Case-in-point… I own a Dell Inspiron 8200 (yeah, I need to upgrade). When this machine was new back in 2003, it was bleeding edge and came with the quickest mobile video card on the market, the GeForce4 440 Go. As time went by, there were updates to many of the ‘official’ drivers for this machine, but there was only ever 1 ‘official’ video driver. This driver was released in April of 2003 and to give you some idea of how old these drivers are, NVidia still called them “Detonator” drivers and they were at version 42.58. Even today, this is the only video driver that Dell offers for this card/machine.

Ok… so Dell hasn’t stayed up-to-date with the drivers for this machine. Not too surprising considering they’ve released a gajillion notebooks since then and the fact that, technically, these drivers work fine. The problem is, even though this is a GeForce 4 series card, it could barely run many games based on the Quake 3 or Unreal 2 engines. It would choke and sputter even with the graphics turned down. Now, how does this make sense? The GeForce 4 desktop card I had at the time would run all these games flawlessly with the graphics cranked. Hmmm…

We all know notebooks are pricey, and they are especially pricey when you opt for dedicated graphics. So, why would anyone opt for dedicated graphics? There is only one answer… TO PLAY GAMES! So how does it make sense that a ‘Gaming’ machine would suck so badly at playing games? I knew the card had more capability than it was displaying so I began investigating. After a few weeks of searching, I came across another site dedicated to the persuit of video driver excellence, Guru3d.com. As I searched the site, I found a modified Forceware driver which supported my 440 Go card and decided to give it a try. WOW! All the sudden, the true capabilities of my card were allowed to shine and I was able to play all those games that were so doggy before. This update bumped me from Forceware version 42.58 up to version 77.70 and was enough to actually allow me to play Counter-Strike: Source (with a slightly modified cfg file) and actually hang with some of the better players out there. I prefer to play on my home rig for sure, but it’s nice to be mobile and able to play when and where I want when the chance comes up.

Now, this card is still old and there are many games it just won’t play (it doesn’t like DirectX 9 much). But, it will now play many of my older games in full detail brilliance. I can play CS Source, Guildwars, Diablo 2 (yeah, I still play it), Unreal Tournament 2004, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and many others. It’s effectively turned my poor old notebook into the gaming machine it was designed to be.

If you happen to have an old GeForce4 440 Go card, you can get these excellent drivers here. And if you happen to want to try out my custom Counter-Strike: Source cfg file, you can download it here. This cfg makes CS look like crap, but I average framerates around 70fps. Easily high enough to stay in the game.

Well, here’s the fix.  The guys over at LaptopVideo2Go have a hacked inf file you can use to update your laptop graphics drivers.  What this does, basically, is remove the restriction from installing the drivers so you don’t get this error message:

nVidia setup program could not locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit.

Here’s a link back to the thread with instructions for making the update:

ForceWare Updater’s Quickstart Guide

Gotta thank guys like that for keeping laptop gaming good, even on hardware that’s a little bit older.

I will be installing my new card in the next couple days and benchmarking many games with it. It will be interesting to see how much difference I notice when playing games like Half-Life II and Guild Wars where I was already playing them at 1280 x 1024 with 2xAA. That said, it’s hard to let the old 5900XT go. It was a great card and served me well as all technology should slave away for the pleasure of mankind.

If you’re interested, it’s up on eBay now and will be sent to a loving new home where the new owner will enjoy many hours of fantastic fun-ness whilst playing violent brain-rotting drivel. I take absolutely no responsibility for the nagging and complaints the new owner will have to endure due to spending far too many hours in front of the computer.

You can view the auction HERE.

Well, I suppose it’s my own fault for assuming. Cause we all know what happens when you assume…

Hopefully I won’t have to wait too long for my new MSI 6600GT card to arrive, but at least I can play Guild Wars on my laptop till then =)

As it happens, Zach and I have been presented with an opportunity to upgrade so we decided to go for it. Now, my current system isn’t really THAT out of date. The following is the heart of my current system:

Athlon XP 3000+ (Barton core)
MSI K7N2 Delta NForce2 Ultra board
512mb Dual Channel 3200 DDR Ram
MSI GeForce FX 5900XT

This baby runs Half Life 2 like a champ at 1280×1024 with 2x AA. The only thing I’ve ever really thrown at it that it had a hard time with was Doom 3 so…

We’ve both decided to go with the following set up (keep in mind that some of the parts were chosen due to financial limitations):

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice Core Socket 939 CPU
Chaintech VNF4/Ultra nForce4 Ultra board
1gb dual channel 3200 DDR Ram
Leadtek A400LE Geforce 6800LE

We picked the CPU based on price mostly. The next step up for the Athlon 64 was a significant price jump. The board was chosen based on the chipset and features included (and also because it was one of the cheapest nForce4 Ultra boards we could find). The Ram was the next natural step up but the video card was where we had the hardest time deciding.

We’re only paying $135 for our GeForce 6800LE cards through Newegg.com. The significance of this is that the GeForce 6600GT’s are currently selling for $145 and up. Now, why is the 6800LE so cheap? Well, it’s because the performance has been limited by the drivers so that it runs at pace with the 6600GT’s. What does this mean? It means that you can purchase a Geforce 6800 for dang cheap. The trick here is that with a quick driver tweak, you can open the locked pixle pipelines and turn the clock up and like magic, you now have a Geforce 6800 that performs like a 6800 instead of like a 6600.

If you doubt the possibility of this, just do a Google search and you’ll see that this has been tested and tested again. It works! The guys at DoomedPC have a nice little write up about how to do it here.

Anyway, we should get the part by next Wed or so and we’ll share our experiences once we try it out. Keep checkin back for updates from our ‘upgrade land’ adventures. We should have some pics and war stories posted by the end of next week.