Feasibility of connecting a PCI GPU to a MiniPCI slot

[phlogios]

I was recently gifted a 2003 Acer TravelMate 290 to use for windows 98 game development, but sadly it does not support D3D hardware acceleration under Windows 98 with the only available drivers for the integrated GPU, Intel's own drivers. It has an 855GM chipset. Acer's official drivers do work, with tremendous performance, but require the NT kernel.

But then I started thinking... these days people use mini-PCIe adapters to connect PCIe graphics cards to laptops as an external GPU solution - but I've never seen anyone do it with old-school MiniPCI slots and PCI graphics cards - I've seen one company that produces adapters, Amfeltec ( https://www.amfeltec.com/products/flexible-mini-pci-to-pci-adapter/ ) - but I don't know enough about the MiniPCI standard to know if it would even be possible to put a PCI GPU in there. Has anyone done it before?
With the modern mini-PCIe slots, the cards have reduced performance but they still work (sometimes) and can greatly accelerate a laptop.

 

[LCGuy]

Theoretically it should be possible. I've got a D-Link 802.11b PCI card thats actually a Mini-PCI card in a PCI to Mini-PCI adapter with a cover over it. I don't recall ever seeing an off the shelf solution, but theoretically with the right equipment and skills, I can't think of any reason why you shouldn't be able to homebrew an adapter to go the other way around.

 

[Stinkerton18]

Yeah, it should work just fine. You might need to provide some supplemental power to the 3.3v/5v lines since Mini PCI cards had a much lower draw than your standard PCI cards.

 

[Trash80toG4]

I tend to hate it when folks give this kind of advice, but it may be time to look your retro-computing gift horse in the mouth?

Unless you're needing portability (which likely can't be the case given an attempt to kluge a full on PCI card onto a laptop board?) you may be spending good money on a questionable gift.

If you have that GPU in hand, maybe look into a 98se platform you can buy for the price of the bits you'd need to achieve what you've stated as a goal?

I'm about as out there as anyone for an insane kluge (you can ask anyone) but this makes no sense to me for some reason or other. If you want to rig something up as a dock for use on the bench and throttle down to the built in graphics on the laptop board for coding on the run, then it's a different story entirely and I'm all in!