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I have an ExpressCard/34 slot on my computer and was wondering what the hell it could be used for. I honestly had never heard of it before buying this system.

Then I found this:
http://www.magma.com/products/pciexpres ... index.html

Wonder if you can actually jam a graphics card in there and have it work... That would be really frikkan' cool. I'm off to GA now, but I'll have to do some more research later. Somehow I'm betting graphics cards are out, but having true blue desktop graphics at home, and a laptop all at the same time would be amaznig.

Reasearch yields:
A)Expensive ($749)
B)GPU's won't be supported until next revision.

This could be a good long term investment though. I mean I am pretty much a die hard laptop user and this would mean never having to worry about graphics performance in my systems again; least no more than the average desktop user does. I can buy a new desktop card without upgrading the whole system... Well until pci express is the old type of slot... something to think about when I get to the point where the CPU is still good, but the graphics card not so much...

Something like this has been needing development for a long long time; I am glad it is coming about...

So if I understand you correctly, you mean you can swap graphic cards in and out of your laptop fvia that ExpressCard/34 slot? wow. that would be sweet. With development, the price is bound to go down, perhaps you should wait a year or two?

it is the follow on to cardbus/pc card from what i understand.

Yeah, replacement for PCMCIA, and I would probably wait at least that long Grif; the X1600 is pulling it's weight just fine for now; but like I said, I am glad there is finally something like this in the works...

Grifter wrote:So if I understand you correctly, you mean you can swap graphic cards in and out of your laptop fvia that ExpressCard/34 slot? wow. that would be sweet. With development, the price is bound to go down, perhaps you should wait a year or two?

Well, there is an ExpressCard/34 card that has a cable that connects to an enclosure in which you will be able to insert a graphics card. The enclosure looks similar to an external hard drive enclosure.

The current version they have will work with sound cards, network cards, and just about anything but todays power hungry graphics cards. There are probably other technical deficiencies besides the power consuption. I'm a little curious how it will work that you will have a detachable secondary graphics card. Seems like the operating system would have a problem with that, but I guess it could be done...

I just think it would be nice to be able to plug it in and use the uber graphics card at home, and unplug and take the laptop with me. If I really wanted, I could of course take the graphics card with me, but on average how often do you take a laptop somewhere you intend to play games? And still can have just one computer, though at it's current price, I may as well get a second computer... so hopefully it will come down in time...

I don't think I'm asking too much. I really need to start my own frikkan tech company...

More research:

ExpressCard is only PCIe x1; considering what I just read on Toms Hardware was showing x4 being adequate and x8 being better this isn't going to cut it for gaming... ATI cards suffered much less horribly from the x1 bandwidth bottleneck, but they still suffered.

Damn dirty apes. I really really really need to start my own company with it's own standards that don't come from a monkeys butt.

in my laptop the graphics cad is socketed and i can change i for future graqphics cards... it even has a heat pipe.

Steel wrote:in my laptop the graphics cad is socketed and i can change it for future graqphics cards... it even has a heat pipe.

What ... do you have a two stroke in that thing?

actually my alienware was a mini pci express form factor. If I had truly wanted I could have upgrade it to a 7900 Go...