Why don't more laptops have external graphics?

I'm not very knowledgeable in the hardware dept of laptops, but I always wondered why more laptops were not designed with the ability to have external graphics support. That way you remove it for the portability, and when you want to do graphic intensive work, you just plug it in.

Is this a trend we will see, or am I just way off here?

 

Well so far the only thriving external graphics all require an external monitor which is what kills the technology so far.

Even the DIY ViDock here on NBR requires an external monitor for the most part.

As for why they all don't, obviously it'd be cheaper to get external graphics than to pay for a separate gaming laptop wouldn't it? From a profit-making point of view it's not very attractive(considering gaming laptops as they are are already a niche market).

 

1. Requires external monitor
2. Bulky and not portable.
3. Massive power consumption in a way.

Also , these external graphics are in a way bottlenecked for now due to lack of bandwidth so until new standards come out, external graphics are not very effective.

 

Lightpeak could theoretically remedy that, but I don't see it being practical.

 

Your thinking is limited to what is and not what could be.

1. If a manufacturer decided to have the external pci-e connector for external graphics, they would probably allow video from the external card to be displayed on the laptop's screen as well as an external monitor.

2. The point of this stuff is that you have a lot of graphics power at home, but can take your laptop anywhere. It sounds more appealing to me than buying a monstrosity. I hate those gigantic laptops and few people actually transport anywhere most of the time. By bulky we are talking just a bit bigger than an external 3.5" hard drive enclosure.

3. Who cares? At stock clocks all of the mid level 40nm cards use very little power though, often the same or less than the laptop that will be used with them.

4. Bandwidth is not an issue because if a manufacturer built a laptop with this in mind, they would surely give it something with a little more oomph than a single pci-e 1.0 lane. Also low to lower mid range cards aren't even bottlenecked at that speed to begin with. A proprietary pci-e 2.0 4x external connector would be adequate for all but the most powerful cards without reducing fps by much at all. With pci-e scaling, there is a point you reach with each card depending on the application where you see vastly diminishing returns.

I really think it would be a good idea to have external pci-e on laptops. There are so many more applications for it than just external graphics.

There really isn't anything technically challenging. It is just that few would buy it. Why not just make a desktop for the same price as Dell or Toshiba would sell you this stuff for?

 

the question should be "why are most laptops dont offer MXM setup video cards"
it would be niceto have options to better cards like alienwares laptops have mxm factor cards

 

Much of what you said was opinion based, so I'll just focus on this last part which makes the most sense.

The biggest hindrance with designing a notebook with this configuration is economics: Before they offer something new, they want to maximize profit on what they already offer. Once sales on that drop, I'm sure there will be laptops made with this upgradable capabilities in mind. If anyone has read any of my previous posts they'd that that I posed this very question before.

As for the answer to the OPs question, I think that configuring the optical drive bay as the standard slot/port for such optimizations. For one, the would be best since they're large enough to accommodate a multiple variety of devices and configurations. And two, are already in partially use as extended battery/HD slots.

Additionally, each user could determine what's most configuration is most important to him when he needed it (or have a variety of devices at hand) and simply plug-&-play whatever option most satisfies his use at the time. Naturally the heavier duty the laptop is to begin with, the more options would be available. Incidentally, desktop replacements aren't for everyone. But for those that need them, they're a godsend.

 

While I'm all for an external x16 2.0, there may be marketting reasons for it to *not* happen. Eg: it would eat up gaming/desktop sales.

The best you may likely get this year is a x2 1.0 link (expresscard 2.0). If Intel follows the same practices as they did for ICH8M/ICH9M, then the *right* notebook will allow you to combine port1+port2 (mPCIe and expresscard) to get a x2 2.0 link. Based on the HD5870 PCI-E scaling analysis, (x1 2.0, x4 2.0) I approximate x2 2.0 would give about 80-90% of real-gaming performance of a x16 2.0 link with a HD5870. So would give impressive performance with current gen ATI cards.

