An external graphics card is a good solution if you own a laptop or other computer with limited space to install special components. If you’re ready to upgrade your graphics card for better performance, consider an external graphics card. When you are on the go or working on other projects, the external graphics card does not need to be plugged in. When you get home and are ready to do some gaming, just plug in the external graphics card and enjoy the graphics!
When in use, a graphics card can eat up a lot of power. It grows warm quickly, drawing the attention of your cooling system away from the rest of your computer.
This can be a big drain on the system. Save power while you’re not using the card by simply unplugging it when you’re using less graphics-intensive programs, like word processors or internet browsers.
Review ViDock
The price of the ViDock 2 with the ATI Radeon HD 4670 de 512 MB is 309 USD at Xotic PC. What kind of performance do you get for the price? According to the official specifications, a laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 (2 GHz) scores 6349 in 3DMark 06 (1280×1024), while a GeForce 9600M GT GDDR3 with a similar processor (Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 2 GHz) scores 5128.
All in all, I think it is a very interesting possibility if you have a light laptop with a weak graphics card as your only computer, because you can enjoy a long battery life when on the move and a good 3D performance at home, but if you need 3D performance on the go and you use a small laptop, you probably do not want to carry this box (in spite of not being a big one). If you have a desktop computer or a laptop with a powerful graphics card (GeForce 9700M GTS, Mobility Radeon HD 4650 or similar) the ViDock 2 is not very worthy, but the possibility of driving multiple monitors is still interesting. It can be a good investment to upgrade an older laptop: while it is relatively expensive, it is much cheaper than a new powerful laptop, if the rest of the components of the laptop are OK and you only need more 3D performance, go for it.
The ViDock 2 seems to have some compatibility problems: under Windows Vista you can only use it if the laptop has ATI graphics, because this operating system can use only single display driver at a time. There is an Nvidia solution in development.
External graphics cards are not just for gamers with laptops.
They are often used by professionals for video editing or other high-end graphics work instead of installing this powerful graphics card directly into the desktop computer.
Most external graphics cards connect to your laptop or desktop computer using the PCI-Express card slot on your laptop, which is the successor to the commonly-used PCMCIA card slots. They are quite easy to unplug when you’d like to save energy and not make your computer work so hard. When you’re ready to play games or work with graphics, just plug the card back into the slot and you’ll be ready to go.
External graphics cards often cost around $100, making them an affordable upgrade if you notice poor performance from your preinstalled graphics card.
They’re not for everyone, especially if you only use your laptop or desktop for surfing the internet or typing documents.
If you enjoy playing graphics-intensive games or working with large files of visual data, consider an external graphics card to balance performance with energy savings and the convenience of having better graphics when you need them without having to replace your computer components. We've provided some recommendations above. Take a look!
