How to find out which video card is on a laptop

If you bought a lap­top a very long time ago or even in the sec­ondary mar­ket, then its com­po­nents are hard­ly known com­plete­ly. A video card is one of the most impor­tant com­po­nents of a PC, which deter­mines the per­for­mance of the ren­der­ing sub­sys­tem. For exam­ple, it is impor­tant for games or pro­cess­ing 3D mod­els.

In this arti­cle, we will show you sev­er­al ways to find out which video card is on a lap­top. And in most cas­es, no third-par­ty soft­ware needs to be installed.

How to find out which video card is on a laptop through the “Device Manager”

“Device Man­ag­er” is a built-in util­i­ty of the Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem, which is need­ed for user inter­ac­tion with the low-lev­el soft­ware of installed devices. In sim­ple terms, through it you can see which devices are con­nect­ed to the com­put­er, install or remove their dri­vers. And, of course, through the “Device Man­ag­er” you can find out which card (one or more) is installed in the lap­top.

The method works only on mobile com­put­ers run­ning Win­dows of any ver­sion.

Instruc­tion:

1. Open “This PC” (it may be called “mine” depend­ing on the oper­at­ing sys­tem you are using) and right-click in any free space;

2. In the menu that appears, select “Prop­er­ties”;

3. In the left part of the win­dow that opens, click on the “Device Man­ag­er” item;

4. In the man­ag­er win­dow that opens, expand the “Dis­play adapters” item by click­ing on the “plus” icon next to it.

5. You will see a list of video adapters installed on your com­put­er. The only draw­back is that the amount of video mem­o­ry for dis­crete cards is not dis­played.

If the dri­vers for the dis­crete and inte­grat­ed adapter are not installed, then instead of their names you can see some­thing like “Microsoft Stan­dard Video Adapter”. Then you have to search and down­load the right dri­ver. But if you just need to deter­mine the name of the video adapter you are using, then you can do it right from here. All you need is an inter­net con­nec­tion.

Instruc­tion:

1. Dou­ble-click the left mouse but­ton on the name of the unde­cid­ed video adapter;

2. In the win­dow that opens, go to the “Prop­er­ties” tab;

3. Below the “Prop­er­ty” label, there will be a drop-down menu. Select “Hard­ware ID” there;

4. 2–4 lines will appear in the “Val­ue” win­dow. Select the bot­tom one and copy it — for exam­ple, by press­ing Ctrl + C on the key­board or by right-click­ing and choos­ing “Copy”;

5. Open any site with a data­base of dri­vers — devid.info, for exam­ple;

6. Copy the high­light­ed hard­ware ID val­ue into the search box and press Enter.

7. The site in the search results will prompt the name of the installed card (AMD Radeon, NVIDIA GeForce, Intel HD Graph­ics, or some­thing more exot­ic). From there you can also down­load the nec­es­sary dri­vers.

How to find out which video card is on a laptop if it does not turn on

But this is already a “prob­lem with an aster­isk”. The fact is that there are two ways to deter­mine which video card is installed in a lap­top that does not turn on — either google accord­ing to the mobile com­put­er mod­el, or dis­as­sem­ble it and see it for your­self. And both of them are not with­out flaws.

So, man­u­fac­tur­ers often release a huge num­ber of con­fig­u­ra­tions of one mod­el of a mobile com­put­er (for exam­ple, Leno­vo G50 exists in more than 10 ver­sions), which dif­fer, among oth­er things, in installed video adapters. So this method can be mis­lead­ing, show­ing a more high-end (or vice ver­sa, less high-end) graph­ics accel­er­a­tor than the one installed in the exist­ing lap­top.

How­ev­er, it can be used. At least for a quick per­for­mance analy­sis.

Instruc­tion:

1. Find the name of the lap­top. Most often, it is writ­ten on a stick­er on the bot­tom of the device;

2. The name con­sists of one or two “words”. It may look some­thing like this — “Asus Vivo­Book Max D540NA-GQ171T”. In this inscrip­tion, “Asus” is the man­u­fac­tur­er, “Vivo­Book Max” is the series, “D540NA” is the mod­el, “GQ171T” is the con­fig­u­ra­tion. You need the man­u­fac­tur­er, mod­el, and con­fig­u­ra­tion;

3. Search the Inter­net for the mod­el and con­fig­u­ra­tion of your lap­top;

4. The tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions on the web­site of the man­u­fac­tur­er or retail­ers will show the desired chip mod­el and at the same time — in some cas­es — the amount of video mem­o­ry for dis­crete graph­ics accel­er­a­tors.

The sec­ond option is to dis­as­sem­ble the case, get to the moth­er­board and see for your­self which graph­ics chip is installed. This also requires tech­ni­cal knowl­edge. Well, the abil­i­ty to dis­as­sem­ble and assem­ble a lap­top with­out break­ing it will not hurt.

An under­stand­ing of lap­top design is also required. So, if your moth­er­board is not equipped with a dis­crete graph­ics chip, but only an inte­grat­ed one, then even when dis­as­sem­bling you will not find its name. It is built into the proces­sor. But the dis­crete one is sep­a­rat­ed from the proces­sor, and the eas­i­est way to find it is to care­ful­ly look at all the chips that are in direct con­tact with the cool­ing heat sink (of course, by remov­ing ther­mal paste or ther­mal pads from them).

How to find out which video card is on a laptop through the AIDA64 program

If the search through the “Device Man­ag­er” did not give any results and the lap­top still turns on, then there is anoth­er option to find out which video card is installed in the lap­top — using the AIDA64 pro­gram.

AIDA64 is dis­trib­uted share­ware. This means that the free down­load ver­sion has been reduced in func­tion­al­i­ty. But it is still enough to see which video card is in the lap­top.

In addi­tion to the graph­ics accel­er­a­tor mod­el itself, AIDA64 will show how much video mem­o­ry it has — both dis­crete and allo­cat­ed from the RAM.

Instruc­tion:

1. Down­load the AIDA64 pro­gram from the offi­cial web­site of the devel­op­er and install it;

2. Open AIDA64 and in the left part of the win­dow open the “Com­put­er” list by click­ing on the arrow next to it;

3. Select the “Sum­ma­ry infor­ma­tion” item;

4. On the right side of the win­dow, scroll down to “Dis­play”. The name of the installed graph­ics chip and the amount of video mem­o­ry will be indi­cat­ed there.

5. After that, AIDA64 can be removed. It is still intend­ed only for view­ing infor­ma­tion about the com­po­nents installed in the device, and for noth­ing more.