 

ATi XGP, as featured on the Acer Ferrari One.

 

According to this short article, at least someone at Nvidea is thinking about dong a better job of it!!

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-external-laptop-gpu-notebook,9612.html

 

Because they want us to keep replacing our notebooks for better GPUs. It's a conspiracy. I am sure that it is technically possible for all laptops to offer MXM or other replaceable GPUs but greed prevent them from doing so.

 

But, this could be a huge boon for ATi/NViDIA, for the sole reason that a LOT of people would be buying video cards for their notebooks. Notebooks are now dominant over desktops. I know my father has never had a desktop, but has had 3 laptops, and one with the infamous 8600mGT that failed. And I firmly believe the people that had a GPU fail, would most certainly buy one if their notebooks had supported that. Overall, I think it's something that has MAJOR potential, and a possible HUGE market.

 

But the laptop manufacturers on the other hand do not profit if you simply get a new gpu upgrade for your laptop.
They want you to buy a whole new laptop.
That's the whole point.

Despite the fact it's technically feasible and that laptops (not to mention our overal technology) could have been much more advanced, money/greed is what's holding us back.
It always did, and until the system is revamped it will continue to be the case.

 

you might find these interesting:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=418851
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=397667

 

There is also a big issue which everyone is forgetting.
That is the pci express signal. It will only be sufficient in ribbon cable lengths up to 14" anything above that and you need highly shielded cables. Even at best pci express cables are known to loose more than 25% bandwidth when the cables exceed 12" of length.

K-TRON

 

It seems they'd just try to improve the internal GPU, instead of adding external GPU connectivity.

 

BUT... There's not a video card I know of (especially for notebooks) that would really tax the bandwidth of a PCI-e 2.0 connection. And I'm pretty sure that the XGP solution uses a pretty short cable. If an ATi HD5970 can run unfettered over a single x16 2.0 connection, anything that wouldn't expose the CPU as the bottleneck would work perfectly IMO.

 

It's not a conspiracy. The vast majority of laptops don't use discreet graphics. Most Nvidia and ATI graphics on laptops are integrated in their chipsets. I doubt laptop manufacturers would go through all the trouble to cater to the small group of people who want to upgrade their graphics cards, while increasing the complexity, size, and cost of all of their laptops.

 

Not necessarily. Every laptop's GPU cooling system is custom designed to only handle a certain amount of heat output. If you replace your MXM card with one that dissipates more energy, you can easily ruin multiple cards or the machine. There is no thermal consideration going along with the MXM form factor, so it's not really a terribly safe thing to offer to consumers if you don't want to deal with a ton of returns and failures and such.

 

I also don't think that there is any type of conspiracy going on - it's just the industry being short-sighted on a potentially killer product for a slice of the mobile pc customer base.

A solution consisting of an ultra-portable laptop with a docking station that packs a decent graphics card is something that doesn't fit the usual product categories and hence market analysts may consider it a risky bet. What they may have not realized is that costumers interested in both having a ultraportable laptop (good for work/studying) and also like a bit of gaming, image/video editing, blu-ray playback, etc. on their free time would be all over this rather than going for a desktop+laptop solution. What we have instead is people tearing their hair while trying to play games on IGP laptops or getting ridicculed when presenting powerpoints off their glowing Alienware rigs.

Personally, I would buy such a hybrid laptop any day of the week. I can't afford to invest on a desktop since: 1) I need my laptop for work, 2) I can't afford also having a gaming desktop, 3) I tend to move flats/countries every 2 years or so and won't consider carrying tower+LCD+K&M+whatever around me.

If anything, the DIY ViDock project shows that it is possible and people ARE interested. PCI-E x16 2.0 is far from getting saturated and it's possible to hook up an external GPU with enough bandwidth. Sure, the cabling is tricky and can't be made too long before signal drops but 0.5-1.5m should suffice for most applications. It's a shame that ATI's XGP hasn't caught enough traction yet but hopefully that will change soon (but pretty please, not just with netbooks!).

