Mobile FireWire External Video Cards

[FragTek]

I think someone should invent this... I know that these could sell like wildfire if designed correctly.

I was just sitting here thinking about how I'd like to play these great new games that are coming out on my laptop... Now my laptop, make no mistake about it, is completely bad ***. The only thing it lacks is a nice gamer-friendly video card. I play CS/DPB/ other HL mods on my lappy fine with outstanding frame rates, but c'mon, the HL engine is oldschool technology.

What i'm runnin' in my lappy is the 64mb Intel Extreme PRO graphics or whatever the hell it is... It's a super basic OpenGL engine that works well for the usual stuff, but really suffers on the cool new games. Don't get me wrong, they run, but at about 5fps :rofl:

So here's my idea.... Why couldn't someone build a small external box that houses a high-end video card powered by a fast PnP port such as a Firewire port or USB 2.0 port that could be plugged in to receive the input data, and then you could just plug a standard monitor into ur fancy lil external video box. Or, if someone wanted to get really crazy, program the software interface for it to display on the laptop monitor and bypass the onboard video.

I think this would be slick as hell... Anyone else buy something like this if it were made?

[Hexis]

Not going to happen due to the bandwidth limitation of Firewire and USB 2.0.

AGP 4x = 1 Gigabyte per second
AGP 8x = 2.1 Gigabyter per second
PCIe is faster yet.

Firewire is 400 megabit per second, or 50 Megabyte per second. Although USB2.0 is slightly faster, it's not so good onthe protocol side. It's 480 megabits per second, or 60 megabytes per second. So they are roughly 20 times slower than the current AGP standard. That's not enough for anything remotly current.

[FragTek]

Hrmmm ok so lets say a swappable drive bay then... most all laptops have those, and yes, they would have to be made manufacturer specific, but would it work in that scenario?

[Hexis]

Those bays are probably a lot slower than Firewire. They would not be significantly faster. Even if they were, the upgrade would have a super limited market.

There may be hope for a future card, there is a standard for PCI-Express Mini Cards, at 2.5 gigabit per second (312 megabyte per second), it's decently fast. It wouldn't be enough to support a high end card, but it could be enough to do something far better than most laptop cards. It would require a new laptop, and is a ways out.

[FragTek]

Thx for the info :)

Alienware just released a laptop that has a drive bay just for the vid card and will be swappable with new cards as they are released. Super pimp *** idea. Almost makes me wanna get one just for that feature alone, but after dropping $2200 on a new laptop, i'm spent!