Any Options of Making my graphics better on my Acer Aspire 5050 laptop?

Question

I have had my acer for 14 months now with no problems, i have been recently thinking of upgrading to a new laptop but too be honest i still think this one is fine for my needs.

However i don't play computer games much anymore but the new pc game called "spore" looks interesting and i was wondering if theres anything i could do to improve my graphics so i can play that game.

I have been searching about and have found out i can't just upgrade my onboard graphics but there is a option in the bios to switch it from the 64mb it is at the moment up too 128mb or 256mb would this work?

The only other thing i think might be possible is maybe buying a external graphics card but i don't know much about these and wether one would even be compatible with my laptop.

Any help much appreciated.

Answer 1

No, nothing whatsoever. Don't even try. Adding memory or disk space to laptops is trivial; upgrading a graphics card is not.

You can buy a desktop PC capable of playing all modern games for about 300 quid - provided you buys parts and build it yourself.

EDIT: that said, whilst you can't *improve* the graphics, I've just check out Spore's requirements versus your hardware - and you should be fine. The only possible bugbear is pixel shader 2.0 - I'll get back to you on that.

The one thing you can do is add mroe memory - it's cheap. That will allow you to up the amount shared with the graphics chip without degrading performance in other areas.

EDIT II: yup, you're fine with pixel shader two. In which case - stuff Spore, get hold of Bioshock ;)

Answer 2

no u cant. except 1 out of 20 acers have that option but you'll have to get the 256mb from another newer laptop..all this process is no point and is too expensive so best to buy a new one and even a new one's got to be at least £800 for a gaming laptop or if cheaper buy a pc

Answer 3

Right, upgrading graphics cards in laptops is pretty much impossible as most of them are integrated into the motherboard, so don't bother. As for external graphics cards, well...one exists, costing £100 or so, and requires you to link to an external monitor (cannot use laptop screen for some reason, very odd). So i wouldn't really recommend that.

Thankfully spore will run on most laptops, so long as your laptop has a Intel GMA 950 at least which my 2 year old budget dell did, so i think your laptop will be fine.

Answer 4

Increasing the memory that your on-board graphics chipset uses will improve graphical performance somewhat, but it will reduce the overall performance of your laptop because it saps that memory directly away from useable RAM.

The good news is that external graphics cards actually do exist! In fact I found a review of one here:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/graphics/n...

and

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/video-boost/m...

Don't ask me how they work, or where to get them because I simply do not know!