I can do to upgrade this laptop?

Thecoolman5

Honorable
Jun 10, 2013
4
0
10,510
Hi everyone. So I have an old Dell Precision M4500. The integrated GPU in this thing is the Nvidia Quadro FX 880M. I was wondering if there is any sort of GPU upgrade possible here. The integrated GPU is on the mobo so I can't take it out. I have looked into PCI to USB adapters but I need to know if there would actually be a speed increase here. There are no USB 3.0 ports or thunderbolt connectors. There is a eSata connector as well as one I don't recognize. Is there anything I can do? Thanks!

Here is that port I don't recognize.
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Solution
Unfortunately no GPU upgrade options there. If it had Thunderbolt you could have possibly looked at one of the external GPU enclosures. But that's obviously not an option here.
Unfortunately no GPU upgrade options there. If it had Thunderbolt you could have possibly looked at one of the external GPU enclosures. But that's obviously not an option here.
 
Solution
You can't run pcie over usb. Tb isn't the only port that runs pcie protocols, it's just higher bandwidth. The wireless card uses a mpcie slot if you have easy access to it. Mpcie to x16 adapters are rather cheap, $30 or so.
 
Most are not proprietary but I don't want to get into it because he doesn't have tb. I discussed in other threads of other commercial egpus and you can search the forum for that info. I also go into some diy options which is much cheaper and more common, even now with all these commercial egpus being released.

Your wireless card, like nearly every laptop, uses mpcie. If you have a laptop with an easy access panel on the bottom to get to it, then it's not difficult to connect an egpu. You will be limited to pcie x1 so it will bottleneck up to 50% but most gpus will still be better than yours. In the past, most egpus were not suggested because the adapter price was $100+ but nowadays it's $30 for mpcie so not a big deal.
 


Asus and Alienware are proprietary.

From PC world. Many people have. There are even a few companies building their own external graphics card (eGPU) enclosures such as Alienware, MSI, and ViDock. But these eGPU kits tend to be overpriced or use proprietary connection technology.

 
I'll only mention current products as there have been some egpu stuff in the past but those ports haven't been on pcs in years. Asus announced tb support at computex a couple months back but this is still an unreleased product. Msi is unreleased, tb. Gigabyte is unreleased, tb. Powercolor is unreleased, tb. Razer is tb. Vidock hasn't made any since last year, but since you mention it, they were expresscard and tb. Alienware is the only one that is proprietary. All of them overpriced yes, but you still keep saying proprietary when only 1 of 6 is (not counting vidock since it's not current).