USB External Graphics Card for Laptops

robertchatty · 06 Oct 2012

Hi,
I have a 128 MB Intel Video Card. I want to play some heavier games but my card cannot handle them. I don't have enough ,money to buy a new laptop with a better video Card. Is there any external graphics Card that can be used via USB? If so, what are they officially called?

Laptop Model: Toshiba Satellite C655-S5049
Graphics Engine: Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 4500M
Graphics Memory: 128MB-829MB dynamically allocated shared graphics memory

bobafetthotmail · 06 Oct 2012

No. USB (even USB 3) is too damn slow to let a decent graphic card do its job. Expresscard slots or mini PCIe should be able to do something better, but afaik, there is not a lot of market for these things.

While none here would recommend it, as it's difficult to do and risky for your hardware, this page gives some introductory info and links to more in-depth instructions to how you can make your own external graphic card dock (what components to buy mainly, it's not like you make it from scratch).
Do at your own risk.

gazz9496 · 06 Oct 2012

wow..usb yeah as boba says is way to slow for a graphics card, if we had usb speeds at the same rate a gpu can transfer data we'd be getting a few hundred dvd size files every second or so, if i recall a graphics card has around 264GB/s memory bandwidth for most 3.0/s+tflops of compute power.

it will be a while before any laptop can do that at the best of times and a longer time before an add on card can even comprehend those speeds, bearing in mind a teraflop was the thing of supercomputers of the past.

solution? get a gaming desktop, as spending the sort of money for a decent gaming laptop would get you one hell of a desktop instead.

bobafetthotmail · 06 Oct 2012

That's internal stuff of the card, the card will be connected to at best a PCIe 3.0 16x, rated at 16 friggin GB/s, which is still in the robs-the-USB-blind levels but a bit less than what you said.