Which video card to get?

[KentuckyJared20]

So, I just re-installed Civ 4 on my laptop (note the LAPTOP part, it's important) after playing WoW for awhile (I'm an all-around gamer), but even though I have Civ 4 Gold and BtS I have only installed Gold because systemrequirementslab.com says that my laptop doesn't meet the minimum requirements to play BtS. Now, if systemlab only said that I didn't meet the minimum req. then I would be playing BtS, but I was in the middle of creating my largest army/navy ever a year-ish ago whilst playing BtS (before I started playing WoW), it froze and a pop-up came up saying that i have/had overloaded my video card. I noticed also, on sys.require.lab that it said the only failing thing on my laptop was my video card, I have a ATI RADEON XPRESS 200M Series (ATI Radeon Xpress Series (0x5A62)).

My question is what video card do I need to buy? I was on bestbuy.com today, and in the past looking for one, but I'm not really tech-savvy so I didn't know which one to buy.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

None. You cannot for the most part buy an upgrade GPU for laptops. Your laptop graphics is most likely not in the form of an MXM module, and therefore cannot be upgraded at all. That, and likely the power system as well as the cooling system for your laptop is unlikely to be able to handle a more powerful GPU.

You can only do these major kinds of upgrades with a desktop system. With a laptop, you're for the most part limited to upgrading RAM and HDD. Sometimes you can change the screen, and if you got a really upgradeable laptop, you can even find a new CPU and or new GPU for it, but such laptops are rare ( Mine is one of these, you can change almost everything)

 

[KentuckyJared20]

Thank you very much.