I’ve got an Intel 950GM in my dual core laptop.
It has a Mini PCI express slot inside it (which the wifi card is currently sitting in)
From what I can tell, with from the parts available on this site, I should be able to convert my 1x Mini PCI-X slot into a 16x slot and put a decent graphics card in it!
Also I read on a forum a while back that it’s possible to split a 16x slot into 16 individual 1x slots, each of which can run a graphics card, and this has been succesfully tested. I doubt I’d be able to split the 1xMini PCI-X slot so that I had 2 or more graphics cards running, but the fact that you can get one card running on 1xPCI-X should mean that this experiment would be possible.
Obviously the problem here is that there’s limited bandwidth between the graphics card and the laptop, but I should still be able to get a significant performance boost once everything’s in video ram for an affordable price (if i can get the adapters cheap).
So the plan would be to:
- Modify the cover of the PCI-X slot on my laptop so it had a ribbon cable going through it to an external box.
- the external box would have a PSU and house a graphics card
If there’s enough interest in this project, we might be able to convince the company to produce a custom part which goes straight from mini pci-x (or expresscard) to an external box with a psu and 16x slot.
Any ideas/experiences/interest?
(p.s. this has mostly come about because asus still haven’t got round to releasing their asus rog xg external graphics solution which goes from expresscard->pci16x)