Question GPU for old laptop ?

[ILI-BIG]

Hi. I have Toshiba Satellite P305-S8915 with Core 2 Extreme X9100 8GB RAM and ATI Radeon HD 3650. I want to play old and less demanding games. I found exp gdc expresscard for installing desktop GPU in laptop. But what GPU should i use?

 

[Lutfij]

I have Toshiba Satellite P305-S8915 with Core 2 Extreme X9100 8GB RAM and ATI Radeon HD 3650
I can't recommend anything for that Core 2Extreme equipped laptop. You should look into something more concurrent as opposed to investing on a platform that is well beyond it's useful lifecycle in 2023.

 

[IDProG]

Hi. I have Toshiba Satellite P305-S8915 with Core 2 Extreme X9100 8GB RAM and ATI Radeon HD 3650. I want to play old and less demanding games. I found exp gdc expresscard for installing desktop GPU in laptop. But what GPU should i use?

I have a better idea: Save money and buy a new laptop.

 

[ILI-BIG]

I have a better idea: Save money and buy a new laptop.

No. My laptop's performace is nice

 

[IDProG]

No. My laptop's performace is nice

Yeah, sure it is.

I just don't get it with these people.
Are they paid, like, $50/month or something, that they cling to their ancient PCs?

Literally anything recent is better than the laptop.

 

[thestryker]

If your laptop supports PCIe over expresscard you're looking at PCIe 1.0 x1 speeds which will cripple any video card that would be better than you're using now. Whether or not you want to hear it there isn't a viable upgrade path for a laptop that old.

 

[Moonstick2]

It depends what "old and less demanding games" you mean. Tomb Raider 2013 for instance is now 10 years old and nowhere near that demanding as current games, but your system would struggle even to reach 30 fps on lowest settings.

If you're thinking about a new current graphics card then it would be a waste of money for that laptop. The HD3650 was a pretty reasonable card for its time (I've a weird feeling I had one for a bit...) For that processor, you could try something like an old HD 4850 to max out its performance but as said it depends what games you're talking about. There are very few that sit in the narrow window between the HD3650 not being good enough and the HD4850 making them playable.

 

[ILI-BIG]

It depends what "old and less demanding games" you mean.

I will play CS:GO,GTA 5 and Fortnite.

 

[ILI-BIG]

The HD3650 was a pretty reasonable card for its time

Nope

 

[Moonstick2]

I will play CS:GO,GTA 5 and Fortnite.

GTA V and Fortnite? And you've got a 15 year old dual-core processor? Yeah, you're going to need a new laptop.

 

[ILI-BIG]

GTA V and Fortnite? And you've got a 15 year old dual-core processor? Yeah, you're going to need a new laptop.

Dual core with high clock speed CPU can run GTA V

 

[Moonstick2]

Right, well you clearly know it all, so you know exactly the graphics card to buy.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Apparently you aren’t going to listen, but a dual core laptop is pretty much ancient at this point for much more than web browsing. Save for a new system imo.

 

[Avro Arrow]

No. My laptop's performace is nice

No, it's really not. It was nice about 15 years ago maybe but not now. You clearly haven't been paying attention to the PC market over the past ten years or so because

According to Passmark, there are 3,094 CPUs ranked above the Core2Extreme X9100 in performance.

Their analysis of that CPU is:
"This is a fairly old CPU that is no longer competitive with newer CPUs."

To give you a better idea of just how bad the performance of the X9100 is, it gets absolutely destroyed by the AMD A8-3500M, a Llano-based APU that was their first mobile APU and came out 12 years ago. I retired my A8-3500M craptop three years ago because there was no way it would've been able to properly handle W10.

Even just a modest and mainstream APU available today like the Ryzen 5 7530U, is over THIRTEEN TIMES MORE POTENT than the Core2Extreme X9100 despite having an RX Radeon Vega 7 IGP.

Don't believe me? Click this link -> Here.

Your best option would be to just buy a modestly-appointed modern craptop because no matter what expresscard and desktop video card that you waste your money on, it will be so bottlenecked by your ancient X9100 CPU that it won't be even worth using. Your CPU is from the Radeon HD 4870-era and even something as old and obsolete as an HD 7970 would be too fast for this CPU.

You're better off just buying a modestly-priced modern craptop with something like the aforementioned R5-7530U at its core:
ASUS Vivobook 15X R5-7530U 8GB DDR4 - $600

 

[Snargelfargen]

When I last looked at eGPUs, they needed a thunderbolt or usb3 port to provide decent performance, expressport doesn't have the bandwidth. Although maybe it doesn't matter considering how old your cpu is.

 

[ILI-BIG]

To give you a better idea of just how bad the performance of the X9100 is, it gets absolutely destroyed by the AMD A8-3500M

X9100 is much better

 

[Lutfij]

I've locked this thread down. If you decide to open another thread of this nature and don't see past your limitation in your hardware, that will be locked down in a similar fashion.