Thinkpad Dock II questions

Message

marouxlas · #1 Post by **marouxlas** » Sun Oct 23, 2005 10:39 am

Hello everyone,

I am a happy T43 14'' user. I had a T42 before and my new T43 seems noisier but also faster. I am thinking of buying a Dock II for my T43 and I have the following questions:

1) The specs say that the Dock's DVI will support resolutions up to 1280x1024. Is that a hardware limitation or can I go to DVI 1900x1400 with different drivers? (My graphics card is a FireGL and supports 1900x1400 through the VGA of the laptop)

2) I would probably get a cardbus to put it in the dock to add Firewire 800 support. In paper that is doable, but is there a bottleneck somewhere in the dock-laptop connection that would not allow firewire 800 reach speeds better than a USB port?
Anybody with experience using a Firewire 800 external hard drive on a laptop? How does it compare to an internal 2.5inch 7200rpm hd?

3) The dock also supports a half size PCI. What is the fastest graphics card in the market that would fit that slot?

Thanks in advance for the input...

Thinkpad Dock II Link:
http://www-131.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/store ... Id=8589593

jtreble · #2 Post by **jtreble** » Sun Oct 23, 2005 11:22 am

I use a W2K/LaCie FW 800 (1394b) card combination with my Dock II to connect external hard devices - it's very fast (much faster than USB 2.0 for backups) and I have had no problems. I can't comment on your other questions.

marouxlas · #3 Post by **marouxlas** » Sun Oct 23, 2005 12:31 pm

What kind of FW800 card are you using? Is your FW800 HD faster than the internal HD?

jtreble · #4 Post by **jtreble** » Sun Oct 23, 2005 12:53 pm

a.) I'm using the LaCie FW800 PCMCIA card
b.) IMHE an external drive, even using the FW 800 (1394b) interface, will never run as fast as an equivalent internal HD. I haven't done benchmarks - that's just my personal experience.

krymson · #5 Post by **krymson** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 8:36 am

Unless that's a PCI express port, which it doesn't seem to be, you can't get a recent graphics card for an external PCI port, because PCI graphics cards havent been made in ages since PCI = slow.

You wouldn't want one anyways because any PCI card you could get wouldn't even be able to to touch your stock graphics card on it's PCI express or AGP or whatever it is the T43 uses.

marouxlas · #6 Post by **marouxlas** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 10:50 pm

Anyone knows if I can get the DVI output of the Dock up to 1900x1200 using different drivers?

mark729 · #7 Post by **mark729** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 1:15 am

I got dock II with t42 and Dell2005FPW(1680X1050) DVI conneted.
it works fine.

Thinkpad Dock II questions

Thinkpad Dock II questions

Who is online