Thinkpads Forum

There is a wealth of information on this forum about using the advanced dock in different configurations (Graphic cards, Operating Systems and external screen setups).

But I would like to know if any of the newer generation of graphics cards (both ATI and NVidia) will fit and work.

For instance for ATI/AMD Radeon cards it says the HD 2400 has a typical power usage of ~25 W and the HD 2600 typically uses ~45 W.

Does this mean that when the dimensions of the card allow it. I should be able to run it in the Advanced Dock?

It gets harder to find the Geforce 7600 GS cards and the Radeon x1600/x1650 based cards that are reported to work succesfully with the advanced dock.

(I live in Rio de Janeiro, but will be visiting my family in Holland next week and I would like to buy the advanced dock and graphics card there)

Thanks in advance for any advise.

I would like to know this also. I was likely going to try using a 2600xt card. I dont really care if vista will work with the intel card at the same time, I just want to be able to play games(currently aoe3 water battles are a disaster, see http://forum.agecommunity.com/forums/thread/558892.aspx)
The ati card uses a 65nm graphics core which might? use less power than nvidias 80nm cores. Also I think most of the nvidia cards are too large physically to fit in the slot, while ati's reference design looks to fit?


Slighty related topic but what will it take to get Lenovo to release a new driver for the x3100? From what I have read intel has been improving the gaming support of the driver, but any of the stock intel drivers lock up with sleep mode. I will admit I like the stability of the current driver, but it cant be too hard to change the .inf's to support a thinkpad.

bump as i'm interested in the same inquiry

Yesterday microsoft released a driver update for vista on windows update that actually seems to work with the games I was having trouble with. The Cod4 demo will at least load the menu, but I did not try playing and CNC3 no longer crashes when building a power station.
Or it also might have helped that I upgraded my ram from 1.5 gb that was running at pc4200 speeds...
AOE ship battles are at least tolerable now. I have yet to try bioshock, hl2 or supreme commander.

So I went with an Advanced Mini Dock and it's working ok for now with the on board x1400.

I know I will have the need for a more potent solution in the near future. To use for CAD (Rhino3d and Solidworks) and maybe an occasional game if time permits.

The reason is I don't have the space at the moment to use the Advanced Dock.

And I am hoping that in the next 6 months a solution might come to market similar to what ASUS with their XG Station and MSI with their Luxium intended. But without the price tag that the Magma Expressbox has.

But if some one knows more about the newer cards in combination with the Advanced Dock I would still be interested in knowing.