PKIFF - ThinkPad - Dock III - Unofficial Graphics Card Compatibility List

Warning/Disclaimer:

This list should only be used as a guide. Not all graphics cards listed will be compatible with all ThinkPads which use the SelectaDock III. The list is also currently specific to Windows Operating Systems only, and not all versions of Windows will necessarily offer the same compatibility. Use at your own risk.

Overview:

This page provides a list of PCI graphics adapters (video cards) which at least one person somewhere has claimed to have installed in a PCI slot in the SelectaDock III model docking station for an IBM ThinkPad 600 or 770 series laptop. Cards in marked like this text have been installed and tested by me personally. If you have any additions or corrections to this list, please email them to thinkpads -aTT- kiff DaWt ca.

The best compatible card I've found so far is the 64MB Voodoo 5 5500. Based on my experiences, I expect that ALL 3dfx Voodoo cards are fully compatible with the SelectaDock III: the ones I have tried are invariably stable and relatively easy to install. The nVidia 32MB TNT2 card was a bit flakey with certain games, but generally stable, once I got it installed right. The nVidia GeForce FX5500 256MB card appeared to install okay, but I found it would freeze my system within 5-15 minutes and I couldn't find a way to get around that freezing. It's possible that the GeForce card might install under another OS, but I needed one that would work under XP SP2. The ATI Radeon card I tried simply was not recognized properly and I was never able to boot up successfully with it installed in the Dock.

Graphics Cards Compatibility List

Voodoo/3dfx

nVidia

Matrox

ATI Technologies

Other Chips

Incompatible Graphics Cards:

ATI Technologies

(I was personally unable to get a 770E to recognize the 32MB ATI Radeon card in a SelectaDock III, and have seen some discussions which suggest that the entire ATI Radeon series is incompatible with the SelectaDock III.)

nVidia

I was personally unable to get a GeForce FX5500 stable in my SelectaDock III under Windows XP SP2. The card appeared to install okay and would even display on an external monitor correctly, but I would get uncorrectable display/video freezes anywhere from 2 to 15 minutes after booting. I tried a variety of solutions, including reinstalling XP SP2 so that it used APM instead of ACPI, but nothing seemed able to get rid of the freezes. In the end, I decided that the problem was either a power supply issue (which is somewhat common with "high-end" graphics cards on old systems) or a PCI Interupt/IRQ problem. It seems possible to me that this card might work under Windows 98SE if the PCI IRQs were properly tweaked to give it an IRQ by itself, but I did not test this as I needed a solution that would work under XP SP2.

References:

There are lots of resources about video cards all over the net. Below are some specific postings to newsgroups where compatibility issues have been discussed specifically relating to PCI video cards in Docking Stations with the ThinkPad 600/770 series. For more information about specific older video card chip sets, you might also try the 4gamers.com Video Card listing. Also, you can try searching through the ThinkPad Mailing List Archive, the arhive of the ibm.ibmpc.thinkpad list provided by Google, or the Thinkpads.com Forum for more info. The links below lead to all the possibly relevant references that found in the first two of those newsgroups as of January 2004. I have tried to indicate the exact video card, ThinkPad model, Docking Station model, and Windows version discussed in each particular post.

Graphics Cards Specifically Named in ThinkPad 770 BIOS info

These cards are specifically mentioned in IBM Document MIGR-4FGPGF: TP 770/E/ED - Symptoms corrected by the latest BIOS update. The relevant notes are excerpted below:

Symptoms corrected by version 1.32 - BIOS:IDET36WW, slave:EXET09WW

Symptoms corrected by version 1.29 - IDET33WW

Page created: 2004-01-09