Such thing as an external Video Card?

[Br1ang]

I know this is a funny question because from my knowledge I only know of internal video cards. I just wanted to know if there is such a product (via USB or some other connection) that can accomplish this? It is because I own a compact book pc and it is just unexpandable with no AGP slot or PCI slot. Is this product out there? Can anyone help me out with this?

[Tommyknocker]

My ADS IDVD is a USB device. It captures in MPEG or AVI (probably DV as well, if I had a DV camera). Also outputs to my TV/VCR as well. Came with PowerVCR, Ulead Video Studio 6 (yay!) and DVD Pictureshow. I think it is worth every penny I paid for it.

[Br1ang]

Sorry. I meant a video card that I can connect a computer monitor to and with more video memory than an onboard video(computer monitor) connection. Is there a product?

[Thorn]

Probably not... considering the internal AGP bus that a video card typically runs on has a bandwidth of 1GB/s and that can be a bottleneck in high-end games and cards... and USB has 1.5Mb (that's megabit...) which is not even suitable for high-quality video transfer (yes, some external devices encode to mpeg which would have small enough bandwidth to fit... but most consumer level usb encoders have poor quality).

There may be specialty products (I'm not a laptop expert...) but I don't know how cost effective they would be. Also, this all depends on what you want to add... if you want to add 4mb of memory so you can use 1024x768 resolution maybe it's possible because bandwidth issues wouldn't be as much of a problem. Maybe use a google search or use computing.net?