8100 video card upgrade?

Best ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 64mb

2nd Best nVidia GeForce4 440 Go 64mb

3rd Best ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 64mb

4th Best nVidia GeForce 2 Go 32mb

5th ATI M4 32mb

6th ATI M4 16mb

7th nVidia Geforce 2 Go 16mb

Get your Drivers for the Radeons and GeForces from www.omegacorner.com

Good luck, Sam I8000 ATI 7500 64mb p3 900mhz 320mb 18gb (probs soon 2b 8100 or 4150)

Message Edited by Rabid_Monkey on 12-24-2003 11:34 PM

Message Edited by Rabid_Monkey on 12-24-2003 11:34 PM

If you can find the Radeon 9000 Mobility through EBAY or Dell Spare parts definatley go with that.  If you can't locate a Mobility 9000, go with the Geforce 440 Go.

Dell Spare Parts USA - 1-800-449-3355 ext 69937
Dell Spare Parts Canada - 1-866-440-3355

The part numbers for the Radeon and Geforce 440 are below:
GeForce4 Go 64mb video board part number - 5J149
ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 video board part numbers - 4U284, 5U427, and 5X659 - $129

One other graphics card possibility beside the ones listed above is the NVIDIA Quadro Go 700GL which offers some benefit over the Radeon 9000 Mobility but costs around 300.00 and will probably be hard to find, here is a good thread involving that:

http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/messageboard.id=insp_video&message.id=74247&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

You will have better luck with the upgrade if you DO NOT have a Hitachi screen - go to the Dell Support's main page and type in your service tag number, then click on Original Configuration on the left and on that list somewhere should indicate the type & brand display that came with your laptop.  Also check what revision motherboard you have, which is a sticker on the motherboard itself under the RAM door.  Normally if you had a later revision BIOS on your i8100 when you bought it new will tell you if you have a later motherboard revision or not.  Also make sure you upgrade to the latest BIOS for the i8100 before doing the upgrade, and uninstall any drivers from your ATI 128.  For more information on this, if you havn't done so already do a search of all the listings I have made and I have several posts on this issue.  I also had a website bookmarked that had step by step instuctions on how do perform the upgrade but I don't think its online anymore, if you want it I can email it to you because I saved the page.  You can go to the online manual for you i8100 and it shows how to take the keyboard off and access your video card.

Message Edited by i8000_coastal on 12-27-2003 11:31 PM