I recently upgraded my old Dell Studio 1555 to a shiny new Lenovo ThinkPad X220.
Needless to say that i love my ThinkPad; it’s light, powerful, and very well build. The X220’s graphical capability however is somewhat lacking, leading me to look into the possibility of having an external graphics card.
The hardware i used was:
- Lenovo ThinkPad X220
- ATI Radeon HD 4870
- Antec 350W PSU (VP350P)
- PE4H (PCIe adapter 2.4)
An easy to use installation guide for connecting the PE4H to the X220 can be found on the Notebook Review forums.
Having installed everything, I ran a few test benches to compare the score of the internal GPU, and external GPU:
| Testbench | X220 & Intel HD 3000 Mobile | X220 & Radeon HD 4870 |
|---|---|---|
| 3DMark 05 | 3DMarks 6190 (CPU 17797) | 3DMarks 16593 (CPU 4233) |
| 3DMark Vantage | 3DMarks P1804 (GFX 1421, CPU 9314) | 3DMarks P5543 (GFX 4852, CPU 9680) |
We can see that the external GPU gives us ~3 times the 3DMarks for both ‘05 and Vantage. SUCCESS!
Clearly the scores for the HD 4850 are lower than if we were using a desktop PC with x16 PCIe (ExpressCard is ~ x1. The people of the internet suggest the performance loss due to this is roughly 50%).