Question about the gfx on my Inspiron 5150

[daonesteven]

hello mates, first time on this forums, i think you guys have a great thing going here specializing especially on laptop video cards :)

but anyways, I had a quick question about my Inspiron 5150 that I was wondering about. I currently have a 32MB gf fx 5200go in it right now, and i'm an avid World of Warcraft player. The game itself runs relatively fine, just because I put everything on the lowest settings and I looked at the drivers and saw that 67.66 was probably the best for me and all that...but I heard I could upgrade my video card to a 64mb version just for my laptop, and surely enough, I found a few on ebay that were selling it.

Question is, is it really upgradable as they say it is? I'm no noob at opening up my laptop because I've done it a thousand times to clean the heatsink and all that periodically, but I've never physically took out the video card before, even though I always see it. I'm actually not even sure if it comes out, but seeing the ones on eBay, I'm assuming it does. THere's one that I saw that the description said it was pulled from a i5100 and it could be used in a i5150 as well, and I dont know how much validity is in this claim.

ALso, these cards seem to go for around 50-60 bux, shipped, and I was wondering if it's really worth it to go from 32MB to 64MB, being an avid WoW player? The game tends to run fine for the most part, but I really wouldn't mine shelling out a few to get some ###### better performance, and I'm wondering how much of a game improvement I'll see if I upgrade it from 32->64.

Anotehr thing is, I'm not really sure what I can improve on to make my gaming experience smoother, with higher fps and no lagging when there's a shitton happening on my screen...I'm not even sure if it's the graphics problem with how it's only 32MB, because for a long time, I thought the problem was my hard drive speed, since being a laptop hard drive it's probably only 4200rpm, and I dont know what the bottleneck is here, really...

Sorry for such a long post, I know there's gotta be all you Inspiron 5150 experts out there, and if not, I would greatly appreciate it if you could offer some insight here. THanks and g'day!

Edited November 26, 2005 by daonesteven

[Bill]

We have I5150 experts!

I'm not one, but they'll stop by, I promise.

Anyway, upgrading video RAM from 32 to 64 MB should definitely give you a performance increase, not sure about WOW (it should) but in a game like Doom3, HL2, you would definitely see an increase.

Now as far the card itself, I do not know if the one from that other laptop works in yours, but it probably does. (Im one of the I8200 experts)

The card should be pretty easy to upgrade, especially if you have opened your laptop up many times and cleaned stuff out.

There is a topic here.

http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/index.php?showtopic=8283

Click the Inspiron link and find yours, it will have an html and PDF manual, will show how to upgrade the video card.

You can also put up to 2 GB of RAM in that (atleast), and get one of Hitachi's 7200 RPM laptop drives, will give you better game loading performance. (especially the newer 7200 rpm drives)

Anyway I'll leave the rest up to Larry and the I5150 experts.

Edited November 26, 2005 by Bill