Grim graphics card on my Acer Aspire 5050

[MrRobin]

There's always the USB graphics card route... sometimes works...

Do such things exist? I would have thought the throughput capacity of the USB port would not be quick enough? Or do they just give a marginal increase in performance than an onboard adapter?

[Ardesco]

Do such things exist? I would have thought the throughput capacity of the USB port would not be quick enough? Or do they just give a marginal increase in performance than an onboard adapter?

USB2 is quite nippy, 480 Mbit/sec should be loads for basic GFX work.

[MrRobin]

USB2 is quite nippy, 480 Mbit/sec should be loads for basic GFX work.

Yes, nippy for that memory stick, but modern gfx cards need interfaces with bandwidths in excess of 4Gbit/sec (PCI-E) so wouldn't be enough here....

[Ardesco]

And AGP1 uses about half that bandwidth. Nobody had any problems with AGP card before PCI-E was out, and previously nobodya had any problem with PCI graphics cards before that which uses even less bandwidth.

Lets face it you are probably going to be using a resolutions of 1024*768 on your projector anyway, USB2 will do the job (And when USB3 comes out it will more than do the job).

[MrRobin]

Fair point, for a projector displaying powerpoint or other docs it would be ample, you are right. I kinda veered off the original requirement thinking about getting gaming performance from a small laptop.

I still can't find anything like this from a google search, except the Asus XG Station which looks like it was shelved last year anyway.