Thinkpads Forum

The advanced dock has a single pci-e slot with reduced space.

What is the most capable video card that will fit?

Windows 7 permits mixing makes of video cards. Has anyone tried an Nvidia card?

No interest in games, but I am interested in some advanced CUDA programming. Nvidia has the edge for scientific work, with better support for OCL (Open Computing Language.)

You can use any card, but
- not more than 160mm length
- < 50W power
- single slot, preferably active cooling

GT640 will work fine (newer v.2 1Gb DDR5 version), which has 49W TDP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_600_Series

If you laptop has at least intel 4500MHD, you may boost perfomance turning on optimus tech.
Must latest drivers to enable NVIDIA optimus.

Thanks for the good info. Looking at
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... isNodeId=1

I can't find a card that is the intersection of all the specifications you provide. As an example of the troubles,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814121771

has a single-slot hanger, but a fan that takes two slot spaces.

The laptop is a W500, with ATI graphics, so Nvidia Optimus is not useful. But it is more important to have CUDA compatibility.

If you deactivate your ATI graphics card, you can just use the Intel one and make an optimus link.

You might want to investigate a PE4L setup. It will be more expensive, but with the correct adapters you can connect two (the PCIe port on the dock, and the expresscard port on the dock) PCie lanes, and make a PCIe 1.0 x2 Optimus link. That should give you a lot more performance, and it will be possible to use whatever desktop card you might want to,

I am about to test a 1.0 x1 connection with my W500 (AMD graphics, no optimus), i will report back and see how it works.