D820 Video Card

Question

Hi,   I am in the process of getting a new laptop and after some research I narrowed it down to a couple of laptops and one of them is the Latitude D820. What I am concerned about is simply the video card.  I have found a couple of people that are complaining about crashes that is very worrying -> http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?s=c89324f1461093c6608c0c092b449c83&showtopic=9737   Another concern is this, how does the NVIDIA Quadro NVS 120M 512MB perform when it comes to Vista and the new Aero interface? I cant possibly buy a new laptop that is not at least future proof for the next OS.   Games are another issue. This laptop has been tested and it has performed horribly -> http://www.pcmag.com/image_popup/0,1871,s=1565&iid=128910,00.asp I rarely play games, but judging from the benchmarks it looks like its one of those experiences that u should never go through!   Please help! Thanks!

kheavy · Answer

i just bought a d820 with the quadro 120 card. the included dell drives are horrible, but i installed 84.25 from laptopvideo2go and these work just fine. i tried the most recent release (91.something) and had really low scores with those. i get a 3dmark 05 score of "2009" with no overclocking (you can oc in the nvidia control panel). i've got the duo 1.83ghz and 1gb ram.

according to nvidia's vista site and microsoft's vista upgrade adviser, this system will run all features of vista just fine. i think that i'll upgrade the ram to 2gb before i upgrade to it, however (since the quadro can eat 256mb).

i don't play many games or use .net apps, so i can't fully address all of your concerns. i do use photoshop and flash, and this computer is a great system for that. no complaints. i default display settings are really dull, but you can fix that with the adjustments in the driver. color calibration also helps a lot - it's like night and day from the factory defaults.

see this thread for more info on 3dmark 05
http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=155297

andrewcamilleri · Answer

Hi!   Thanks for your helpful reply! The D820 seems just about perfect, except for this video card problem that everyone is having. The thing is that I need it primarily as a development machine so unless these problems are ractified i have to find some other machine. Please if anyone has fixed this video card problem, speak up! Thanks!

pfazzino · Answer

Well I bought a D620 with the Intel graphics chip (950) and in the brief time I had it (I sent it back for a refund after I experienced the screen problem everyone is talking about) I installed Vista and ran it with the aero interface with no probs.

crashball · Answer

We had a number of display switching issues on XP.  I just installed Vista a couple weeks ago and it worked great for about two weeks with whatever driver it installed by default.  Then i installed the NVidia driver from dell and it was horrible.  As soon as i installed it it rotated both my displays 90 degrees! after clumsliy getting that turned around, i tried to uninstall the driver which crashed and did not completely unisntall.  So i tried to install again and first it said that the correct hardware wasn't there. Then it said it was only valid on a Vista OS, which it is.  I had MS updates search for the driver and it found one, and i had hoped that it was the same that was installed previously.  I am thinking it is not, because now i have the screen switching issue no only when i undock/redock, but when I lock my PC as well. And I can't seem to do a rollback on the driver.   Come on dell, give us drivers that fricking work!

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