Originally posted by: niggles
wow, thanks for getting back to me.... I can't believe no one else is doing a barebones... also, I wonder how hard it would be to make a barebones with an upgradable graphics card... I mean if Dell is now offering an upgradable laptop, on the GPU, surely it would be a no brainer for a barbones notepad. Interesting about the battery. Am I to understand that the battery is an entirely seperate unit? You say that the battery is external, just want to check. Just out of curiosity, what are you running in terms of RAM? It's just that the integrated graphics assigns RAM to the GPU based on the inherent RAM on the system.
Yeah I thought so too, its just that these companies are too afraid to think outside the box to include an agp port. I really think that it was a stupid choice of asus, being stuck with this Sis graphics is horrible and mocks the rest of the laptop components. There is one barebone kit, the ECS i-buddie a980 that offers an agp port for a specifically made 32mb geforce 4 go module, but the module is sold in only one place and it cost $80. I am not sure if the agp port or the space for it can be modded to use another module (like a dell m9). I have seen dell m9 64mb modules sell for only $20 on ebay, so it would have been great if my barebone did have an agp.
My kit had an external battery, because it is based on the desknote idea. The external battery allows more room for components, which I believe should have been used on an agp port as well. Your A2000H i believe has an internal battery.
As for the ram, I am using 512mb pc2700 standard 184-pin desktop ram. My barebone only had one dimm so I had to use 1 stick of 512. I allocated 64mb to the vga and it made the overall performance in wc3 alot better, but still mediocre considering its the graphic's core that is the big bottleneck. Even with a decent bandwith from the ram, the core graphics is just horrible. Some barebones use sodimm instead.
My advice is avoid desknotes or barebones for now because they haven't matured yet. People want to see desknotes with a standardized laptop agp port with a compartment that allows for all sorts of vga modules. I think the new Dell Inspiron XPS is just overkill. Dells idea makes the size too big. I personally believe a compartment can be used similiar to a laptop harddrive compartment. The compartment should be certain dimensions that allows many vga modules of all sizes to fit and a agp port to plug into. Yesterday I found two auctions for ECS laptops on ebay. They were more geared as laptops than notebooks and both ended around $850. They were fully loaded too and had ati m9 graphics.
I think I got a great deal on my desknote. For that price and power, it kills celeron notebooks. And other notebooks with ati m9 graphics and either a p4, p4-m, or centrino cost at least $200 to $300 more.