Advanced Dock or Advanced Mini-Dock

[Chris83]

Hi

I own a R61 thinkpad with Intel X3100 On-Board Grapics.

I want to buy a Docking Station.
I have to decide between the Advanced Mini-Dock and the Advanced Dock.
I want to sell my desktop pc and only use my thinkpad.
I use my pc 95% to work for the University and surfing the internet.
But sometimes i like to play some games.
Not such games like crysis or call of duty 4.
Is the Advanced Dock with a extra Grapics Card fast enough to play Games?

What do you think?

[kajencik]

I have no practical experience, but you could look here: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkPad_Advanced_Dock

The dock will definitely not support every card which is PCI-E, at least not the thick ones (as mentioned on the thinkwiki page).

To the gaming, it's a question what games do you play? To play some older ones is the integrated intel X3100 definitely enough, and, the thinkwiki says that the speed of the PCI-E graphics interface in the advanced dock will be something between PCI and AGP, which is not a big deal....

So the question remains, what do you want to play? On the ATI 7500 I have in my R40 I am able to play for example, Live for speed, need for speed underground 2, GTA Vice city, Operation Flashpoint, without any problems, which is lot of fun, even when the games are older

[Chris83]

I play only older games like:

- Call of Duty 1 & 2
- Operation Flashpoint (best game ever)
- Baldurs Gate 2
- GTA Vice City
- Codename Panzers
- Max Payne 2

Do you think games like Gothic3 will run @ the Advanced Dock with a Graphics Card?
The Cards the Dock supports, are not state-of-the-art.
Which one is the best Card by now for the dock?

[kajencik]

First, for the PCI-E cards - Since I have no PCI-E slot in any of my machines, I have no overview about these card, so I'm afraid I can't answer this, but as only thin card would fit in and according to a quite slow PCI-E, there may be no performance card available
for the dock, but I'm really not sure about this.

I recommend trying your favorite games on the integrated intel, I think it has to have much better performance than the ancient radeon 7500 with 32 MB RAM, or these games you mentioned can't run on the integrated X3100?

[Chris83]

Most of the run perfect, others only with lower graphics settings.
I thought with the extra card the will run with highest settings.
At the moment, i will run 3DMark05 on my Thinkpad.

[kajencik]

Well, I see two main problems with the grapics card in the dock:
1) No cooling on the whin card - not much performance
2) slower PCI-E - less than AGP, nothing impressive... and the integrated intel definitely runs at full bus speed.

There is an info from IBM pages:

Code: Select all

One half-size PCI Express card slot - Supports half-size PCI Express cards, including graphics adapters that enable multi-monitoring 

so, only HALF SIZE CARDS! not the full size... - no great performance with the half size cards :-/

(http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-61232)


Also take a look here: http://zurich.ai.mit.edu/hypermail/thin ... /0176.html

as you see, there is a problem with a PCI-E slot in the dock.

You could also take look here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA#GMA_X3100[/url][/code]

So whats the conclusion? If you are lucky, you could get better performance with a card in the dock, but I wouldnt be sure about it.

[Chris83]

So, i compared my R61 with my Desktop PC

Desktop PC:
Athlon X2 4400+
2 GB G.Skill DDR Ram
Radeon X1900XT 256MB
Mainboard: ASRock DualSataII

3DMark05 Free Version (Same Settings for both)

Points Thinkpad: 681

Points Desktop: 8981

This is not a fair comparison, but at least, look @ the CPU, it is a Soket 939 and the X1900XT is very old now.

I think i will keep my Desktop PC and buy a used Advanced Mini-Dock. So I will safe money and keep my option to play newer games

[kajencik]

hm, interesting, it seems that intel grapics are still not so good But in the post about the dock cards, there was anyway, that the X1600 dont work, only he is awaitng an x550, but I dont no if it's similar card you have, or what is their performance, I try to run the 3DMark 05 at home on my R40, for comparsion, I'm really wondering if there is so big diference between the intel X3100 and radeon 7500 as I was expecting.

[Chris83]

Update:
I did a second Test, and now i got more points. But that seems to be the maximum

840 Points