 

Well actually they sometimes do. The gaming industry proved that..."if you build it, they will come."

Again, they do. They're just not in any big hurry about it. Trickling out innovations is an age old tactic to keeping revenue constant. Recall that GM had it's electric car design on the shelf for decades. And if I'm not mistaken, long before Toyota.

 

It's been done before. All I can find right now is the more recent Acer Ferrari One and the ASUS USB 2.0 XG Station dock, but I think there was an earlier model too. I don't think any of them sold well, though. What could be instructive would be how many people have bought ViDocks, to give an idea of what kind of market there might be.

 

The North America distributor has sold 2000 Villagetronic ViDock's worldwide. Quick calculation.. $US300 (for the blank) x 2000 = US$600,000 in sales. We don't know how many DIY ViDock's have been sold (hwtools' PE4L/PE4H). There is a market for external graphics on notebooks.

 

Sure, but the question is more, how does 2000 units compare to overall notebook sales? If it's 2000 units out of, say, (totally random number here) 10 million notebooks sold, that's only 0.02% of the market, and thus it might not be worth the R&D and trouble required.

 

That depends on the specific aspect and situation you are talking about. Bigger and better graphics cards and new games with ever more realistic graphics, yes. A fairly expensive way to add better graphics to laptops? That's a different story.

That can only work if one company has a monopoly or far superior market position. That situation is not present among laptop manufacturers that are all competing more or less evenly. It would be in the self interest of one manufacturer to innovate more than another. The situation you describe works for intel's release schedule of processors because AMD doesn't provide a lot of competition at the moment. So Intel can keep churning out what it has been for the past couple years and still beat the new stuff coming from AMD.

For the car industry, there is no monopoly or single company with a huge market lead on all other competitors combined. If the GM's electric car was profitable to sell, they would have sold it and had a leg up on their competitors. Unfortunately it cost way too much to manufacture and its performance was severely lacking compared to contemporary gasoline engines.

 

I only referred to a single aspect of on market all other things being equal. However, I'm sure other much more versed in economics would agree your overview is much too simplistic.

On the other hand, GM's arrogance (and overconfidence) played a big part in keeping their electric car off the market for so long. As everyone can see, they learned a good lesson following that philosophy. As for bringing this closer to home, Dell also fell into the overconfidence hole. Once the computer giant, until recently struggling just to keep above water. I hope they learned a lesson too...don't hold back technology!! I hope to make Dell my next computer. But that all depends on their ability to stay on the cutting edge. And as this threads shows, the ability to upgrade graphics, is the way to do it.

 

it's not very convenient and has many draw backs. Laptops are made to be portable and external GPUs just kill that pro

 

And what an excellent point you've made. Shall we set a new precedence:

From hence forth all new laptop improvements worthy of recognition and considered as innovation, will be internal. Any device or component that does not fit that criteria will be categorized as ancillary, relegated to a level of less importance, and view within the confines of simple accessories and not as an improvementsto the standard laptop design.

 

Right I understand that which is why I think it makes perfect sense. When you are home and what to play games etc that require a lot of GPU power you plug in the external. Than when you go to work/class etc, you remove that and have a portable laptop. Why stick bulky graphics cards into laptops to make them less portable?

Also- for everyone saying they might not want to spend the R&D etc on it, and that they want to capitalize on what they having going on now first. Don't you think the first manufacturer to implement this well, will benefit pretty big from it. I feel like with the right marketing this could be the future to an extent. Anyways just my .02

 

I see your point and manufacturers could go that route. After all, stereo manufacturers (yes, I know it's a lot simpler) have been manufacturing products that have this capability for decades. You plug in your iPod and go from tinny headphone or speaker to room fillng sound.

On the other hand, what you've just described is the difference between a desktop and a laptop.