The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
DX10 is overrated. There are going to be few games that support DX10. The company behind Half-Life 2 is going to stay with DX9 since less than 1% of people who play on Steam have DX10 cards and Vista. DX10 is slower than DX9 and does not look significantly better. They can backport some (but not all) DX10 functionality into DX9 cards (so you don't need Vista DX10 junk). By the time Vista and DX10 games and hardware becomes more mainstream, you would want something a lot better than the nVidia 8800.
For the record, 7900gs >> 8600GT. DX10 is not even worth it at the moment.
It is NOT an MXM card. The Dell laptops use a proprietary Dell design similar to MXM technology, and as such you'll only be able to upgrade a Dell laptop to a GPU that
was available with that specific model during its lifetime. Dell significantly re-designed their laptops with the new DX10 capable laptops, so it is highly likely the graphics card design also changed...which means you will most likely NOT be able to upgrade.
Its not possible to change the Go 7900 GS to an 8600M GT. At least, its not possible for the upgrade to take pace if the 8600M GT is coming from a non-Dell notebook. Even if an 8600M GT is taken from a current 1720, the upgrade probably isn't possible. That is because the new 1720 probably uses a different proprietary form factor than the previous model, the E1705, which the M1710 is based upon.
However, another upgrade is possible. The recently announced Dell M6300 uses the same "old" chassis, and probably the same internals as the E1705/M1710. That possibly means that any graphics card in that notebook, may be compatible with the E1705/M1710. Since the M6300 is a workstation notebook, it will include workstation graphics cards, which include the Quadro FX 1600M, which is based on the 8700M GT. If nVidia release any faster graphics cards at a later date, they will certainly be used for other Quadro mobile cards, which could, again, possibly be physically compatible with the E1705/M1710.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
