Laptops, Notebooks -- ACER aspire 5920G Graphics card upgrade

by Matt
(Canterbury, UK)

Hi,

I have an ACER aspire 5920G and would like to upgrade the graphics card. What is the best I can get to boost it? I currently have a NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS TurboCache. I have also just upgraded to 4GB of Ram and going to be upgrading to a 64bit OS.

Thanks

Matt


ANSWER

Like other laptops or notebooks it isn't easy for the user to upgrade the graphics card in the Acer Aspire 5920G. The NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS is the standard graphics card in this model and if you want to stick with NVIDIA the best you can be sure will work in the 5920G is the GE Force 9500 M GS (DDR2). It seems that you can also upgrade to the ATI Mobility Radeon 4650 (DDR2). This is a faster card than the GeForce 9500M.

The good news is the upgrade is possible, but it is hard for a non-tech to do. The other problem is that these cards are not readily available. You can get the GeForce 9500M GS on e-bay including some that they say are new.

The ATI Mobility Radeon 4650 is also available on e-bay and at this website: www.eeshops.com/ati-mobility-radeon-graphics-card-hd-4650-hd4650-ddr3-1gb-mxm-p-2153.html. I have never done business with this seller and do not know how reliable it is.

The Radeon card is superior to the GeForce 9500, but in either case it is a much more difficult upgrade than upgrading memory or the hard drive. You will have to strip the computer down to the motherboard to swap the cards. If you haven't done it before, I would suggest you search the internet to see if you can find instructions for disassembling the 5920G before starting. I've never stripped a full size Acer just Aspire 1 net books. It seems to be something people have done, so I would assume that the card isn't soldered in but, still, it isn't something I would recommend someone do as their first inside work on a laptop.