Laptop Motherboards

Hey guys, I am curious; If you take a laptop motherboard are you able to upgrade it to basically any mobile video card? Or does it al depend on the laptop? I am looking at ebay and was thinking of getting a pretty recent laptop motherboard (basically that's all it is, no drives, hdd's or anything, putting in the same type of processor, ram etc, but I was wondering if lets say it came with a Radeom 9000, if I could upgrade to a X300 or someting?

I'm just trying to explore different motherboard ideas for a mod I have in mind ;) Thanks guys. I tried googling, but had no luck really :/

There are some recent laptops which come with upgradeable graphics, but they are very much in the minority - if I had to take a blind guess, I'd say the one you're looking at probably doesn't, but thats just based on the law of averages - there are very few video-upgradeable laptops out there and a hell of a lot of ones you can't upgrade. I'm almost certain the older laptops that'd come with a 9000 would fall into the non-upgradeable category - I THINK (and I'm really not sure on this) it's mainly the new line of GeforceGo video chips that have some upgrade potential

Thanks for the reply ;) Yea, I was worrying about that and probably due to my lack of results with google, other forums etc.. I have to agree with you and I think you're right. I'm looking to make a mod project [TOP SECRET] :p But I didn't want to pay an arm and a leg for a laptop, or just a motherboard because I want something with decent graphics (like mobility 9600pro) or the nvidia equilvilent or maybe even better. I'm thinking of getting a Dell, and ripping it apart to create something really cool.

I am also looking at easier slightly cheaper alternatives like mini-itx and pico and micro btx. I really would love to go with BTX, but only seen one mini btx motherboard out right now, so I am kind of playing a little waiting game. Since my project is gonna be small with higher end parts that tend to heat up a little more I kinda want to wait for btx to become a little more popular.

Any suggestions or input is greatly appreciated. I just keep jumping from one idea to another trying to find the best, smallest, cost effective solution that won't leave me high and dry if I ever decide to add a part or upgrade in the future.

Great intelligent community here and I hope you guys can help me more with input and suggestions. Thanks :)

No-one here is going to steal your ideas (we might borrow em a lil but thats the whole point of sharing on a community). The more you can tell us, the more we can help - you say small with high end parts - makes me assume you're looking for something for gaming and as you point out BTX is still a dead end due to lack of support - mini-itx is also pretty difficult as the boards you can get are severely limited in expansion capabilities - is there no way you could stretch to micro-atx - if you can, you have virtually unlimited options - pretty much any processor and any video card - and if you don't mine losing the PCI slots, you can always get a right-angle riser for the AGP or PCI-Express slot so the VGA card lies across the board...

Oh i'm not worried about theft here :p Well i'll spill a little more. Basically I want to make something about the size of a gaming console. So pretty small as you can imagine. Basically I want it to play games, that's number 1, also secondly as a multi media device. So added card readers, dvd writer and maybe even a tv tuner. But basically I want it very portable, a super sleek device (i'll be building a case from scratch) and like I said before a beast of a machine.

As for budget, right now I don't have very much saved, so I can stand to wait. This project is going to be one of those where i'll just keep saving and then buy everything at once and build it, so I don't buy something in advance and something beter comes out near months later :p

I know with mini-itx some boards have P4 support, even Pentium M and AMD support with a PCI Express Slot for graphics, but the boards are pretty darn expensive. I'm talking like $400.00 a pop, whch is a little more than I wanted to spend. I was thinking laptop because you're pretty free to position components where you want, but with the desktop motherboards you're a little more limited.

So basically that's it, oh and I have another question, with the micro atx, can you buy those PSU's like this: http://www.helmetpc.com/index.asp?Pa...OD&ProdID=1468 or are they only so powerful? Not enough for higher end parts?

Micro atx is just too big for what I had in mind. Size is a big concern for me and because so many computers are huge when they could be a lot smaller, that's what this mod is really all aout for me, so that's why mini btx seems like another great option (even if it isn't fully supported) It does have potential for more efficient air flow and is smaller than micro atx.