Well, you didn't tell us which video card you've built into your 8200. There's the Ati9000 and the Nvidia Quattro700Go availabe as an internal but not "official" upgrade for the basic 8200 with the 64 mb g-force on UXGA. These 2 are top choices. There are many posts here and in the Latitude forum to inform you better on that subject (incl. part numbers and price).
Thinking C-Dock II instead ... First you'd need to convert your Inpiron into an equivalent Latitude by flashing it's BIOS to the A12 BIOS of the Latitude C840. Otherwise you can't run in a C/Dock but only in a C/Port (no PCI slots).
Now running in a dock.... as you noticed, you'll need to buy a PCI video card. The most suitable current PCI card is probably the Conquerer FX5200 from "Mad Dog". It has both, an analog VGA and a digital DVI connector. So it's fine for both, TFT or Glass. You'll find a couple of different brands with the same FX5200 chip. All others, which I was able to locate however, will give you an analog VGA output to the external screen only. Running a TFT screen, you'd loose display quality because of the 2 convertions : digital to analog on the video card and back to digital within the TFT display.
Should you want to connect an external glass tube however (always analog), I'm not sure that a Dock is your choice at all (unless for other reasons like USB2 cards and such).
The notebook internal card is connected via 4*AGP . That's a lot better compared to the PCI bus connection of a dock based card. Internal cards can serve external screens well -if you have such- through the notebooks VGA out. For more performance on the internal screen or an analog external screen you wouldn't need a dock. An internal upgrade would give more bang for the buck.
External cards can support external screens only. Redirection of video data back into the notebook is not possible at all.
This leave Multi-Screen needs as the main reason to use an external video card in a dock.
seto_kaiba
222 Posts
0
January 1st, 2004 21:00
flortep
114 Posts
0
January 6th, 2004 12:00
...or read this one here, still warm, 50 minutes old...
http://delltalk.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_apr&message.id=5878
Well, you didn't tell us which video card you've built into your 8200. There's the Ati9000 and the Nvidia Quattro700Go availabe as an internal but not "official" upgrade for the basic 8200 with the 64 mb g-force on UXGA. These 2 are top choices. There are many posts here and in the Latitude forum to inform you better on that subject (incl. part numbers and price).
Thinking C-Dock II instead ... First you'd need to convert your Inpiron into an equivalent Latitude by flashing it's BIOS to the A12 BIOS of the Latitude C840. Otherwise you can't run in a C/Dock but only in a C/Port (no PCI slots).
Now running in a dock.... as you noticed, you'll need to buy a PCI video card. The most suitable current PCI card is probably the Conquerer FX5200 from "Mad Dog". It has both, an analog VGA and a digital DVI connector. So it's fine for both, TFT or Glass. You'll find a couple of different brands with the same FX5200 chip. All others, which I was able to locate however, will give you an analog VGA output to the external screen only. Running a TFT screen, you'd loose display quality because of the 2 convertions : digital to analog on the video card and back to digital within the TFT display.
Should you want to connect an external glass tube however (always analog), I'm not sure that a Dock is your choice at all (unless for other reasons like USB2 cards and such).
The notebook internal card is connected via 4*AGP . That's a lot better compared to the PCI bus connection of a dock based card. Internal cards can serve external screens well -if you have such- through the notebooks VGA out. For more performance on the internal screen or an analog external screen you wouldn't need a dock. An internal upgrade would give more bang for the buck.
External cards can support external screens only. Redirection of video data back into the notebook is not possible at all.
This leave Multi-Screen needs as the main reason to use an external video card in a dock.
Confused ?? So am I !
Have fun in 2004. flortep