Adding 9500 GT to laptop via PCI in docking station

[Xcelerate]

Okay, so I have a bit of a weird situation. I have a Latitude D630 I got in 2007, and it came with an integrated Nvidia Quadro NVS 135m, which unless I am not utilizing it properly, is very crappy at simply playing back 1080p HD. The only way that I have been able to play 1080p smoothly so far is using CoreAVC (CUDA unchecked) with the overlay mixer as renderer. The overlay mixer of course has horrible color reproduction, so I switch to using the DirectX Enhanced Video Renderer, and suddenly frames drop. Never mind the fact that all of the actual H.264 decoding is taking place in the CPU-- simply pushing that many pixels through the graphics card is apparently enough to drop frames. And when I run CoreAVC using CUDA, then I get about 4 fps. (Same thing occurs when I use DXVA on FFDshow).

So, in order to get anything watchable, I'm in a bit of a need of an upgrade. Buying a new computer is out of the question as I'm a college student, and my laptop with its T7700 works great for everything except this one particular task.

I do, however, have a docking station, which supports the option for a PCI card to be added (internally, the laptop supports PCI express, so why Dell made the docking station take PCI is beyond me). On Newegg, I saw this particular graphics card, in which one reviewer (channelv) mentions that he successfully made the thing run in his docking station. I would like to order one, but I have a few questions as I know nothing about graphics cards.

The memory on the card is 128-bit DDR2, but since the docking station interface is PCI, is this going to severely cripple the card's performance?

More importantly, do you think this configuration will allow smooth 1080p playback?

And also, the reviewer mentions how hot the card gets because it is in a docking station, and how he soldered some copper onto it to try and keep it cooler. Because of this, he recommends a different card for the docking station that uses an 8400 GS. However, this card has a 64-bit GDDR2 interface, which when compared to the 9500 GT, is this enough to do what I want?

And finally, the specs for the card say a 400 watt power supply is required. The docking station is only 130 watts, but since that reviewer managed to get his card working, it seems possible. Looking up the 9500 GT itself (on this page), it says it draws only 50 watts max.. why the discrepancy?

Sorry for the long post, but any help for a GPU newb would be greatly appreciated!

 

[JohnleMVP]

So there has to be something wrong with your PC's setup if it can't play 1080p. Is this a blu-ray or just a video file?

And yes that video card should be more than enough to play 1080p.

The power requirements for a video card include the actual computer (CPU, Motherboard, Harddrive, etc) and it compensates for those crappy free PSU that come with cases. Thats why its so high when the card only needs 50w.

If this is a video file check your power settings. Set it to high performance or if you know what your doing modify it to make sure the CPU isn't staying a low clock speed.

I have a D630 as well and its still a great laptop.

 

[Xcelerate]

This is a video from my Canon camera. It's encoded a 24Mbps, so maybe the bit rate is too high? The CPU is running fine (well, after I fixed it from underclocking itself because the thermal paste had melted), and with CoreAVC both cores reach about 90% decoding the video. However, even though it decodes fine, once it is pushed through Microsoft's DirectX to display it on the screen, it drops frames. I've tried VMR7, VMR9, EVR, EVR custom, Haali Renderer, MadVR-- all of these use the graphics card and all of them seriously drop frames. Overlay mixer is the only thing that works, but it's color rendition is unacceptable (and it disables Aero). I've checked GPU-Z while the graphics card is in use, and it runs at 100% and with full RAM.

I'll try a 1080p video from online and see what happens.

 

[Mk32]

I have a ULV 1.3ghz + intel integrated graphics and it runs 1080p videos just fine with vlc (did you try vlc?), so i doubt it is your laptop hardware.