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    Dell inspiron 8600 video card upgrade

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by guho, May 18, 2010.

  1. guho

    guho Notebook Consultant

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    I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 with 2GB and a Geforce FX Go5200 64Mb. Upgraded to win7. Aero works with driver 98.16 but not superb. Having issues not recovering from sleep and video playback not smooth and bad video black levels. On ebay I can buy the Mobility Radeon 9600 pro 128MB video card for Inspiron 8600 for $52 or so. Is this a sensible upgrade? I need smooth full-screen hardware accelerated playback of 1080i and 720p video as well as full Win7 aero.

    Another thing I can do is sell this beast and buy a refurb Latitude D830, which will set me back $250 in total. I love the 16:10 displays with WSXGA+ plus the docking capability.
     
    guho, May 18, 2010
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  2. MaxGeek

    MaxGeek Notebook Evangelist

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    Get the D830, their worth the money they are going for these days. I've seen them as low as $250 on Craigslist locally so you might want to check that out too. One thing to consider is that the Nvidia GPU's in that generation of hardware has some know fatal issues with overheating. You could just get the onboard intel video it will handle Aero just fine and a Core 2 Duo CPU can handle 1080P video just fine.
     
    MaxGeek, May 18, 2010
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