Darth Hater Forums

External Hard Drive?

  • #1 thedoodabides

    Hello,

    Like many I am having FPS problems.

    While I know that many people have great rigs and still have issues, I am wondering if an external card might help my laptop. I play while on the road so i have variable speeds of internet service, but I am pretty darn sure that my graphics and CPU are not up to snuff.

    I don't need to run at a high end graphics setting to enjoy the game. As long as I am above about 15 fps I can play. I have the shadowf off already, and I am having to play at 1024X600 resolution.

    I have looked into my laptop, and as I understand it my laptop has the graphics card built into the motherboard and therefore can not easily be changed.

    I have 3 UBS ports, and an eSATA port.

    Specs:
    Windows 7
    ATI mobility radeon HD 6370
    i5 processor 2.53 GHz
    6.0 GB RAM

    I looked into external drives on the web and it looks like they had problems in the past because the UBS2 was too slow ( I could only find 2 year ols posts). Is this still the case?

    Will the eSATA port help?

    Thanks in advance,

    TheDoodAbides

  • #2 chronium

    Ram and hard drive are really the only thing that can be changed in laptops so your pretty much stuck with the FPS you have all you can greatly improve is loading times.

  • #3 Archer

    Imaging hard drives as cars. 

    An old one goes about 60 mph.

    A new one goes about 120 mph.

    A super car can go as fast at 600 mph.

    No matter how fast it can go, usb 2.0 is a basically a school zone and will limit speed to 20mph.

    esata is much faster than usb but most have to have devices plugged in before boot iirc. Its not plug and play like usb. 

    All that being said, I cannot imagine that using a external hdd on your laptop will dramitically increase performance. I would instead invest in a $30-$50 cooling pad to prevent throttling when parts of your computer get hot.

    edit: overclocking your cpu beyond 3.0 ghz should grant results, but I personally wouldn't do that.

    Last edited by Archer on 2/1/2012 4:36:11 PM
  • #4 viper1884

    while i don't know exactly how the mobility versions of vid cards compare to desktop cards i think you should be getting better FPS

    compared to what i have
    i7 860 2.8ghz
    8gb ram
    radeon hd 5770

    you shouldn't be too far off.

    im running 45-50 + almost all the time with 1920x1080 running max in game settings

    i did notice a significant increase when added a 120gb vertex 3 SSD but that probably has more to do with the fresh install of both swtor and win 7 on it

  • #5 chronium

    Well your 5770 is closer to a 6770/6750 then you are to a 6370. The 6300 series isn't meant for gaming just watching HD videos.

  • #6 viper1884

    ah thnx my bad

  • #7 djplasmid

    You have 2 options. You can buy an external video card dock called the ViDock (expensive), or you can make one yourself if you are the slightest bit handy and/or creative. Read up.

    http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=5846&review=how+to+upgrade+laptop+graphics+notebook

    http://forum.notebookreview.com/gaming-software-graphics-cards/418851-diy-egpu-experiences.html

    http://optimitza.cat/news/2009/07/01/vidock-2-are-external-graphics-cards-finally-here/

    http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/hardware/40268-diy-egpu-tablet-pcs-experiences-benchmarks-setup-ect.html

    -Plasmid

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