External Graphics card.

Ok been a bit frustrated with my laptop so I started thinkning about this again, and did a search.

I found something called a Vidock4 which appears to be an external box that you can put a graphics card into and plug the box into your laptop using the express card slot (Fairly sure my laptop has one).

Here's the link:

http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=ViDock

The best model costs about £179 and I suspect you have to buy a graphics card to go in it, which is sort of good since it lets you upgrade.

Looked around a bit and haven't really found anything else that doesn't look like its been cancelled. But I wonder if I'd be better off buying a PC. Also I have a intel dual core 1.66Hz so I don't know how much it would help getting a new graphics card without being able to upgrade the core.


So any tech heads out there that understand this stuff about to give me some advice?



You appear to only be able to buy it from the US, it's $279 + $50 postage world wide.

A video of someone trying out the Vidock2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCK5dLWiO2Q

If you want to be able to play games with decent graphics,get a desktop.The cpu in your lappy is also pretty weak and will potentially cause a bottleneck making the expense of buying one of those docks and a graphics card pretty redundant.
Personally if I was on a laptop I would`nt even consider one of these.

Yeah I figured as much, still its tempting. But most of this is just fueled by wanting to play Napoleon Total War on its best settings (which I could certainly do with this card thing), thing is it isn't even that good of a game, and doesn't look good even on its best settings. I haven't really been looking but I don't think there are any PC games I'm interested in at the moment except maybe Shogun 2 Total War which comes out sometime early next year, but given CA's recent record may not be good. So I may wait until next year and buy a good gaming PC tower. I need to drop my weight a bit and as I work in a shop I tend to buy food when I get bored so I think I'll put £5 in a pot everyday that I don't buy crap and put that towards the PC (Or buy the whole thing with it).

I'm more than a bit out of date with specs for PC's (I've never actually been in date) and games, what would be the spec for a PC that could easily run new games at the highest setting and not be outdated a day after I buy it, might as well include a stereoscopic 3D graphics card if it will work with my TV and what kind of cost would that be? (Don't count keyboard/mouse or monitor).

Shogun 2 trailer if you are interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz-x1_GYQIw&fmt=22&annotation_id=annotation_100248&feature=iv


Oh, yeah Napoleon TW was a Steam game so Shogun 2 might be as well, that may take a way any interest you have in either games.