How To Upgrade Your Notebook with an External Graphics Card

It’s no secret that upgradeable notebook graphics are a bit of an oxymoron. Despite the fact Nvidia’s MXM modular graphics card technology has been available to notebook designers for over a decade, few have fully adopted the standard. The lack of a universal solution for notebook graphics upgradeability has left notebook owners at a significant economic disadvantage relative to desktop owners.

In the gaming world, and other graphics-intensive usages, the graphics card is usually the performance limiting factor. Extending the gaming lifecycle of a desktop can be as simple as swapping in a new graphics card. On the notebook side of the equation, even if its processor, memory, and storage are up to the task, as they usually will be for many years after the fact, the lack of a powerful-enough graphics card can kill the deal. It can make a gaming notebook a hard sell if you’re interested in a longer-term investment.

Although not a new idea, using an external graphics solution has only recently caught on in the mainstream. These solutions allow you to plug in an external graphics device to your notebook, and enjoy the power of a desktop graphics card. The original DIY solutions, as we’ll discuss in the next section, weren’t all that elegant, but they paved the way for the elegant plug-and-play solutions now being produced by mainstream notebook makers. Let’s take a look.

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