Chris Socha
by Chris Socha

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%).